I should have seen the danger of sealing myself in an echo chamber to prevent contamination from outside viewpoints; I began only hanging out with conservative true believers, only reading conservative books, only getting my news from conservative media outlets. In order to avoid journalistic "left-wing bias," I embraced right-wing bias, foolishly confusing sensationalist entertainment with debate and truth-telling. Outrage became my drug of choice.

And at this point, the GOP are addicts. Because the addiction to outrage is easier than a commitment to actual conservative solutions to our current, actual problems. And I don't mean mere recitation of conservative dogma, a recourse to cliches such as "big government", or a binary left-vs-right paradigm that is blind to actual policy. I mean grappling with actual solutions to health insurance cruelty and expense, to climate change which is real, to Islamist terror that doesn't make global polarization worse.

This also strikes very close to home:

Just as morphing into an extremist took a couple years, un-becoming]]>