Polarized
There are a whole lot of things to disagree about in America today. We align on our sides, from voting rights to Covid . We’re right, they’re wrong, and they must be idiots to think the way they do. Polarization is the watchword of American politics, and life, in 2022.
When I was an eighth grade American History teacher back in the 1980’s (forty years ago!!), one of the key concepts I taught my students was that polarization led to the Civil War. America was divided, riven by the issues surrounding enslavement. There was no turning back. All of the “tricks” of the legislators, from Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise to Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act, were unable to resolve the issue.
Kids
Back in “the day”, my kids didn’t quite get it. How could America be so divided, that Virginians would fight Pennsylvanians, and Missourians fight among themselves? Why did best friends like Winfield Scott Hancock and Lew Armistead lead armies into battle against each other? It just didn’t seem possible, even after Vietnam, and Watergate, that Americans couldn’t find some common purpose. It wasn’t just the “pathos” of brother versus brother. There was the sheer waste of lives, blood and treasure over what seemed in hindsight to be an inevitable outcome.
Kids in class today would get the division just fine. They would feel right at home with the hate of the 1850’s, the justification of “my side is the right” and “you’re in the wrong”. Look at today’s arguments pitting “freedom” against public health, and you’ll get the idea.
I’m not predicting another civil war (but I’m not discounting that possibility anymore either). And while I certainly have a “side” on the issues of today, the purpose of this essay is to examine how we got here.
Gerrymandering
Ohio is in the throes of another “gerrymandering” debate. The majority Republican State Supreme Court just turned down its own Republican plan as being too partisan and ignoring the expressed desires of the people. But as a national issue, gerrymandering has significantly contributed to our national division. That’s not an issue of blame, just fact. We’ve divided ourselves in a way to encourage more division.
How does that work? Gerrymandering for political gain is simply drawing the district maps so that one political party or the other is guaranteed a win. Take Ohio’s 4th Congressional District, carefully etched into the countryside by the Republican controlled 2011 re-districting. It goes from the outskirts of Dayton east to the edges of Columbus, up north to near Toledo, then again east almost to Cleveland. It is the tenth most Republican district in the nation.
Base Rules
So when a Republican runs for Congress in the 4th, they know that winning the primary election is a guarantee of winning the Congressional seat. Primary voting turnout is notoriously low compared to general election voting. Only the most “motivated” voters show up, the Base. And the most motivated are usually those more extreme voters, the ones who are “fired up”. Gerrymandering has put the power to select legislators in the hands of those few extremists, not intentionally, but practically. And to keep getting re-elected, the legislator must continue to pander to that Base, the few that vote in the primary, versus the many who vote in the general.
Multiply that by the sixteen districts in Ohio. And then add many of the states in the Union, both Republican and Democrat. Gerrymandering fills the Congress (and the state legislatures) with members who have little to gain in compromise, in “making sausage”. Instead, their personal interest to remain in office pushes them to the extremes, to non-negotiable stands. Look at Jim Jordan from Ohio’s 4th, or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from New York’s 14th. To what common purpose could those two work?
Media
In 1996, Media mogul Rupert Murdock hired Republican campaign consultant Roger Ailes to set up a new kind of “news” channel. It would represent the “conservative” view, despite its promise of “fair and balanced” news. Ailes, who campaigned for Nixon, Reagan and HW Bush, did a remarkable job of creating Fox, a news source for “the right” and the supposed counter-balance for CNN. But to have an effective strategy to gain “the right” viewer, Ailes needed a better bête noire, an opposing network that was more obviously “left” than CNN.
When Microsoft and General Electric came together to create MSNBC about the same time as Fox, Ailes had what he needed. The market was calling for a “left” news source to counter-balance Fox, and MSNBC slid that direction to pick up viewers. Ultimately both Fox and MSNBC eclipsed the older CNN, and both served to further divide the viewing public. Today there is “a balance”: Fox has a little more than half of the cable viewing share, MSNBC and CNN split the rest.
For Profit
With the expansion of cable broadcasts, other networks have tried to gain shares by outflanking Fox to the right. Newsmax and OANN joined the right, challenging Fox to skew even more. But Fox found the ultimate viewer enhancer, a political candidate who was already a television “star” (created by NBC oddly enough) who became the President of the United States.
But it’s really all about money, not politics. I learned that at a very early age. My Dad, a “Rockefeller Republican” back in the 1960’s, put a very liberal Phil Donahue on television in Dayton. Donahue and Dad didn’t agree on politics, but they both knew a good thing when they had one. By the end, the Donahue Show was in every television market in the country, all 210 of them, and lasted twenty-six years. It was about money and success, not politics.
Information
And now in the past two decades, there is an entirely different source of information. Mass use of the internet and social media has allowed everyone to “silo” their information. They get what they “want to hear”, with little alternative or criticism. The infamous “algorithms” of Facebook (and Google, and Twitter, and, and, and…) constantly pour gas on our fires of ideology. That’s all about money as well. Social media is monetized by “clicks”, by the number of people who view a particular site. And nothing drives “clicks” like outrage. From a financial standpoint, the more outrage – the more clicks – the more money.
And so the wedges polarizing us are pounded in deeper by the unseen mathematical forces that keep appealing to our emotions. It isn’t “love” that drives us to the next site or the next message – it’s negative. Hate, anger, and indignation are the powers that make social media the place for profit. Tired of hating McConnell – move onto Manchin!! Tired of hammering Biden – try despising Fauci!!
Revolution
The “theory of revolution” postulates that people don’t “revolt” when they are at their lowest. Instead, they “revolt” when their lives improve, or they see “hope” for the future, and then that improvement and hope is dashed. The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States might be one example of this. For a significant number of Americans, the election of a progressive Black man as President was a “bridge too far”. They were shocked, both by his politics and his race, especially after the conservative administration of George W Bush following “Republican Lite” Bill Clinton. That shock soon became organizational anger, and the “Tea Party” movement began. It wasn’t all “racist”, but it was definitely encouraged by the racial issue.
Should it be any surprise that their ultimate response was the election of the diametric opposite t0 Obama, an opulently rich White man who voiced “Tea Party” like views, and had the support of the “right’s” media? Especially when the alternative choice was another ground breaking candidate, a woman for President? And with Trump’s election there was a predictable progressive response to that “outrage”, from Inauguration day on, culminating in the elections of 2018 and 2020.
The Middle
Enter Joe Biden, quite literally a man “of the middle”. And for many, there was hope that his electoral success would bring our nation to a “middle” where common purpose could again be the driving principle. But Biden ran into the realities of 2021-22 American politics. We are polarized by all the other forces in our lives – politics, healthcare, media; the phones we spend so much time on (my daily average an incredibly low 2 hour and 17 minutes this week).
In an environment where magnifying failure is so much more profitable than touting success, and where much of the “middle” has been wedged to the sides, it’s no surprise that Biden is struggling. Look at the Senate of the United States. They can’t even manage to reaffirm the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1965. The no-brainer of a decade ago is now controversial. Even some Democrats don’t support it (or at least, won’t support a means to pass it).
I wish I had a “good answer” for what we need to do to “fix” all this. But to start, we must at least recognize where it began, and why it continues. My bet: when the money can be made by fixing rather than dividing, we might be on our way to a common good: Capitalism at its finest. I’ll hold my breath.
