An epitaph for American politics

Ross Douthat, in the context of gently scolding people for writing nasty things about Breitbart after his death.

While it’s true that extremely important issues are at stake in our public debates, the appearance of the eternal footman can serve as a useful reminder that by the standards of human history — recent Western and American history very much included — the right-left stakes of the current era are often relatively low. Partisans on both sides may emphasize the world-historical consequences of our elections and policy battles, but compared to the world of our great-grandparents, the level of political agreement is far more remarkable than the level of polarization. Yes, there are still controversies (mostly on the culture-war front) that reflect radically divergent ideas about first principles. But fundamentally we’re an extraordinarily rich country with a remarkably stable consensus around our form of government arguing about whether federal spending should claim 18 percent of G.D.P. or 22 percent of G.D.P. — an important question, to be sure, but one that doesn’t always justify the level of heat and hyperbole that it generates.

Of course, he's right, though one can object to the fact that he pretty clearly thinks it's a good thing. The point, though, is that it's not for lack of their being issues of a magnitude that would justify intense political battles; it's that those battles will never be met in the mainstream political domain.