Our Divisions Are Killing Us
How Social Media Is Ripping Us Apart
I'm so tired of our politics. My guess is you are too. We are not alone.
In a recent private Facebook post, I pointed out that the narrative on social media that everything is falling apart and we are all divided is exaggerated by social media itself. I quoted Will Stancil, a Democrat running for election to the Minnesota House of Representatives. His argument might sound familiar to my readers: if things in this country are getting better, why does everything feel worse? His suspicion: social media did it.
A well-meaning friend responded with this: "I guess the question, and it is a sincere one, is how do we go back at this point? I also don't think some of it is manufactured - there are a lot of social strains that folks are experiencing in their day-to-day lives."
First, I agree with Stancil that, generally, great progress has been made in recent years, and social media has fed our collective anxiety to the point where cynicism has won the day.
But that doesn't mean that everything in this country is going well. Like my friend, I believe that there are very real pain points for many Americans, and I'm not kumbaya on our divisions, either. This stuff is real. Race, class, and regional divisions—all real. If any one of us believes that a political policy or party is going to destroy one's industry, threaten one's job, make our towns and cities less safe, decide who we can and cannot marry, determine whether we can get housing or health care... No, we can't just agree to disagree. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are at stake. We can't shake hands and move on. It's going to be hard to have a cookout with someone who supports policies that could destroy your life or the lives of your loved ones. We've got to solve it.
But where do we start? Partisan politics and collective negativity have made so many of us lash out because we are frustrated, bitter, divided, and frightened.
Ideology Above All Else
The state of our political discourse is discouraging because there is so little valid debate. There are few issues where we agree on the facts. Often we can't even agree on the problems, never mind the solutions. If we can't find any common ground, there is no room for dialogue of any kind.
This is increasingly nearly unique to our politics. Anyone who went to a good college knows that in nearly every field—physics, medicine, paleontology, sociology, theology, philosophy, history, literature, you name it—well-meaning, intelligent people can agree on the facts and have helpful, insightful differences of opinion on how to apply or interpret those facts. In academics, it is common for intellectuals to agree on common ground and debate what remains unknown. Often, the most important breakthroughs come from the attempt to reconcile multiple conflicting points of view. These types of conversations are all but absent in our politics, confined to university classrooms and forums run by think tanks, far from the chaotic partisanship of our public discourse.
What's even more frustrating is that we live at a time when there is more data than ever before in human history to inform our decisions, yet our political discourse makes little attempt to do so. There are between 5,000 and 6,000 colleges and universities in the United States alone, perhaps exponentially more across the globe. Most of them are studying data from 195 countries, including the US. Inside the US, we have multiple regions, 50 states, and nearly 20,000 incorporated cities, towns, and villages. Each of these provides a laboratory to test the intersection of different demographics and conditions with various policies. Furthermore, with the advent of the internet, we have the ability to see the results in almost real-time. If Germany, California, a small town in Arizona, and the city of Philadelphia all have a problem with unhoused people, and all enact various policies to deal with those problems, we can study each result and assess whether something that works for one might work for others. So much of this work is possible—in fact, so much of it is already being done—on every subject and every problem under the sun, but too few policymakers, too few voters, are paying any attention.
Instead of using data to solve a problem, they're relying on tribalism and naked ideology to confront the problem. The results are usually worse, but they also deepen our political and social divides because, rather than analyzing the data and proposing informed solutions, we are debating intractable ideology in total absence of reality.
There are countless examples, and while I hate to give a partisan example or make a "both sides" false equivalence argument, perhaps the clearest one is climate change—whether it exists, whether it is man-made, and what to do about it.
This author is an American and has spent considerable time reading about and debating this topic. But I have also spent significant amounts of time in Europe, or engaging with Europeans or other world citizens and thinkers on the topic. I have been to energy forums, foreign policy conferences, and countless seminars. I have read opinions of experts of every nationality and point of view. In that time, despite interacting with many conservatives, employees of energy companies, and politicians who are leaders of countries that are fossil fuel exporters, I have only met a single European who told me that he disagreed with me on climate change, and his opinions were very different from American climate change deniers I have met.
Bratislava Castle overlooks the Danube River and separates Slovakia from Austria. From the castle overlook, one can see endless Austrian fields filled with huge wind turbines. My colleague actually mentioned to me what a beautiful sight that was. I responded that it was nice to see Austria directly confronting climate change. And this is when he disagreed and told me he was skeptical of human-caused climate change.
Austria’s wind turbine fields, taken on the road from Vienna to Bratislava — Photographer: James Miller, 2016
I was shocked. This man and I agreed on so much, and it was he who brought up the wind turbines. I asked him why he made his comment if he was a climate change denier.
First, he corrected me. Climate change is indisputably happening. The science is overwhelming. What he doubted was that scientists had proven the case that human activity was entirely responsible. But then came a clear break with American climate-change-denier tradition: there were so many other benefits. "Every turn of those turbines makes Europe more energy independent. I can almost see the dollars being sucked out of Putin's pocket." He went on to say that there was also humility in his belief: if he was wrong and humanity is causing climate change, the consequences of not changing our behavior could be cataclysmic. If he was right, the consequences are that we generated clean, renewable energy, and didn't have to rely on fossil fuels, which are often produced by authoritarian states, to power our economies.
The entire conversation left a lasting impression. First of all, there are so few European climate change deniers. But in hundreds of examples of debates I have had with climate change deniers in the US or on social media, it is the only time I felt that the person had used factual analysis to find common ground.
How Did It Get This Way?
Part of the core problem in American politics is the two-party system, which forces individuals to either accept an entire platform or live with the cognitive dissonance of voting for some of their beliefs while simultaneously voting against others. For example, if someone supports one party because of their stance on same-sex marriage, they are also voting for that party's stance on, well, everything, from abortion and tax policy to border issues, education, or even foreign policy. Some voters may feel comfortable voting a certain way for a certain amount of time to champion the causes that are most important to them, but most voters, if continually put in this situation, tend to eventually adopt the policies of the party they consistently vote for.
Social media, the "Internet that never forgets," and the group-think dynamic all share blame.
Politicians are often haunted by past remarks, as are individuals whose social media pages are a collection of all their political statements for the last two decades. It's increasingly hard to find middle ground or change direction when anyone who disagrees with you can pile on. Furthermore, groups of people can easily form on social media around a particular political belief or grievance, and those groups can degrade into a mob mentality.
One should not dismiss, not for a single minute, that there are governments, think tanks, PR companies, and shady political organizations that also work, either independently or in concert, to pollute our social media feeds with talking points, disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, fear, and hate.
Volumes of books can and have been dedicated to how we got here. But the truth is it'll be up to each of us to find the path out of this mess.
It Starts With You
I don't think the path forward is simple, but I think the first step in healing our divisions is to stop making things so much worse.
Memes are the best example. In elementary school, we should have learned about political propaganda. Memes are just the 21st-century equivalent. These are not meant to inform, but instead, they boil a complicated subject down to a single phrase or image, often an inaccurate one, in order to divide and score points rather than to work together toward a mutual understanding. These are designed to shut down communication and dialogue by oversimplifying a complex issue and scoring the biggest point possible. There are countless articles about how memes amplify division, spread misinformation, and are easily manipulated by powerful forces, and yet they continue to spread.
To be clear, I do not think the intention of most people who share memes is division. I grew up in the 90s. Our generation is notorious for "taking the piss," as the British would say. But context is key, and anyone who is paying attention to what's happening in society should know by now that very little about our politics is funny.
Second, we absolutely must begin to publicly accept that those who have different beliefs than we do may have legitimate grievances or concerns. I've seen plenty on the left ignore the fact that guns are both Constitutionally protected and important to the lives of many Americans. I've seen plenty on the right ignore the very real, very lethal consequences of guns in the hands of the wrong people. The result is that both sides resent and distrust the other, and both see the other as fully to blame for the problems, and neither is able to work together to find solutions.
We also have to admit that the record of the political party we identify with the most has been far from perfect. Even if we ultimately feel like we have to vote for one party or the other, strict adherence to a single party repudiates our criticisms of the other as partisan. Furthermore, it makes us bad neighbors. It's possible that every conceivable policy will have adverse effects that impact human beings around us. If we're going to pursue policies that negatively impact a portion of our society, we need to acknowledge this damage and begin to work toward mutual solutions, rather than just ignore the fallout because the ends justify the means.
Third, we have to publicly acknowledge when the facts are not on our side, no matter how uncomfortable that process may be. In my experience, this may be the hardest one for most Americans. For instance, if one side wants to focus on the data that many American households face real economic problems, and the other side wants to ignore the problems Americans face by focusing on the data that shows the economy is strong, neither side is recognizing the full scope of the problem: yes, inflation is lower, and the unemployment rate is low, and wages are slowly growing faster than inflation, but systemic problems in our economy and our society persist even when all those statements are true. If both sides want to cherry-pick the good data to say everything is good, or cherry-pick the bad data to say everything is bad, no one is working to find solutions to the reality that some things are getting better while others are getting worse or staying the same. If we can't agree on the problems, and we ignore what the data actually says, we're never going to be able to move forward on finding real solutions.
Lastly, we have to know our neighbors. We have to have sympathy for their pain. We have to find common ground. We cannot pursue a zero-sum-game political strategy where if we get our way the consequences of our decisions, intended or otherwise, go ignored. To go back to my earlier examples, if one side wants to shift away from the coal industry, that side also needs to dedicate themselves to helping the people who earn a living off that industry. If one side believes that responsible gun ownership has to be protected, that side should also be working toward ensuring that the American people are being protected from people who should not have guns. If one side wants health insurance for more people, they should also acknowledge that this could mean an increase in premiums that may need to be paid for by everyone.
It's Not False Equivalence To Say "Both Sides" Need Work
For the record, I do not believe that "both sides" have equally contributed to this problem. In the examples I gave above, for instance, I believe and could strongly argue that one party has indeed worked for such compromises and the other, by and large, has not.
But I also believe that each of us has contributed to this problem, and each time one of us contributes to this problem it makes the other side more defiant and the division wall between us grows ever higher.
Furthermore, failure to acknowledge the concerns of the other side will almost guarantee that rather than settling the issue it will only set the stage for years of political battles with a focus on the past rather than the future. Each time there is a mass shooting, we rhetorically shoot at each other rather than solving the problem. By ramming through policies that the other side disagrees with instead of finding common ground, both sides have indeed worked toward ensuring that we continue to relitigate these policies.
Perhaps most urgently, I believe that time is running out to find common ground. History has shown us, time and time again, that if divisions become intractable, the end result is often violence. As someone who has studied how discontent turns to social unrest turns to civil war, I can promise you that any time the political process for addressing problems breaks down, the result is terrorism, war, or other forms of bloodshed.
