As young men my friends and I would sit at Steak n Shake for hours on end, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and arguing about philosophy. Relative strangers would sometimes join us — a girlfriend, an acquaintance — and very often they didn’t enjoy the experience. “It seems like all you guys do is fight,” they’d say to me later. “Why would you want to hang out with guys like that?” What they couldn’t see is that we were having fun. We liked it. Everybody’s engaged in politics, now, and the truth is that most of them don’t actually like it. They react to stories emotionally, because they’re not getting anything from the experience intellectually. It’s a complete disaster for everybody, including themselves. Most people would be much happier if they simply disengaged.