There’s a strange numbness in the political ecosystem regarding the apparent second attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump. We’ve collectively underreacted — and maybe there are perfectly reasonable explanations for it.
Yet I fear that some of the underreaction has to do with the fact that we are now so close to election day that some people are basing their reactions on whether what they say will help or hurt their party political positions, rather than taking a step back and critically asking themselves how we got here.
And unfortunately, I think the broader electorate and the media are more concerned about that larger question than any elected leader we have collectively put at the helm of our democracy. It is frustrating to see this episode being exploited for political gain, which only serves to fuel the divide, not heal it.
Just look at Trump’s initial response to the arrest of a man with a gun spotted on the edge of his golf course. Unlike when he was gunned down in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, when he and his team embraced a “let’s keep our cool” approach and left some of the heated rhetoric to other Republicans, there’s no sign of that this time around.
Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than a moment of reflection. That initial attempt to overtly politicize the situation likely accelerated the collective desensitization to the event itself. Fox News has been particularly aggressive in its programming in recent days, going out of its way to find examples of left-wing rhetoric that might sound inflammatory on its face. It’s something Fox could easily have done with Trump’s rhetoric but chose not to. It’s simply feeding an audience what it thinks it wants, rather than deciding whether to be responsible and provide nuance and context. It’s not alone.
Of course, we’ve had so many confrontations with increased political violence over the past decade that it’s perhaps not surprising that the public has become somewhat desensitized. There’s a part of me that didn’t even want to bother writing this column because anything that even remotely attempts to rise above partisanship is either completely ignored, dismissed as naïve, or dismissed as being said by someone who simply “doesn’t know what time it is.”
Let’s face it: The current level of political discourse is unsustainable for this democracy. It may not break us this year, it may not break us next year. But unless we choose to rise above it, either by choosing de-escalators over purveyors of zero-sum political boxing or by demanding that big tech stop creating algorithms designed to incite and divide, we will break — and that break will be dangerous. It has happened to this republic before, so don’t assume it can’t happen again.
The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we’re all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see is not what it is, and how we’re seen is not who we are. And yet here we are.
What better example of this than the fabricated stories about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio? As a Miami resident, I witnessed firsthand similar attempts to dehumanize and “other” Haitians amid an influx of refugees from the country in the early 1980s. This is not a new theme, unfortunately. We didn’t have social media back then, which may be why the story of attacks on Haitians in the early 1980s didn’t travel beyond the South Florida information ecosystem.
Clearly, this is not the 1980s. Let us not forget who bears the blame for sorting Americans and feeding them the worst examples of their political enemies and the most righteous examples of their political supporters: the tech companies that control the flow of information we routinely receive.
I promise you that the way Americans talk about each other online is not the way most Americans act in real life. (That goes double for the actual majority of Springfield residents.) But unfortunately, because so much of our daily politics is discussed online, it’s starting to change us — and for the worse, starting with the political leaders who spend more time online than the average American.
The algorithms emphasize the demonization of the other side the longer you stay online. This is why so many of us who spend most of our lives not online do not recognize the land we see in the world of online information exchange.
And that brings me back to what happened this past weekend. Be honest with yourself: while the news on Sunday was surprising, it was unfortunately not terribly shocking. Spend 10 minutes doomscrolling on your favorite social media app and you’ll be presented with examples of outrage and demonization that can do two things: make you shake your head at the state of the country, leave the platform in disgust or anger, and drive you to engage even more, usually by consciously or unconsciously contributing to the demonization of “the other side.”
And yes, I am being deliberately vague with these descriptions, because this kind of behavior is not limited to one group of party members.
Now imagine what this discourse does to people who already struggle with mental health issues.
As social media has emerged and become the primary disseminator and facilitator of political information, our politics has become more militant and less collaborative. And no one has used this new medium of discourse more effectively than Trump.
That’s why it’s hard to take seriously the outrage from some in Trump’s inner circle that it’s Democrats and their media allies who have created the most violent conditions in our political landscape. For every complaint the judge raises about discourse he says could be triggering, there’s a series of pugilistic personal attacks Trump himself has made, aimed at Americans by name, endangering them.
But just because Trump started it 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, much of our political discourse features people who rationalize their bad behavior by claiming that the other side is worse. My friends on the left love to scream about both-side-isms and complain when some of us hold them to a higher standard than Trump. But the side that promises a higher standard is asking to be judged by a higher standard. This doesn’t mean that anyone condones the other side’s bad behavior, but it does mean that if you ask voters to expect better, you should always behave better, period. It’s not always easy, but a good leader behaves well, even when it’s hard.
On 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 accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing should be gradual, not radical.
Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incremental improvements or nuances, it punishes both. In fact, it rewards those who come up with the best stories.
Most Americans tend to de-escalate when tensions run high, but most elected officials in modern times tend to behave differently.
What worries me most is whether most Americans have become so distorted by the way information travels through the social media funhouse mirror that we have forgotten how much we all have in common. If we don’t get out of this maze of distorted reflections, it will only get worse.
To paraphrase Churchill: Let us hope that after we have exhausted all the wrong ways to unite this country, we will finally realise what has really divided us and begin to look for a better path.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
