It's broke and I don't know how we're ever going to fix it. Political discourse is rabid, acidic, poisonous, ugly, and has become pointless. It really has. I don't have the answers, but there are three things I want to point to.
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| Discourse is in the gutter. |
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| Where do you go to get your disinformation and vitriol? |
Cable news, FoxNews, CNN, MSNBC. It's bad enough that all the broadcast major networks are biased. Cable news networks, thinking back to the 90's and the Clinton era, took bias to a new level. But worse than that, they sold us arguing, bickering, and insults and called it political discourse. With each televised argument, I could feel my anger at "the other side" rise up within me. While sometimes the arguments were intolerable, often the underlying issues were of great importance. They'd talk over each other, filibuster, and toss insults back and forth. I'd find myself sucked into watching, and with every passing day I became more and more unhappy with and intolerant of the other side. I knew "my team" was just as bad, but at least they were fighting against that other nonsense. That kind of TV set discourse back, way, way back. The ugliest face of each side became the face of the whole for those on the other side of the political fence. And both sides were so ugly, it was very hard for anyone to stay on the fence for any length of time.
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| Twitter, where the fringes define the whole. |
Social Media, especially Twitter. Anonymity. Vitriol. Yes, I use Twitter. It's the public square in 2022. But the state of discourse there is awful. Memes and insults. Mischaracterizations and untruths. >99% talk, <1% listen. On social media there is near zero listening to understand, talking to be understood. Instead it's destructive, attacking, monologues designed to gain the admiration of like thinkers, those who think differently? Be damned. It's not helpful.
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| Lied for years about having evidence. Re-elected anyway. |
Electing and re-electing extreme lightning rod politicians who become perfect caricatures of how the opposing point of view paints the entirety of the other side (Ocasio-Cortez, Schiff, Boebert, Taylor Green). This last point I want to make is how we let lightning rods, the far extremes of each side, define the whole of it. For every outrageous thing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, there are 10 Democrats who are unheard. For whatever crazy thing Rep. Lauren Boebert might have to say, there are 10 Republicans who didn't get any mention at all on TV or social media. And as crazy as it seems, the bulk of each side seems to like the extreme whack jobs out there on the fringe. As long as Marjorie Taylor Green and Adam Schiff are making noise on the fringe, then the others feel like they've got duck and cover room to act unhindered by public attention or scrutiny.
Washington is broken.
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