Partisan politics and America’s delusions of grandeur
Originally published in July, 2021
“I’m not political.”
This is something you often hear people say these days. If asked, they will admit that they don’t regularly watch the news or read the paper. They’re not closely following policy debates or the inner workings of government. They don’t follow media elites, read in-depth articles, or listen to podcasts on subjects considered political. Most people are simply not paying that close attention.
And yet everyone you talk to seems to have strong opinions on a whole variety of cultural issues, many of which they might not even consider being political in nature. They have strong opinions, but no in-depth knowledge or understanding of the details. They know what they know, from what they hear, often from those they trust, regardless of whether that trust is earned or not.
It’s a lot of innuendo, inferences, and whispers down the lane. A lot of over-the-top social media posts that they sort of know are jokes, but also believe are at least partially true. Hyperbole performed as entertainment, but stated in a way that is designed to make you question everything except what the person is telling you.
According to Pew Research, 67% of Americans say that they have participated in politics in the last year, either by volunteering for or donating to campaigns, attending protests or meetings, contacting officials, or “expressing their views on social media.”
It’s that last part I wonder about.
Tribal By Design
Even people who don’t consider themselves political will admit to sharing political viewpoints on social media. It’s built for precisely that. To divide us into groups that share a common worldview, philosophy of life, and a common value system. It’s tribal by design.
The reality is that 85% of Americans have a much more casual relationship with politics. Only 15% are what you might call invested. These are the wonky, political junkies. The type who reads political bloggers and podcasts. The type of people who follow FiveThirtyEight or The Heritage Foundation. Possibly even the type of person who would read this article.
It’s this tiny group that makes most of the noise, and everyone else merely picks a camp and chooses a side. There used to be a lot of nuance in our political discourse, whereas now it’s more binary and much more absolute. We’re exposed to a lot of jokes, memes, and sound bites, but very few people take the time to read beyond the headline.
Eight in ten Americans (87%) get their news mainly on their phone or tablet, 68% from television, 50% from radio, and only 32% from print. A vast majority of people get what amounts to news from hearing things discussed on entertainment programming such as opinion programming, talk radio, late-night television talk shows, and Facebook.
The problem is that everyone has an opinion, but very few people have any real knowledge to support that opinion. It’s not an informed opinion. It’s more like a matter of taste. They have decided that this is what they believe because that is what other people they like believe. It’s closer to saying you like the Dallas Cowboys even though you live in Baltimore. Why? Because you think it makes you look cool, that’s why.
The Age of Voldemort
My wife will sometimes bring something up that she has heard someone comment on. She won’t view it as political at all, but it’s clear, at least to me, that the person she heard had a political leaning different from my own, because they are interpreting the bit of information through a filter of partisan politics.
A decade or two ago, I might have disagreed with the same number of people politically, on a whole wide range of issues, but the issues were much more compartmentalized. They didn’t bleed over into every aspect of our culture like they do today.
Initially, we had the backlash of the first Black president, which itself engendered a whole ecosystem of opposition, unlike anything we’d ever seen before. It was no longer ideological in nature, but more of a scorched-earth approach to blocking any and all initiatives, simply because of who had originated the policy, not based on the merits of the policy itself.
Then we saw the rise of He Who Must Not Be Named, and we entered a world of alternative facts and wholly fabricated narratives. We detached from reality, like a space capsule leaving the rest of the ship, breaking off and floating away, no longer bound to the rules of gravity. The Age of Voldemort.
Don’t Believe Your Eyes
Now we’re in a post-apocalyptic haze of uncertainty as we try to come to terms with catastrophic weather events we have no way to prepare for, as our medical systems are strained by the effects of a global pandemic that is entirely solvable, but which we struggle with because the lack of trust in institutions itself has become a political tool of the right.
In his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
The former guy told his followers much the same when he told them, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” I’m not making that shit up. He actually said that shit.
People are dying from stupidity just so that one political party might gain an advantage and solidify its base. Over a million people have died in the US alone, directly due to COVID-19, but millions of Americans refuse to believe their eyes and ears. They’ve been told that they can’t trust what they see and hear, so they don’t.
The Cowboy Myth
We think we know what’s going on in the world, but we don’t actually understand the most basic aspects of how anything works. From the phones in our pockets to the international banking system. We don’t know how aspirin works, let alone our car engine.
Our entire existence, from paper currency to medicine, history to science, is built on the trust we share in experts and institutions. It’s the historical or institutional memory that maintains stability and continuity. Once that trust is eroded, we have only our own knowledge to lean on, and that is thin ice to be sure.
We have taken what is easily the most advanced accumulation of knowledge in human history and reduced it to what can be reconciled with the uninformed, personal opinion of a high school dropout. We’ve reached a state of mass hysteria, fueled by a shared delusion of independence and a spurious ideology of self-reliance. The cowboy myth.
A large swath of the American public has been convinced that all you need is a gun, a horse, and the freedom to live on the range in peace. The gun provides protection from wild animals, violent natives, and a greedy government. It doesn’t matter if they live in Staten Island or Santa Barbara, and don’t even own a cat, let alone cattle.
It’s the American ideal of independence and freedom, taken to a comic book level of absurdity. A nostalgic relic of mythology that didn’t have any basis in reality in the first place. Stories written by people who were never there, to sell newspapers to people who would never go. Our much-revered history was largely built on myths written as fantastic tales to sell mercantile goods. It was merely ad copy. Entertaining fables, written to sell soap to the filthy huddled masses.
Out In The Garden
The problem we now face is that tribal politics is no longer a separate element of our society that one can ignore. It has become the filter through which we see the world. Our understanding of the events that shape our lives is seen through the prism of where we get our information, and those sources have become far less reliable.
We are currently experiencing a paradigm shift, a divergence of knowledge, and a gap between what we know and what we believe. It would appear that, as a culture, we are moving to a place where the more we know, the less we believe. We have created our own reality, and it’s going to be the death of us. You can live in a fantasy of your own choosing, but the tiger doesn’t care if you believe it exists.
There was a band in the 90s called the Crash Test Dummies. They had a few modest hits, then seemingly disappeared. They had a song called “Two Knights and Maidens” that comes to mind:
Once there were two knights and maidens
They’d walk together
Out in the gardens
In all kinds of weather
The knights always pestered the maidens
To love them together
Out in the gardens
And they could watch each other
The maidens had other plans for the two knights
They’d give them potions
And make them see dreams and lights
The knights took the potions gladly
They laughed at their visions
But outside the garden
Tigers smelled them together
The maidens had other plans for the two knights
They’d give them potions
And make them see dreams and lights
The knights only laughed at the tigers
They thought they were visions
Out in the garden
The maidens watched them together
Ah, but for the two knights
Ah, but for maidens
Who gave to them dreams and lights