Reform is necessary and past due IMO, and I'd find it difficult to find any of the "neolibs" on this site that wouldn't agree with you. No orange plank or bushes, trees, or foilage blocking the views. Also as to the WaPo opinion article Anastasis posted: it should be common fucking sense to have an audit apparatus within the FBI/FISA courts to be checking on abuses of the system. So it pretty much didn't say anything contrary to what most of the left leaning posters have said previously: "yes there were shortcuts taken, report says they should be looked at but did not invalidate the requests, agreed that reform should be done after all is said and done" (I'm pretty sure JimmyJazz has posted something along those lines at least 3 times).
lets dissect this:
"paying attention to politics for the first time" - imo this has more to do with technology being more readily available to all walks of life now and not just the middle to upper class. Information (good and bad) is available at their fingertips when before some would not be aware of anything going on. One big tool used by the younger population is twitter (boomers have taken over Facebook so fuck that). Twitter has information overload where they can get information about pretty much anything (right or wrong) for all walks of life.
"a reckless use of the “traitor” accusation to smear one’s enemies" - no 2 ways around it, Trump is a traitor. He is a self-interested businessman "acting" as president (2 things: yes I know self-interested businessman acting as a president is redundant / at least they acted semi presidential and didn't flaunt it in our fucking faces they were fucking us). If you can't see the shit he's done and agree it warrants his removal from office, then I don't know what to tell you.
belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and foreign policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing - hahahahahaha