Is there a cure for outrage?

At the end of the year Hugh Hewitt, an anti-Trump conservative, diagnosed a nationwide addiction to outrage. He describes it as "the state of being perpetually offended, ... the need not only to be angry at someone or something, or many people and issues, but also to always and everywhere be, well, hating." Addicts, Hewitt writes, see their outrage as a sign of life. He blames social media for the condition he identifies across the political spectrum, but social media and the smartphones that allow us to take part in it everywhere at most facilitate, or at worst accelerate a decadence arguably latent in the American character.  The American ideal of personal liberty became decadent once a critical mass of Americans decided that their ability to dissent, protest or simply bitch was the only proof available that this was still a free society. The Founders may have regarded the right to dissent as a necessary safeguard against tyranny, but I'm less sure that they saw it as the essence of liberty itself. That it has become that probably proves the death of the American Dream in which the ability to do whatever you dreamed of, as long as it was profitable, was the essence of liberty. Now that opportunity seems stagnant and few see tax cuts or other supply-side measures as a liberating force, the right to outrage -- to express it and to provoke it in others -- is the only freedom, thanks to social media, that almost everyone can exercise. The last meaningful vestige of egalitarianism is the ability to "speak truth to power" or tell power, and its constituents, to fuck themselves. When this freedom is all we have, or the one thing that distinguishes us or elevates us above other powers, many of us inevitably will seek out things to be outraged over, to remind ourselves that we are still free after all. Having a President who, his reasonable complaints about media bias notwithstanding, has a bad habit of demanding praise from everyone for everything, only makes things worse lately. If the alternative to outrage is to think positive or look on the bright side, many will find the cure worse than the disease, or perhaps as a North Korean import. Fortunately, there is another alternative. The happy medium between compulsive outrage and dutiful affirmation would be a kind of enlightened cynicism grounded not in misanthropy but in modest expectations for the world and the people in it and, perhaps most importantly, a modesty about one's own feelings and opinions. Such an attitude would replace hate with a milder mockery ideally nonpartisan in its scope, based on a recognition that, just as my utopia is never going to happen, neither is my worst dystopian nightmare. This will be a tough sell, of course, since imagining the worst delivers the same kick as partisan outrage, but persistence may reward modest mockery by making it cool the way H. L. Mencken's cynicism became improbably cool in the 1920s. Promoting mockery may seem to fly into the teeth of the storm given the rage for respect that unites antifa, the alt-right and much in between. Even at this late hour, however, many of us still want to be cool, however problematic coolness itself is,and the compulsive outrage Hewitt decries will simply never be cool. If that were our ultimate safeguard against  outrage as a way of life, how cool would that be?