…you come to understand that by “everything” they don’t mean everything, and by “broken” they don’t mean broken. They mean something like “Our dominant political and cultural institutions don’t function nearly as well as they should.” But that doesn’t sound as interesting, does it? “Everything is broken” is not a defined claim; still less is it an argument. It’s a cry of frustration.
And? Or should I say, so?
I get Jacobs' drift, but how many readers don’t see how the terms are employed for rhetorical effect? How many think these pieces are intending to provide prescriptions?
Most saliently, given that not everything is intended to pose a solution (there are many other possible objectives behind such pieces), at what point does something function insufficiently well that it can be considered broken? And there is a point unless one wants to use some prescriptivist etymological argument about the term along the lines of “proper” use of the term “severed,” which I find unpersuasive in either case.