Corey Robin: Our perverse centrist patriots: Everything the elite media gets wrong about American politics

Call it Chris Matthews-itis. George Packer wants an exciting politics of heroism, sacrifice, war. It's dead wrong

George Packer is bored with American politics. “The 2016 campaign doesn’t seem like fun to me,” he writes in The New Yorker. Today’s politics “doesn’t quicken my pulse.” It “doesn’t shock me into a state of alert indignation.” The “thrill is gone.”

When George Packer gets bored, I get worried. It means he’s in the mood for war.