In a Time of Crisis, Public Discourse Has Descended Into Nonsense

A perilous war rages in Europe, as a failing tyrant with nuclear weapons launches desperate new waves of cannon fodder against a nation whose defense we are financing and reinforcing. In Asia, the emerging Chinese superpower is in the throes of a significant economic and social upheaval that may propel it toward the full-scale confrontation it increasingly threatens with Taiwan, an island whose people we are pledged to defend. At home we are caught in the worst of economic traps—as the Federal Reserve inflicts unavoidable monetary pain to kill the surging inflation incurred by its avoidable mistake. Meanwhile the global economy seems to be sliding into a potentially serious recession, and financial markets are eroding our wealth at a dizzying pace.

But at a time when the need for quiet, calm deliberation has never been greater, the U.S. is engaged in a conversation that sounds less like the Constitutional Convention of 1787 than the game room of a psychiatric institution.

This isn’t a partisan point. Both sides are only too eager to point out the mania in the other’s rhetorical obsessions but deny the delusion in their own. So secure are they in the knowledge that their supporters will stand by whatever they say that our leaders now seem free to utter things completely at odds with reality and logic.

We have a former and quite likely future Republican president who muses on national television that by merely “thinking” something, he can exercise executive authority.

The Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, who has a chance of being a leading contender for her party’s presidential nomination in 2024—and who, by the way, has the same dismissive attitude toward unhelpful election results as the former president—insists that a fetal heartbeat is a “manufactured sound.”

When minds do seem to…