History also tells us that a desire to enforce dogma and suppress heretics is a recurring human weakness, one that has led to recurring waves of gruesome oppression and violence. A recognition that there is a bit of Torquemada in everyone should make us wary of any attempt to enforce a consensus or demonize those who challenge it.
--Steven Pinker
There is a serious problem in American political life these days. Instead of voting based on reason and well-thought out policies we have a shallow popularity contest. Everywhere you look you see a wash of ideology that blinds voters to pragmatism and clean politics. This is the ideology of hate. What do I mean by this? Well, let’s look around at the mainstream of political opinion. Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh. What do these outlets have in common? They take on an attitude that their opposition is in fact the devil himself. Am I exaggerating? If we go to Daily Kos we find accusation that George Bush is no better than Hitler [1], that libertarians are corporate sycophants [2], and that all republicans are fascists [3]. If we saunter over to Townhall.com we can see allegations that liberals fight to support terrorists [4]. According to Renew America liberals hate god, and America too [5]. A youtube video courtesy of the Heritage Foundation goes on at length about how liberals want to destroy everything that is good and build up everything that is evil [6]. Even from little blogs are trickles and blips of this mindset. Jabs are made over hating the poor, wanting to control our lives, and hating our constitution. We hear it everyday on the mainstream media and our A.M. radios. How bad is this problem and what does it mean for American politics.
From the right we have the common refrains of godless, America-hating, terrorist, fascists. Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, and Rush Limbaugh (among others) take to the airwaves daily to tell us how evil the liberals are and how they are wrong and hateful at all turns. Ad-hominem attacks take the place of voting records. Bald assertions take the place of facts and evidence. According to the spin doctors of the right all liberals are socialists who want to take your money and pay people not to work. Only through their party-loyal reporting can you learn the truth, because all other media is controlled by a vast leaderless liberal conspiracy. Liberals want America to fail and be taken over by muslims. Liberals hate god and want to outlaw Christianity. Liberals want to put everyone on welfare and punish people for making money. It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd. It’s everywhere.
Once upon a time the majority of the hate-mongering from the left was isolated to a few key radicals, but as the market place of ideas finds hatred and vitriol a prime investment we see more and more venomous opinion outlets. What started out as a grassroots blog has become a party mouthpiece where the most misanthropic are invited to take the stage. Calls of selfishness replace fiscal policy. Images of Hitler and Mussolini replace constitutional scholarship. Instead of economics, corporations and chain stores are re-branded with swastikas. A tale of repression is taken up to cover up bad campaigning. Conservatives wanted the south to win the civil war. Conservatives are rich old white men who want women bear foot and pregnant. Conservatives want to segregate schools and jail gays. Conservatives want to kill brown people and stamp out Islam. I think we can begin to see a pattern here. It’s ridiculous. It is absurd. It’s everywhere.
So what harm does it do? After all, in our modern American culture we expect entertaining news. It creates dogmatism. The politically inactive often take the word of those they perceive to have authority. Combine this with the sad fact that we often side with those that agree with our preconceptions and we have a dangerous cocktail. Look at the number of people who believe Iraq was involved in 9/11. Look at the number of people who believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories. Our minds are contingent on the information at our disposal and unless you choose to pursue independent fact-checking you receive a great deal of your information through the “main stream media”. And the main stream media is replete with this type of immature popularity-contest style politics. Instead of debating the issues we have the most popular pundits making their fame from frothy mouthed mudslinging.
The greatest problem here is that of dogmatism. Ask the common man on the street why he doesn’t support the other side. If he is a liberal he will tell you that Republicans don’t care about the poor, or their racists, or their murderers. If the questioned is a conservative they will likely tell you that Democrats hate our country, they want to criminalize Christianity, or they hate the troops. This is the political landscape of America. Broad rejection of an opposing idea comes to us fresh and hot from the tap of mass media, ready to be consumed without question. Among the myriad of problems this creates is an America divided down the middle. By demonizing the opposition to the point of near hysteria we polarize every issue to the point that moderates are excluded and people are encouraged to vote strictly along party lines. All this leads us to the point where we can determine the vote of an average American by examining where he gets his news. The myth of the red America and blue America is fostered in the carefully cultivate soil of fear and hatred.
What America needs badly is mature conversation. We can discuss honest disagreement over policy and philosophy without resorting to ad-hominems. Rational liberals and conservatives can have a dialogue based off of intelligent disagreement without declaring each other enemies of the state. Our television news can give us a broad objective look at a political situation without throwing around emotional arguments. It has been said by some that at the heart of America is a great untouched moderation which is pulled inexorably toward the two parties out of pragmatism while many more stay home. They stay home not out of ignorance or fear, but out of genuine cynicism. How can we change this? Some in congress have attempted to create a measure forcing equal air-time to dissenting opinion. That way madness lies. No, the government has no interest in practical solutions because fear mongering makes for fantastic party-building.
No, rational discussion will have to be a grassroots idea. The first step is rudimentary education. First, there is no “liberal media”. Media outlets come in all flavors, shapes and sizes with both liberal and conservative angles. I can show you ten liberal television shows and newspapers in one breath and ten conservative television programs and papers in another. Second, what a newspaper of news outlet reports is not the same as the beliefs of Americans. So if you see a New York Times article reporting something fishy and attention-grabbing like this doesn’t it make more sense to assume that this paper is trying to make money by using attention grabbing headlines than accurately representing an entire class of people’s political beliefs? The same is true for FOX news and attention grabbers like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. They’re shock jocks out to get ratings by playing to the lowest common denominator, and not accurate barometers of individual philosophy. I can’t stress this enough.
Going hand in hand with separating people from the image of the entertainment industry is separating people from politicians. The modern career politician is likely to be concerned with one thing and one thing only, money. From graft to kickbacks to pork to lobbyists, politicians want money and will say just about anything to get it. Not only will that but often times a person has to vote for the lesser of evils. Does that mean that the voter then agrees whole heartedly with everything their candidate does and says? Of course not! This is another major misconception that is made worse by the limited selection inherent in a two-party system. So remember, just because elected officials act that way doesn’t mean their entire voting bloc does as well. In the name of this cause I have taken to trying and disarm hate-mongers. I go where dogmatic politicos pontificate about the evil of their opposition and try to correct them. By all means disagree, but don’t label your opponents as immoral monsters or harbingers of evil. By all means disagree, but do it over the issues and not through straw-men and ad-hominems. So far I have been unsuccessful, but I hope the peanut gallery is listening.
An educated nation have a lot of ideas, an un-educated nation don't have ideas, it limits to follow someone.
--Vasco E. G. Lima e Silva
