OGER KIMBALL: They Can’t Bear the Thought That Trump’s Win Was No Anomaly.

In the deepest sense, what is at stake can perhaps be best formulated as a question. Was the 2016 election, or more specifically, was the election of Donald Trump a horrible anomaly, a sort of political black swan event?

I suspect that most of President Trump’s more doctrinaire opponents, from the Right or soi-disant Right as well as from the Left, believe this. Like many who support the president, I have often entertained myself on sleepy afternoons by watching one of the various compilations that have been made of the mocking predications that were made in the days leading up to the election. It’s good family fun. Those reactions, especially the stunned reactions on election night as the awful truth was born in upon the punditocracy, was partly amusing, partly alarming. It was amusing because of the discrepancy between the pundits’ smug self-assurance and the reality of Trump’s election. It was alarming because of the uncomprehending virulence of their response to what was, after all, a free, open, democratic election in which their gal happened to lose.

Yes, they keep telling us Trump is a crazy man who will destroy our institutions, as they respond crazily to his presidency by trying to destroy our institutions.

White liberalism is dying: It’s too liberal for a majority of whites, yet too distant from the concerns of most non-whites.

The protests liberals whipped up against Kavanaugh this weekend, on the other hand, revealed too much about their own weakness. Washington, D.C. is a majority Democratic city with a black majority. But the Democratic voters out there yelling about Kavanaugh were as white as any country club gathering of Republicans. They looked like a line of Starbucks patrons — Caucasian, professional, largely millennial, with earth tones and earnest expressions aplenty. Men and women wore the same fashionable glasses and more or less the same clothes. It was a Pumpkin Spice Riot.

Where were the black Democrats? Where were the non-yuppies? Hillary Clinton could have asked the same questions on November 9, 2016, after she failed to get them to show up for her the way they’d showed up for Barack Obama. That election, like the Kavanaugh protest, showed that white liberalism has a problem: it’s too liberal for a majority of whites, yet too distant from the concerns of most non-whites.

Its appeal is becoming more “selective,” as legendary rock manager Ian Faith would say.

 John Nolte tweeted “The future is Trotskyite fascism cloaked in self-righteous victimhood.”

IT NEEDS CONSTANT UPDATES BUT HERE’S PELOSI’S LATEST TOP 10 DUMBEST QUOTES: There are so many to choose from, but somebody has to do it, so LifeZette’s Jim Stinson steps up to the plate.

IT’S NOT JUST TARANTINO: HOLLYWOOD’S HISTORY OF DEFENDING CHILD RAPIST ROMAN POLANSKI.

Exit quote: “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion” — Harvey Weinstein, 2009.

“Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.”

—Harvey Weinstein, as quoted by the Los Angeles Times, October 1st, 2009.

JOSEPH BOTTUM: What explains the sudden mania for toppling statues?

The glory of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. And the horror of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. Coin collectors, baseball-card enthusiasts, and used-book readers have all benefited from the opportunities offered by online connection. So have neo-Nazis, child-pornographers, and Communist agitators. Where they were once connected only by the sickly sweet smell of the ink from the mimeograph machine clumping away on the kitchen table, the forces of anger now have instantaneous links.

And that instantaneity allows a radicalizing more rapid than the world has ever seen. Back in a 1999 study called “The Law of Group Polarization,” legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein suggested that discussion among people with similar views causes a hardening of opinion. “In a striking empirical regularity,” he wrote, “deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments.” It hardly matters whether the groups are pro-gun, pro-abortion, or pro-anarchy. With sufficient group discussion on one side of an issue, everyone involved takes a step toward the extreme: The mildly supportive become strongly supportive, the strongly supportive become wildly supportive, and the wildly supportive become fanatical psychopaths.

These are Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.

RUSS ROBERTS:

The current state of the country and the current state of political and intellectual conversation depresses me in a way that it never has before. You have to understand — I’m never happy with the state of the country — that’s the inevitable fate of holding an ideological position that rarely gets any traction — I’m a classical liberal who’d like government to be dramatically smaller than it is now.

But the world today feels different. Everything feels angrier. . . .

Maybe it’s paranoia but it’s been a long time since I felt the thinness of the veneer of civilization and our vulnerability to a sequence of events that might threaten not just the policy positions I might favor but the very existence of the American experiment.