You rightly point out that (if the video you present as evidence is accurate enough to use as a barometer) there’s a coherence and an organized civility to the discussions going on elsewhere that just isn’t present in American national politics. In regional contests, I think we’ve gotten better lately at disseminating it across all platforms, but even a farce like O Brother, Where Art Thou? provides ample illustration that the form is much older. It’s always been like this. The real difference is the money and the technology.

The Citizens United case is up there with “Obamacare” for the chaos it’s engendered. The idea that our government openly agreed to allow anyone to spend whatever they want on political speech is just mind-numbing. But here we all are, spending billions of dollars just trying to draw out our favorite arguments. All of our lives is political action.

We create so much economic activity through the politicization of every interaction, we can’t even afford to pay attention to it anymore. You can’t get away from it, so it becomes pervasive in a form identical to sports fandom. Except people die, jobs are lost, and everyone’s going to the hospital and then going bankrupt and retreating to heroin use once they can’t afford to keep their unnecessary oxycontin scripts current. I had to wait 18 hours in an emergency room and four weeks for surgery on my broken wrist, and yet with $3 on my credit card and a few clicks, I’m only a few weeks away from my limited-edition “Birdie Sanders” sticker. Why are we running our political media so much more efficiently than we’re running our health care? And why did they give me a bottle of Valium for a broken wrist?

I’m being dramatic, of course, but these are all real details. My point is one that’s hard to really buy into unless you’ve been there, but — America is losing its mind, and we’re all trying like hell not to think about it because we don’t know how to stop it from happening.

Of course, there’s real problems boiling up, and whenever one does the people who get hurt try to leverage the situation into whatever form of control they feel capable of using to keep themselves from getting hurt again. But we’re saturating our media landscape with so much of this stuff that it’s all just fading into a mildly irritating background noise. We’re feeding all of our money into an outrage machine, and each of us is buying in because we want OUR noise to be the one that drowns out all the other ones that are worse. We’re trying to drown out this horrible sensation that won’t stop, and we’re doing it by retreating into drugs (legalize it!) and hate and social media. It’s the classic symptoms of a psychological crisis, writ large.

So take something like the demonization of “socialism” as even an idea. You’re not allowed to think or say it, because if you’re not spitting as you do then it’s because you’re living in a world where someone likes that word. You must be, because you’re putting up with it, and no one in their right mind would listen to something they don’t like. It’s to easy to screen them out. So it becomes a shibboleth, a guidepost, a reference by which the Believers can tune their antennas to hear whether you’re on our side or not.

It’s the same with Islam, rape, taxes, abortion, healthcare, racism, drone strikes, BENGHAZI, Barack Hussein Obama, gay marriage, Ronald Reagan, welfare, drugs, prison, poverty, mental illness…we’ve carved out lightning rods in every aspect of our lives, just to make sure we never accidentally consort with the enemy.

It’s scary. It’s psychotic, it’s paranoid, it’s delusional, it’s exhausting, and it’s happening to our entire public discourse at once. I take antidepressants just to deal with the necessity of paying attention to any of this, and I’m lucky enough to have lots of chances to develop coping skills. I shudder to think of of what all those people who aren’t cis-gendered heterosexual well-educated young white men must have to resort to just to deal with it all.

Sometimes I think I might respect Trump for what he’s doing — hopping from landmine to landmine, never actually getting caught in the blast, illustrating through his madcap idiocy that none of us actually care about anything. He’s winning because he doesn’t care one way or the other about whether we believe. He knows he can outrun us. He’s been doing it this whole time. And we (apparently) can’t stop him. Does he actually want to destroy anything? Who knows. He’s already convinced the Republican Party to level a gun at its own head. I don’t really want to see how much further he can take this, but I don’t get the feeling he’s done.

But you know, fuck Ted Cruz. That guy’s really scary.