How many more minutes until the final crackup?

I may do a search of the LITD archives to determine just when the terms "cacophony" and "brittleness" started to show up in posts. I'm pretty sure the by the time of the university-campus chaos of 2015 I was employing them to depict where we were headed. Maybe when the racially-charged urban unrest in places like Ferguson and Baltimore were the main headline fodder. Maybe during the religious-freedom firestorm of 2013. I'd just have to check it out.

But as I said in Friday's post, "A New Level of Unhealthiness," I'm seriously considering that we're surpassing the polarization and danger for real violence that became manifest in those previous periods.

I'm not alone, either. When I read Derek Hunter's Townhall column today, I thought, it does a disservice to a pundit's readers to dance around this now. It's time to state bluntly where we are, and Hunter does:

In a time of crazy, it’s been a Hell of a week. I literally wrote the book on the liberal outrage culture and this week disturbed even me. There are some things you simply can’t undo, some ledges you can’t pull back from. We’re teetering on one now. How can we, as a nation, get back to civility or even just get along again?

Now, let me reiterate what I've been saying since about this time in 2015. It's undeniable that the Left is driving this crackup. But from 50 years ago, that tumultuous year of 1968, to three years ago, there were two forces contending for the sold of the nation and the West: Left and Right. It got worse as the decades ensued, with feminism, environmentalism, the mutation of the civil-rights movement into a race-huslting enterprise, the rot of the culture, and the hijacking of the entertainment, education and journalism worlds by the Left (and much of the corporate world and many "Christian" denominations as well) becoming so pervasive that we became inured to the process.

But now we, of course, have the Trump phenomenon added to the process. Here's where a new level of cacophony gets added to the mix. Much is going quite well in this country, particularly on the economic level. But Trump enthusiasts who make that the main point are in denial that something is terribly wrong.

And I maintain that the Left's current level of frenzy is exacerbated by the fact of who Trump is. Yes, they would have been howling - and marching, and disrupting people's restaurant meals, and calling for elected officials' children to be kidnapped - if an actual conservative were president, but the fact that Trump has the outrageous personality that he does is a new type of flammable substance being poured onto their rage.

Then there is the element of the Right that continues to find Trump objectionable in signifiant ways. You may know this element from the derisive term by which Trump enthusiasts characterize it: "Never Trumpers." (Or, as Kurt Schlichter calls us - yes, it's disclosure time; I said us - "Fredocons".) The Trump enthusiasts would have us believe that his mercurial ways, his rudderlessness and his boorishness are negligible compared to ever-more-favorable numbers for GDP and employment. Never mind that he was snookered by the most dangerous rogue regime on the planet in his megalomaniacal quest to look like a "winner."

But those of us trying to see our way clear to hold fast to conservative principles have to face yet further splintering in the form of calls like that coming from George Will, who is now exhorting anyone and everyone not to vote Republican for any office in this fall's election. Will was the poster boy for serious polemical discourse, informed by an unsurpassed breadth of historical perspective, for decades, and now he is making us ("Never Trumpers") look ridiculous to Trump's slavish devotees, and giving the Left a glimmer of hope that it has found the wedge with which to pry apart conservatism and send the resultant shards flying in every direction.

For God's sake, will someone in post-America try to make some sense?

Quit trying to stuff the grim panoply of civilizational threats into neat little boxes of shorthand analysis.

The answer is not to "get behind Trump." Neither is it to go all George Will on the Republican Party.

It is to defend those pillars and principles that have always been true and always will be.

One of which is the assertion that a high level of civilization is good, that it keeps people safe, allows them to prosper, and keeps life from being hellish.

Whether it's not too late in the day to persuade a sufficient swath of post-America that this is the way out of our present juncture is not at all certain.

Have a nice Sunday.