There’s been an odd numbness in the political ecosystem regarding the apparent second attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump. We’ve collectively underreacted — and perhaps there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that.
Yet I fear some of the underreaction has to do with the fact that we are now so close to Election Day that some people are calibrating their responses through the prism of whether what they say will help or hurt their partisan causes, rather than stepping back and asking themselves critically how we got here.
And unfortunately, I think, the broader electorate and the media are more concerned about that larger question than any of the elected leaders we have collectively put in charge of our democracy. It’s frustrating watching the effort to exploit this episode for political gain, which is only feeding the divide, not healing it.
Just look at Trump’s initial response to the apprehension of a man armed with a rifle who was spotted on the perimeter of his golf course. Unlike after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, when he and his team embraced the approach of “let’s have cooler heads prevail” and left some of the more heated rhetoric to other Republicans, there has been none of that this time.
Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect. That initial attempt to overtly politicize the situation has most likely accelerated the collective numbness to the event itself. Fox News has been especially aggressive in its programming the last few days, going out of its way to find cherry-picked examples of rhetoric from the left that, on its face, can sound like incitement. It’s something Fox could have easily done with Trump’s rhetoric but chose not to. It is simply feeding an audience what it thinks it wants, rather than deciding whether it should be responsible and provide nuance and context. It is hardly alone.
Of course, we’ve had so many run-ins with increased political violence over the last decade that perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the public has gotten a bit numb. There’s a part of me that didn’t even want to bother trying to write this column, because anything that attempts to rise above partisanship in any way gets ignored completely, pilloried as nave or dismissed as having been said by someone who simply “doesn’t know what time it is.”
Let’s be honest: The current level of political discourse is unsustainable for this democracy. Maybe it doesn’t break us this year, maybe not next. But unless we choose to rise above it, either by electing de-escalators rather than purveyors of zero-sum political pugilism or by demanding that the big tech companies stop creating algorithms that are designed to incite and divide, we will break — and that break will be perilous. It has happened to this republic before, so don’t assume it can’t happen again.
The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are.
Is there any better example of this than the made-up stories about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio? As a native of Miami, I saw firsthand similar attempts to dehumanize and otherize Haitians amid an influx of refugees from the country in the early ’80s. This is, sadly, not a new trope. We didn’t have social media back then, which may be why the story of attacks against Haitians in the early ’80s didn’t travel outside the South Florida information ecosystem.
Clearly, this isn’t the ’80s. Let’s remember who is at fault for sorting Americans and feeding them the worst examples of their political foes and the most righteous examples of their political supporters: the tech companies that control the flow of information we routinely receive.
I promise you that the way Americans speak about one another online isn’t the way most Americans behave in person with one another. (That goes double for the actual majority of Springfield residents, too.) But sadly, because so much of our daily politics is argued online, it starts to change us — and change us for the worse, starting with the political leaders who spend more time online than the average American.
The algorithms emphasize the demonization of the other side as long as you stay online longer. This is why so many of us who don’t live most of our lives online don’t recognize the country we see in the world of online information-sharing.
And that brings me back to what happened over the weekend. Be honest with yourself — while the news was surprising Sunday, it sadly wasn’t very shocking. Spend 10 minutes doom-scrolling on your social media app of choice and you will be served up examples of outrage and demonization that can do one of two things: make you shake your head about the state of the country and leave the platform in disgust or anger you and get you to engage even more, usually by contributing wittingly or unwittingly to demonizing “the other side.”
And, yes, I’m being intentionally vague with these descriptions because this type of behavior isn’t limited to one set of partisans.
Now, imagine what this discourse does to some who already have mental health challenges.
As social media rose and became the main distributor and facilitator of political information, our politics have become more combative and less collaborative. And no one has done a more effective job of exploiting this new medium of discourse than Trump.
It’s why it’s hard to take seriously the outrage from some in Trump’s orbit that it’s the Democrats and their media allies who have created the more violent conditions in our political landscape. For every complaint the right surfaces about discourse it says could have been triggering, there is a slew of pugilistic personal attacks that Trump has made himself and directed at Americans by name, putting them in harm’s way.
But just because Trump started it doesn’t mean his opponents have the high moral ground when they single out him and some of his supporters for personal derision. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Sadly, so much of our political discourse features people rationalizing their bad behavior by claiming the other side is worse. My friends on the left love to scream about both sides-isms and love to complain when some of us hold them to a higher standard than Trump. But the party that promises a higher standard is asking to be judged by a higher standard. This doesn’t mean anyone is condoning the bad behavior of the other side, but it means that if you ask the voters to expect better, you should always behave better, period. It’s not always easy, but a good leader behaves well even when it’s hard.
Come Jan. 21, we all are going to be living in the same country and sharing the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.
Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories.
Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated, and yet most elected officials in the modern era are incentivized to behave the opposite way.
What concerns me the most is whether most Americans have been so distorted by how information travels through the social media funhouse mirror that we’ve forgotten about how much we all have in common. If we don’t find our way out of this maze of distorted reflections, this will only get worse.
To paraphrase Churchill, here’s hoping once we’ve exhausted all the wrong ways to bring this country together, we’ll finally realize what’s truly been dividing us all along and seek a better path.