The Breakdown in Political Dialogue: Why are We Tearing Ourselves Apart?
There’s been a breakdown in our ability to have constructive political dialogue. We as a nation seem to be more divided than ever and increasingly incapable of civil discourse, even viewing the other side as a demonic bunch of idiots. Unfortunately, our leaders in Washington are failing to provide a shining example of collaborative governance. Just the opposite, they are cheering on the mob and seemingly taking every opportunity to lambaste the other side. We seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle that appears to be in a death spiral. How did we get here? Does it matter? Has it ever been this bad? Is there a way forward?
Have Things Really Changed?
Regrettably, this fracturing of the country is not merely perceived, there is a measurable shift occurring in the United States. According to the Pew Research Center in 2004 about half of Americans had a mix of conservative and liberal positions. That number shrunk to about a third by 2017. Notably, between 1994 and 2004, there had been little change.
Further, in 1994, only 64% of Republicans were more conservative than the median Democrat whereas by 2017 that number rose to 97%. Likewise, in 1994 only 70% of Democrats were more liberal than the median Republican compared to 97% in 2017.
How Did We Get Here?
We seem to have completely lost the idea of a shared truth. We used to have three television networks, the New York Times and a few other newspapers that were our sources of information. And with these limited voices it was easier to find a consensus about what was really going on. And these news sources took their responsibility of bringing an unbiased view of the news very seriously. Now there are nearly infinite sources of “news”. News Media is increasingly focused on getting clicks, likes and ratings versus a duty to do responsible journalism. And the traditional sources of journalism have become part of the problem. In an effort to compete with Internet “news” sources that lack the rigor and integrity of traditionally run news organizations, the traditional sources now sensationalize news and present a spin on the news tailored for their increasingly divided audience. For example, below is the headline following the passage of the “Tax Cuts and Job Act of 2017” from the Right news Source (Fox News), the Left news source (MSNBC) and one fairly down the middle from PBS News Hour.
Fox News: Trump's tax bill and regulatory reform will spark an economic boom, benefitting all Americans. With imagery of companies giving out Christmas bonuses to their employees (notably, Christmas bonuses not Holiday bonuses):
MSNBC: Americans brace for fallout from GOP tax bill; corporations happy. With imagery of corporations and the wealthy getting a big handout from Uncle Sam:
PBS News Hour: What you need to know now that the GOP tax bill is going to be law “Boring” facts and data:
Where you get your news from, actually changes what the news is. There is a heavy bias based on the news source you choose and people are self-selecting into their version of the story which is increasingly not “tainted” by “boring facts and data” but a version of the story that reinforces their already held beliefs. The broader lack of unbiased news reporting has led to a breakdown in the trust of the news reporting. Perhaps easy to understand when you look at just how different versions of the news can be as shown above.
According to a Politico survey on Americans view on the news media there is a real breakdown in the trust we have in the media. Although 84 percent say the media play a “critical” or “very important” role in our democracy, 43 percent of respondents had a very or somewhat unfavorable view of the press. A Monmouth University poll this past April found that 77% of American’s believe that the major traditional television and newspaper media outlets report “fake news” which was up from 63% the year prior. Additionally 83% of those polled believe fake stories in major publications are planted by outside interest groups. An even larger, 87% believe that it happens on social media.
Social media is an amplifying force in this trend. First of all, sources of “news” that appear in social media can be entirely disreputable but can still spread like fire and do the damage intended with much less consequence when compared with a traditional news source. For whatever reason people are quick to believe things that reinforce their beliefs and not so good at doing fact checking or even applying a little bit of reason to a fantastical story.
The artificial intelligence/machine learning applied by these networks actually exasperates the problem. If you watch a YouTube video that’s a little right or left leaning, the algorithms will tend toward pushing content that is a purer and purer form of an underlying belief which quickly leads to serving up an extreme set of content or at least a complete lack of diversity of content. The algorithms that work well to get you to buy that pair of shoes have turned out to have disastrous consequences when serving up “news” content.
To make it all worse there are foreign sources deliberately planting stories with the intent of getting us to argue amongst ourselves and distrust our institutions. And sadly when we do this we are really playing into to the hands of the Russians and others who are seeking to do us harm. Social media is where fake news has really found rich ground. According to Buzzfeed analysis, in the months leading up to the 2016 election the top 20 fake news stories had more shares, reactions and comments on Facebook (8.7 million engagements) than the 20 top hard news stories on Facebook (7.3 million engagements).
Does It Matter?
Well why do we need a “shared truth” and what difference does it make if we increasingly disagree on our interpretation of events? It matters because we live in a country that’s run by its citizens. And it’s hard to self-govern if there are no agreements on facts and truth. Even harder when there is a basic unwillingness to engage in civil and reasoned dialogue.
Has It Ever Been This Bad?
Well, almost certainly yes. If you go back to the third election in the United States, the first that didn’t include the unifying figure George Washington, you’d find that it was quite unsavory. This is well documented in the excellent book John Adams by David McCullough. At that point, early in our country’s history, there was a lot of fake news which included completely fabricated lies. It was this period of time that produced libel laws and the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts in an attempt to prevent individuals and the press from making up stories in order to turn the public against government officials, specifically John Adams (complicated story but strictly speaking many of these laws are no longer in place).
Most people in America were not alive for this or just don’t remember the extreme turbulence of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. In this time period there were a number of politically motivated, extreme leftist groups such as the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army that were set on tearing apart American institutions and used bombings as one of their favorite tools. As astounding as it sounds, “In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day.” Time Magazine article entitled, The Bombings of America That We Forgot does a nice job of covering the details of this and taking a crack at why we seem to have little national memory of this extreme level of politically motivated violence.
Maybe We Aren’t That Divided, But We’re Being Divided
So maybe our current situation isn’t as bad as it could be. And per the earlier Pew Research report, there is still a third of the country that is solidly centrist. According to recent research by Morris Fiorina of Stanford’s Hoover Institute, “more Americans classified themselves as moderates than as liberals or conservatives; moreover, the numbers are virtually identical to those registered in 1976. The distribution of partisan identification flatly contradicts the polarization narrative: self-classified Republicans are no larger a proportion of the public than in the Eisenhower era, while self-identified Democrats are a significantly smaller proportion than in the 1960s. Forty percent of today’s public declines to identify with either party.” What Fiorina does say is that positions haven’t changed they’ve just become more highly correlated with parties. In essence, parties have taken ownership of certain issues, gun control, abortion, environmental protection and used these as wedge issues to sort voters into their camps. “…we have two highly sorted parties, each of which tries to impose its narrow vision on a big, heterogeneous country.” For example, even on an extremely contentious issue like abortion, “…the Democratic platform position is ‘any time, for any reason,’ while the Republican position is ‘never, no exceptions.’ The public says ‘sometimes, for some reasons.’ ”
Which is to say that our politicians have found it advantageous to accentuate the differences in political views in order to win elections. Because of this effort to force all members of a party into a single set of beliefs, it’s become harder to find common ground on issues that are used as wedges to define parties. It also makes it harder for politicians to compromise and give a little on one issue because they might be able to get something on another issue. Since after all, they’ve built the issues to sort the voters into a Republican or Democratic party so it’s now considered treason to the party for politicians to step outside their party on any issue.
But again, we as an electorate are still more centrist than extremist. Which is reason for hope. And really there is only a small, 31%, (and shrinking) amount of discretionary spending that all of this antagonism is fighting over and about half of that is on defense. Even if you assume the defense budget could be cut by a decent amount, you’re still only looking at 15-20% of the budget that isn’t going to mandatory social welfare, interest on debt and defense. There is a line of argument that suggests that it’s precisely because of this increasingly narrow discretionary slice that politics have become so confrontational; there isn’t enough money for everyone to get what they want any more.
Why Can’t We Engage in Civil Discourse?
Still, it can’t be escaped that we as American’s are having a very difficult time engaging in civil discourse with each other. Communication and understanding comes from actually listening and when people feel they aren’t heard they become frustrated, angry and hostile. This current environment is very hostile to opposing views and demonizing of the other side. We now have an unwillingness to even listen to someone with a different perspective, to demonize them such that, even listening to their beliefs is abhorrent. There is an unfortunate trend of associating all people from the other side as Nazis or racists for expressing a belief different from your own. This does much damage as it makes it hard for others to listen to them for fear of being associated with being a racist or Nazi themselves. This is really an issue because there really are racists and Nazis and by painting such a broad brush, it actually creates cover for real racists and Nazis to operate. In doing so, we do a disservice to the rightful disdain that we all should have for actual racists and Nazis.
There is an excellent episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast that covers research from John Hibbing at the University of Nebraska and his book, Predisposed - Liberals, Conservatives and the Biology of Political Differences. What Hibbing and his team have found is that liberal or conservative views are hard wired into how people see the world. Liberals and Conservatives, on average, have different views on pets (family member or just a pet), food tastes (meat and potatoes vs. ethnic food), should poetry rhyme, should novels have clear resolution, etc. This effects how they see threats and danger. For example, conservatives really feel like it’s being patriotic and a good citizen to be able to protect yourself, your family and your community and therefore support policies to reduce threats: people well-armed, more police, border controls, etc. Whereas liberals strongly believe that the world would be safer and better with less guns, less policing and more open borders. This leads to each side feeling that the other side are clearly idiots or liars because they don’t have the same response to the world. This is referred to as a False Consensus.
Fortunately, there are a couple great examples, which most people have interacted with in the past few years, that really make this idea of a false consensus easy to grasp. Remember the Yanny or Laurel controversy from last May? Or the White and Gold/Blue and Black dress that divided the world back in 2015?
In both cases, people were completely divided on what they heard or saw and couldn’t believe that other people saw it differently. It seemed like other people were crazy or lying. Sound familiar? We just perceive things differently and that affects our viewpoints. It’s not that the other side is crazy or disingenuous, they just perceive the issue completely differently from you.
As you can see in the Buzzfeed poll above, twice as many people see it as White and Gold vs. Blue and Black. And what’s the reality? It’s actually Blue and Black (someone actually owns this dress and it was made by a company that did not make a White and Gold version of it but did make a Blue and Black version).
Back to Hibbing’s research. They tested people in a lab by showing them images while monitoring their brain activity. Researchers were able to accurately predict Liberals or Conservatives based on their brain scans when they saw images. It turns out that Liberals are more reactive to positive images and Conservatives are more reactive to negative images for example. Based on analysis of extensive twin studies, Hibbing and his team were able to determine that political views are actually heritable genetically. Political views are 30%-40% heritable compared to say height which is 80% heritable or personality traits which are about 56% heritable. But this makes the point that it’s not just how you were raised or the environment you grew up in but some component that’s innate to you as a person. This should be kind of obvious when we consider the nasty arguments over politics that can happen between people who grew up in the same household. If it were all about nurture, how could these differences occur?
We, as a society have moved past the days of believing that left handedness was a lazy habit and forcing left handed people to be right handed by smacking them with a ruler if necessary. Similarly, we’ve largely moved beyond treating sexual orientation as choice and recognize that it’s a genetic predisposition. In the same light, isn’t it time for us to recognize that political differences may be rooted in a fundamental difference in perception for which we shouldn’t ostracize each other over.
With this understanding it should be clear that we can’t simply “fix” the other side by yelling at them and making them understand how wrong they are. We are literally caught up in a Yanny/Laurel, White and Gold/Blue and Black dress argument. They aren’t going to instantly see it differently because you’ve explained to them what color it actually is. They just don’t see it the same way.
There is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson which addresses the intractability of this divide quite clearly, “The two parties which divide the state… are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history…and now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities.”
What may be different this time around is the shift in our media and the fast pace of technological change which is transforming how we get our information and how it is positioned to us. There are external governmental forces that have better tools to disseminate disinformation at a faster pace than has ever existed in the history of mankind. We have a news media, that’s fractured and more focused on maximizing ratings, clicks and likes than on delivering upon the sacred role of a free press in our society to deliver challenging and unbiased reporting.
Is There A Way Forward?
So what can we do? We can actually try to listen to those who have different views than our own. Maybe you’ll learn something that does in fact change your opinion on a topic or at least tempers it. If nothing else, you’ll better understand why someone holds a view different from you and perhaps respect their position even if you disagree with it. Maybe you’ll change their mind on a topic. But more likely, you’ll be able to discover common ground and that, although you disagree on some issues or solutions, there is a lot you can agree on.
More importantly, everyone doesn’t need to agree with you. And it’s enriching and more fun to have friends that you disagree with on a number of political issues. There are still many things you can enjoy doing together that don’t have anything to do with politics. In fact, most of the things that you do with your friends don’t have much to do with politics. It’s much better to get along with co-workers, neighbors and associates who share different political views than it is to spend time yelling at each other and demonizing each other. When you do that, you’re falling into someone else’s trap. Step out of the echo chamber where everyone pats each other on the back agreeing about how right they are and how wrong “the other side” is. It might feel good in the short term but it doesn’t accomplish anything and it’s toxic.
Start with a belief that everyone has the best interest of this country at heart but may just have different ideas about how to get there. If you’re really animated about something, try to learn about it from reputable and diverse sources. In fact, you should always look to different news sources to ensure you’re getting the whole story; you can’t count on a single news source to give you the whole truth anymore. Due to lowered standards and the rush to report the hot story, you can’t believe a story just because a bunch of news sources are saying it, but likewise, if it’s only coming from one source, view it with skepticism. Try to work with others to come up with solutions that aren’t just a compromise but are better because they address the concerns of opposing sides. But if need be, compromise is not a dirty word. Hold our elected representatives to that standard as well. Don’t allow them to get away with being intentionally divisive but likewise don’t light them on fire for finding common ground and compromise with the other party (that’s how it’s supposed to work). And remember, our country has survived a lot, it will survive this too.
