May I kvetch about a minor thing? The slug on Catherine Rampell’s Washington Post column is “The left as well as the right are spurning our shared democratic values.” With a lead-in like that I couldn’t bring myself to read the column. If something is spurned by both the left and the right, by definition it is not shared. How about saying “historic values”, “legacy values”, or just “past values”?
I think that the decline of literacy has lent itself to an increasingly agonistic style of expression, fewer appeals to reason, and increasing tribalism. Our problem is not that the extremes are spurning previously shared values. The problem is that the values are no longer shared.
