Last week I read Sebastian Junger’s 2016 book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. I highly recommend it—like all Junger books, it’s a compelling but easy read.

Tribe directly addresses the nature and impact of today’s negative political discourse, a trend that presents an alarming threat to our republic.  It’s not that vitriol and personal attacks are unique to the 21st century.  Thomas Jefferson generally referred to Alexander Hamilton as “bastard brat of a Scotch Pedler.” He outsourced his attacks on John Adams to a journalist named James Thomson Callender, who wrote that Adams was “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, not the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” So, no, it’s not that sick burns are new to the 21st century.

But the impact of our caustic discourse—exacerbated by social media—is having an unprecedented effect…