Kevin Williamson of National Review Online is no stranger to the world of heated political criticism. Still, Williamson offers NRO readers some reasons to keep their cool.

While race riots and snipers do bring to mind the worst of the 1960s, it isn’t 1968, much less 1860. We’ve had a few years of economic weakness, but there is broadly shared prosperity. We have corrupt and often ineffective public institutions, but government remains responsive enough to ensure general consent, and, beyond its provision of basic physical security, it is less and less relevant to our immediate happiness and well-being. Even as our political discourse becomes more theatrical and hysterical, we are, as a people, remarkably complacent. When Sean Hannity sat down to do a “town hall” show with Donald Trump, he attracted an unusually large audience — but 28 times as many people tuned in to watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory, the Coriolanus of broad, laugh-tracked sitcoms.

You’d think a country on the verge of political meltdown would pay a little more attention to the news. Despite what you may have heard from Donald Trump, National Review is the largest magazine of its kind, and our readership is about 4 percent of US Weekly’s. Golf Digest, Glamour, and Martha Stewart Living all have readerships that the New York Times management would sell Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.’s soul for, if anybody were buying.

But telling people that we’re on the verge of civil war is a good business model. Michael Savage has made a lot more money peddling Armageddon than he ever did peddling herbal nostrums as Michael Weiner. His colleague, the Reverend Al Sharpton, has grown rich trying to give him that civil war — it’s a little like the symbiotic relationship between police and terrorists described in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Conrad knew all about living in consequential times: His father had been a famous revolutionary and exile. Like any sane man of his age, he became a British subject as quickly as he could, changing the dramatic rule of the czar for the sedate reign of Queen Victoria. Boring, stable societies are best appreciated by those who have known the other kind.