There has been a strange feeling in the political ecosystem regarding the second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. We collectively underreacted—and perhaps there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that.
Still, I fear that some of the backlash is due to the fact that we are now so close to election day that some people are calibrating their responses based on whether what they say will help or hurt their partisan cause rather than push back. they ask themselves critically how we got here.
Unfortunately, I think the wider electorate and the media are more concerned about this larger question than the elected leaders we lead our democracy. It is frustrating to watch the efforts to use this episode for political gain, which only feeds division, not heals it.
Just look at Trump’s initial reaction to the arrest of a man armed with a rifle seen on the perimeter of the golf course. Unlike the July shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he and his team took a “let’s keep cool heads” approach and left some of the more heated rhetoric to other Republicans, that hasn’t been the case this time.
Instead, the Trump campaign is treating this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity, not a moment for reflection. The first attempt to overtly politicize the situation likely precipitated a collective numbness against the event itself. Fox News has been particularly aggressive in its programming over the past few days, going out of its way to find examples of cherry-picked rhetoric from the left that could appear on its face to be incitement. This is something Fox could have easily done with Trump’s rhetoric, but chose not to. It simply feeds the audience what it thinks it wants, rather than deciding whether or not it’s responsible or provides nuance and context. He is hardly alone.
Of course, we’ve had so many run-ins with increased political violence over the past decade that perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the public is a little numb. There’s a part of me that doesn’t even want to bother trying to write this column, because anything that attempts to rise above partisanship in any way is completely ignored, written off as glib, or simply dismissed as not being said by someone who “does it.” I don’t know what time it is.”
Let’s face it: The current level of political discourse is unsustainable for this democracy. Maybe it won’t break us this year, maybe next. But unless we choose to rise above it, either by electing deescalators rather than purveyors of zero-sum political pugilism, or by demanding that big tech companies stop creating algorithms designed to incite and divide, we will break — and it will break. it will be dangerous. It happened in this republic before and don’t think that it can’t happen again.
The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we’re all stuck in the mirror booth of the social media funhouse. It is not what we see and how we look is not who we are. And yet here we are.
Is there a better example of this than the fictional stories about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio? As a native of Miami, I saw first-hand the efforts to dehumanize and alienate Haitians amid the influx of refugees from the country in the early 80s. Unfortunately, this isn’t a new trope. We didn’t have social media back then, so the story of the attacks on Haitians in the early 80s didn’t make it beyond the South Florida information ecosystem.
Obviously, this isn’t the 80s. Let’s remember who is guilty of ranking Americans and feeding them the worst examples of their political enemies and the fairest examples of their political supporters: the tech companies that control the flow of information we receive on a regular basis.
I promise you, the way Americans talk about each other online is not the way most Americans treat each other in person. (That goes double for the actual majority of Springfield residents.) But unfortunately, as so much of our daily politics is discussed online, it’s starting to change us — and it’s changing us for the worse, starting with political leaders who spend more money. more time online than the average American.
Algorithms emphasize demonizing the other party the longer you stay online. That’s why many of us who don’t spend most of our lives online don’t recognize the country we see in the world of online information sharing.
And that brings me back to what happened over the weekend. Be honest with yourself – while Sunday’s news was surprising, it wasn’t terribly earth-shattering, unfortunately. Spend 10 minutes poking around on your social media app of choice and you’ll be presented with examples of outrage and demonization that can do one of two things: make you shake your head and leave the platform in disgust about the state of the country, or enrage you and make you engage more, usually on purpose or otherwise. unwittingly helps to demonize the “other side”.
Yes, I am being deliberately vague with these descriptions, because this kind of behavior is not limited to a group of partisans.
Now imagine what this discourse does for some people who already have mental health issues.
As social media has risen and become the primary distributor and facilitator of political information, our politics have become more combative and less collaborative. And no one has done a more effective job of using this new discourse tool than Trump.
That’s why it’s hard to take seriously the outrage of some in Trump’s orbit that it’s the Democrats and their media allies who are creating the more violent conditions in our political landscape. For every complaint he says the right surfaces to talk about, there is a series of pugilistic personal attacks by Trump himself that put Americans in harm’s way by naming them.
But just because Trump started, that doesn’t mean his opponents have the moral high ground when they single him and some of his supporters out for personal ridicule. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right”.
Unfortunately, our political discourse has traits that rationalize people’s bad behavior by claiming that the other side is worse. My friends on the left love to rant about both parties and complain when some of us hold them to a higher standard than Trump. But the party promising a higher standard is asking to be judged by a higher standard. That doesn’t mean that one condones bad behavior from the other side, but it does mean that if you ask voters to expect better, you always have to do better. It’s not always easy, but a good leader behaves well even when it’s difficult.
Come January 21st, we will all live in the same country and share the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who recognize that there are great political differences among us and that governance needs to be incremental, not radical.
Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward growth or nuance, but instead punishes both and, more than that, rewards those who craft the best stories.
Most Americans have an instinct to de-escalate when things get heated, but most elected officials in modern times are encouraged to do the opposite.
What concerns me most is that most Americans are so distorted by how information flows through the social media funhouse mirror that we’ve forgotten how much we all have in common. It will only get worse if we don’t find a way out of this twisted maze of failures.
To paraphrase Churchill, we hope that after we’ve exhausted all the wrong ways to bring this country together, we’ll finally figure out what really divides us and look for a better way.