Pure political junkies don’t really notice this as they can always live “in the moment.” They are like the guy in Memento: everything is perpetually new. Every new issue is taken upon its face value, and analogies are just tools used to bludgeon the other side and not to remind us that we have been here before.

Political junkies always see the world they live in as a “tipping point” (the most overused trope of the last fifty years). Every issue is of epoch making importance, each setback is a “disaster”, and every politician can be categorically labelled as ally, enemy, hero or traitor.

Of course, there are those rare times when the political junkie has the better of the skeptical/cynical Political Scientists, such as when epoch changing moments do arrive. Soviet experts were too wedded to old patterns of behavior to notice the end of the U.S.S.R. until it was upon them, and the general reaction of Political Scientists to the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1990’s was “How’d that happen?” But these moments don’t alter the fact political junkies most often lack even the semblance of perspective.

Not that any real political junkie would ever care.