How American Politics Became So Exhausting

Alan Jacobs is something of an internet enigma. The Baylor University professor describes himself as a conservative Christian with some “very liberal” political views. In his prolific blogging, he often takes surprising and counterintuitive positions; his recent feature for Harper’s Magazine on the decline of Christian intellectuals won praise and criticism from unusual bands of allies. Maybe it’s inevitable that today’s hyper-partisanship and lightening-fast news cycles have left the open-minded Jacobs frustrated with America’s low tolerance for disagreement—a political order characterized by “willful incomprehension [and] toxic suspicion,” as he calls it.

Jacobs’s new book, backs into this description of American politics, claiming to offer a rejoinder to scholars like and who focus too much on the “science of thinking and not enough about the art.” Perhaps Jacobs’s work should have beenframed as a eulogy for pluralism in the age of Twitter: how people’s snap judgments, generalizations, and feelings of repulsion toward certain ideas create