The style of criticism that is so often being curated by both sides of the political compass, but more often from the left-leaning, liberal media is the polar opposite of effective. Quite simply, ineffective criticism is far worse than no criticism at all. That’s simply because poorly designed criticism gives the upper hand to the advocates of the thing you are criticising. And in the following paragraphs, I’m going to explain exactly why we are seeing the largest political and moral divide in the United States since the 1960s.
Trump Hotel: Unsplash
Malicious Trends
There
has been a general trend of liberal news media in the U.S. largely
emanating from organisations such as the New York Times, Vox, the
Washington Post and Al Jazeera, publishing articles that ridicule,
demean, and slander both Donald Trump and his followers. That is not to
say that outlets like Fox News and Breitbart don’t engage in these
practices (they really really do), it’s simply that more liberal outlets
have a much further reaching potential on Facebook because its primary
constituents are younger and more left-leaning. And it is the role of
the left to progress in a way that doesn’t revert to using the same tactics against its opponents. It is about shaping up and leading by example.
From
a purely personal standing, I have absolutely no issue with Donald
Trump’s flaws being pointed out in satirical, demeaning, or vitriolic
fashions. It doesn’t do me any harm as just a single individual
reading the news. But, the problem is; news media isn’t consumed in a
vacuum. People don’t read the news and then keep their opinions to
themselves. Not even close; instead they share their opinions, often
unashamedly on any one of the social media platforms available to them.
The problem isn’t just what we share with others. It is primarily: who
we share it with, that has become the issue. As Facebook is the most
broadly used platform for social engagement in the United States, I’ll
use some 2018 very broad and general statistics on it to illustrate the
depth of the issue at hand:
66% of the American population uses Facebook.
45% of the Americans use Facebook for news media in general.
22.5% of Americans use Facebook as the sole distributor of their news.
Up in Flames: Unsplash
So,
what exactly is the problem with increasing numbers of Americans using
Facebook as a news platform? Well, most internet users have probably
heard of the term ‘echo chamber’: meaning that we prefer to surround
ourselves with opinions we agree with.
A digital echo chamber
is merely our innate instinct to populate our friend groups with people
that share opinions we favour. And so; the problem with using Facebook
as the sole distributor of our news, is that it allows us to extend our
innate to desire undertake these biological preferences with almost
every aspect of information that enters into our lives. We can
voluntarily subscribe directly to the things we want to see and hear
and block out the things we find unpleasant. We click ‘like’ on pages
that deliver us the information we agree with, and therefore that
information shows up on our newsfeed. We quite obviously don’t
click ‘like’ on pages we disagree with and therefore unless the
“counter-preference” articles are shared by someone within our friend
circle, it stays out entirely of our newsfeed.
This is why we
can have entire groups of regular human beings that honestly believe
that Donald Trump is the lone saviour of the United States and that
anyone who opposes or criticises his reign, is merely a “triggered”
left-wing snowflake.
Or, contrastingly; it’s why we have swathes of the younger population that derive such immense pleasure from articles and videos that depict Trump to be a floundering orange idiot stumbling around the White House like an angry drunken child.
Skits
that play this hedonistic role, are constantly reinvigorated by shows
such as Saturday Night Live which seek to further illustrate pictures of
his followers as nothing but uneducated, racist, “trailer-trash” that
hate anything that doesn’t have blue and red stripes emblazoned upon it.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
And whilst both of
sides of the political spectrum have fallen into the ever-tempting yet
childish trap of painting emotion filled caricatures of the opposition,
the new liberal-left has been the one to do so far more consistently.
Why These Caricatures Survive:
These
inflammatory caricatures that appear in so consistently in the
underlying themes of articles are not simply an accidental flaw of
internet news media, or an isolated emotional phenomenon, rather, they
are the very blueprint of new online news media that is functionally
oriented to keep our attention solely oriented upon on hyper-specific
points. To many, this sort of discussion begins to present itself as
deeply conspiratorial; but it’s how the “free” internet economy works.
Information based web pages generate revenue based on the amount of time
you spend engaged in their content. The longer you are engaged with
certain content, the more information can be harvested from you. It’s
how Facebook remains “free”.
The data they gather is not just simple personal information like age, gender, location and so on, it consists of every click you make. Every click gives advertisers that buy information from Facebook further insight into your online behaviour, what you’re interested in, and how to market (or not market) things to you.
These mega-data advertising conglomerates don’t really care
too much for the function of democracy or civility in the sterile world
data analytics. Therefore, we can see that the majority of free news
media isn’t a Fourth Estate. It’s an outsourced emotional board game
where you win by inflaming people’s response to your content enough to
get them to share it, decry it or use it as a method of virtual protest.
This mode of revenue generation, based upon the ridicule and slander of
opinions that are not our own has become so dangerous to the very
fabric of our politics that it seeks to undermine the foundations of the
democratic process itself.
The Social Issue of Ridicule:
Herein lies the fundamental problem of ridiculing and slandering Trump and his followers. By engaging in the warfare of digital speech
we are simply hammering an enormous virtual wedge between the “warring
sides” of the increasingly divided States of America. We are electing to
condemn ourselves to our echo chambers every time we surround ourselves
with information we agree with, and instinctively lash out at those who
have conflicting views.
Illegitimate: Unsplash
People’s political opinions do not make them instantly or inherently evil. Ridiculing or insulting people does absolutely zero good. Period. When have you ever changed your mind in regards to your behaviour or thoughts directly after being shamed, or condescended? No one responds well to this sort of criticism. It causes us to double down on our opinions and defend them at all costs. But, from the perspective of news media outlets; ridicule, insult, and slander are incredibly powerful tools. They make our ears prick up when we see inflammatory and aggressive; “click-bait” headlines and they get us all worked up, ready to interrogate whatever we find in the article we click on. It’s what a lot of new journalists want. They want to create a fight. Don’t let them. It’s only harming the potential for real dialogue between the political left and right in America.
As Jonathan Haidt so eloquently points out in his work: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics; we are simple creatures with moral preferences that inform our politics post-hoc. We have a series of moral tastebuds
that seek to inform our emotional reaction to certain information. It’s
not that conservatives who don’t support certain types immigration
programs are “evil”, they merely have a different moral preference that
informs their political viewpoints. They more often than not have
incredibly good empirical reasoning for their viewpoints, we just
misunderstand them because we seek to talk over one another. It’s not
that all conservatives who don’t support “diversity” movements are
bigoted, racist xenophobes; they simply see that the world functions in a
very different way than we may presumptively think it does. Try to
approach every conversation you have from a place of ignorance and you
will soon realise that people you disagree with have a lot to offer.
Even if it’s uncomfortable to begin with.
Political
conservatives come from an enormous variety of social backgrounds, yet
the liberal-left seeks to paint a very distinct condescending portrait
of Trump and the Trump voter.
And it’s dangerous.
It’s dangerous because whenever we seek to de-humanise our “opposition” we instantly lose. It happens so consistently from liberals who view themselves as “rational” and “tolerant” when quite often they are the furthest thing from it.
There are reasons that conservatives in the United States feel the way that they do. One of the fundamental reasons that Donald Trump managed to manhandle the electoral college and clinch victory in the 2016 election was in the way he utilised votes from the working class in the rural Midwest and Pennsylvania, whilst Clinton seemed to take the Upper-Midwest for granted, with all economic policy and campaigning being notably absent from Wisconsin, foolishly believing that she could hitchhike off Obama’s former reputation in the “blue-state”.
The manufacturing
heartland colloquially called the “rust-belt” was already leaning
Republican, Trump’s campaigning tactics just managed to tip the scales
in his favour. The new condescending liberal-left so obviously
represented by the Democrats had forgotten the plight of hundreds of
thousands of working Americans, and instead focused on purporting a
bourgeoisie campaign of buzzword oriented focus such as: diversity,
inclusion, tolerance and acceptance in a political climate where
hundreds of thousands of Americans were already suffering from
widespread unemployment, technical poverty, and genuine socioeconomic
hardship. Not only did the Democrats forgot about them. They were
actively belittled in the Clinton campaign. And so, when Trump arrived
and gave voice to their woes, no matter how volatile his incendiary
accusations at the establishment were. People listened. These people are
not “stupid”, they are coming from a place of genuine hardship, of
genuine economic disparity: with some post-industrial townships
reporting over 30% unemployment and yet they were laughed at by the
Democrats with Hillary Clinton herself declaring that: over half of
these people should be thrown into:“the basket of deplorables”.
This
is why I ask that you don’t give your time to incendiary articles and
that you don’t reflexively click on videos and memes that seek to
ridicule and despise anyone: Left or Right. Instead, I plea that you
direct your attention towards methods of real political engagement, and
that you seek to unite and care for those in positions of hardship, no
matter how foreign their moral disposition may be. There are many ways
to stand up for yourself and assist strong political movement that
doesn’t immediately disparage and defame your “opposition”.
All Rights Reserved for Thomas Mitchelhill
Productivity Hub 