Photograph by Lev Fazio for The New Republic

In the months since I first started thinking through all of this, I’ve picked up on a marked shift in the way The Discourse works. While the mechanism remains the same, the relevant content no longer lands the way it once did. The usual grandstanding rings hollow; the earnest notes feel forced; and the blanket condemnations clunky and overused. Maybe the novelty has worn off. Maybe The Discourse has begun under its own steam to exact a toll and thus to become a cognitive burden rather than an illusion of engagement. Maybe its efficacy as an outrage-delivery system was compromised by one too many pieces of especially pointed bad news. Maybe the ceaseless deflection from the world finally succeeded in creating an insurmountable distance, undoing the whole premise that The Discourse was about something other than itself.

Whatever the reason, The Discourse has curdled, going back and forth from faux-earnest to fully earnest in announcing its therapeutic aims, and then succumbing at length to a feckless and wholly empty pursuit sustained by inertia. When it makes us feel anything, it’s only because it allows us to feel nothing. Instead of insulating us from the world by pretending to do the opposite, The Discourse is now the experience of being nowhere and belonging to nothing. All that’s left to do is fall back on self-referential byways and go after likes and retweets as an impoverished means of filling the void it’s created.

As The Discourse has cannibalized itself, it’s also done away with any pretense of seriousness. Dunking on people is now the prevailing mode of Twitter interaction, and if anyone tries to change the world via a series of tweets, there’s a good chance that they will get laughed off the stage. Irony poisoning has gone from an in-joke to the only reasonable response to a daily routine that is slowly sucking the life out of all of us. You can see this in, for example, the change in how The New York Times’ op-ed page is discussed these days. At one point, it was a source of outrage. Bari Weiss got called out for clumsy, appropriative ethnic rhetoric, and the Times was lambasted for having climate change denier Bret Stephens on staff. There was real concern that the likes of Weiss and Stephens were dangerous, that the ideas they put out there could have a harmful effect and therefore had to be headed off at the pass and roundly discredited. The paper of record was going down a dark path, the Twitterfied resistance proclaimed, and only The Discourse could save us. This all also had something to do with Trump’s vendetta against respectable journalism, the subsequent fetishization of it by liberals, and the subscriptions that the Times or The Washington Post succeeded in wringing out of them, which in turn has allowed both papers to thrive in the midst of a dying industry. The Times’ reporting was seen as a force for good, while its op-ed page was often cast as evil, a by-product of the separate editorial oversight of both operations. (It’s perhaps indicative of the mounting take-based confusion at the heart of The Discourse that this managerial distinction appears to be eroding, to judge by the paper’s puzzling decision to publish a news-breaking excerpt from Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly’s book on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in its Sunday opinion section, sparking in the process no end of outrage on the Twitterfied right and left alike.) In any event, the broad online tendency to interpret the Times’ journalistic identity in split-screen fashion elides certain fundamental truths about the centrist coalition and the fallacy of two-party polarization; in terminal flight from any disconsolate, outrage-dampening thought on this scale, Twitter instead framed the repeated high-profile miscues and editorial lapses of James Bennet’s pundit shop as a problem that badly needed repair.

Meanwhile, the Times soon grasped that it had a potential marketing boon on its hands: Columnists such as Stephens and editors like Weiss were potent clickbait. The last thing their employer wanted to do was give up the traffic they created. In other words: Far from undermining the Times’ credibility or hurting its bottom line, Stephens and Weiss (and to a lesser extent, David Brooks, Thomas L. Friedman, and other easily lampooned Times opinion makers) were good for business because people hated them. At some point, however, the dance became ritual, and from there it was but a short step for it to become farce. The recognition that the op-ed section pushed a steady stream of disastrously conceived ideas out into the world took a back seat to the sheer obtuseness of Stephens and Weiss, both bad writers whose ideas and arguments typically play out at the level of high school English papers, and undistinguished ones at that. Holding them up as villains in some grand morality play began to feel like a misguided, if not outright foolish, use of collective mental energy. Indeed, making them the enemy was actually a lamentable self-own. And predictably, the anger they’ve elicited gave way to pure mockery, potshots replaced critique, and the realization that these pundits were almost always wrong, and were indeed cynically all but programmed to be so, took a back seat to how dopey and half-baked their work was. Dunking on them both was a reflexive burst of endorphin-charging smugness, and soon became shorn of any political overtones whatever. The now-infamous “bedbug” episode, pitting Stephens against a heretofore obscure academic Twitter user, had nothing to do with the so-called marketplace of ideas, but what Stephens perceived as a personal attack. That he was so thin-skinned and vindictive made for great content. At the same time, the episode was also entirely illustrative of how The Discourse had evolved. Stephens melted down because he got called a name, which is what happens now because there’s nothing else for him, or for most of the rest of us, to do.