"Politicians are tearing down the guardrails because they're convinced they're always right"

 The Instapundit Glenn Reynolds penned this column. Is there where we are right now? The politicians are doing anything and everything because they have the right and ability to, not because they know there are long term consequences?

Civilizations are complex machines, invariably run by people who don’t fully understand them.

They’re generally also equipped with safety devices, in the form of rules, customs and informal understandings, designed to keep things from going off the rails.

Our previous generations of politicians weren’t great.

As Will Rogers said roughly a century ago, this country has come to feel when Congress is in session the same as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.

But most of our politicians were products of political machines, which, whatever their flaws, had a vested interest in society holding together and a deep firsthand understanding of people and institutions.

Then, too, 100 years ago, or even 50, there was some institutional memory of the last time things really broke down, which led to the Civil War — which spread death and economic devastation across America that far exceeded what the nation experienced in the 20th-century world wars.

Nowadays, we’ve lost that cautionary memory. (We even took down many of the statues.)

Politics are driven more by social media than by anything else — and by “driven,” I mean something like “careening, drunk, around twisty mountain roads from which most of the guardrails are steadily being removed.”

This process has been going on for a while, but it seems to have accelerated in the past decade or so.