In this sense what we’re doing resembles a complex incantation, a calling of spirits from Shakespeare’s “vasty deep.”

Can Democrats call spirits from the vasty deep any more than Glendower could?

In my favorite of her nonfiction works, “Familiar Spirits,” a brief memoir of her friends and Key West neighbors, James Merrill and David Jackson, Lurie writes in the concluding pages, “To conjure spirits from the vasty deep of one’s own mind is always dangerous.”

But in room after room, the vasty majority of the objects were mute and meaningless, and only those that somehow referenced other periods of tumult and decline spoke with clarity.

This won’t be a huge deal for the vasty majority of Twitter users who access the service via the app or website.