Just as Charlottesville is eternally imprinted into the American psyche as “the deadly white-supremacist rally,” this week’s pro-Trump, anti-elite protest in Washington is successfully being tarnished as “mob violence” and “a siege.” The pearl-clutching is pretty epic, even for a postmodern people. “Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol” and “rioters breached security,” go the contrived commentaries …
Historian Brion McClanahan uses a sports metaphor to explain the coarsening of dialog pervading our culture. His theory isn’t that we’re playing the same game but with different rules. Rather, it’s that the “left” is playing football – a fast-paced game with frequent rule changes – while the “right” dutifully plods along playing baseball, which (used …