I Appeared On A Podcast To Talk About Politics. It Didn’t Go How You’d Think.
We had a good time together and I discovered that we have a lot more in common with one another than I’d have thought.
We’ve been talking about politics quite a bit as a nation and a friend of mine — before you ask, yes, a real friend — across the political spectrum posted about doing a political chat on his podcast. It’s a group of philosophically inclined white guys from the South. And I have a history with them, despite our apparently disparate political views: These folks are the first people to help me promote my philosophy book, Formal Dialectics. I have to take my relationship with them seriously even if it’s just out of appreciation for the solid they did me back then!
That said, Dr. Jones is a nice guy and seems to be exceedingly reasonable in a lot of ways. As we watch people like Matt Gaetz and Lindsey Graham talk about how the Democrats stole the election and the entire political landscape braces for the seismic jolt that will be the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, there’s a lot of fear in the air. I’ve been worried that democracy could end and I’ve been worried about people I love getting sick and having their lives torn apart by a terrible disease that’s sweeping the nation.
It deeply bothers me that more Americans didn’t immediately ditch Donald Trump for not doing better against the COVID-19 disease that figures so prominently in so many of our schedules these days.
I could go on.
But, you know what? For every gripe and worry I’ve picked up during the Trump administration, my friends on the right wing feel largely the same.
Now, my explanation for that probably sounds a lot like their explanations of what has happened with me: I think they’ve chosen bad media sources and used them to construct a faulty narrative of the events we’re going through together.
And I do. I really do. I think that Fox News has destroyed politics in this country in conjunction with politicians like Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, and last but definitely not least, Donald Trump. I could tell you a long story about how Reagan recovered from the Nixon debacle and turned trash into treasure by playing on the American people’s distrust of government, which should have led to the creation of a new political party and instead simply gave a makeover to the Republicans: more evil.
Today, however, I have something different on my mind. I, holder of the above views, went onto a podcast and was diligently listened to and appreciated by people who did not agree with these political views. And I found myself compelled to do the same. It was a lot of fun, and I would absolutely love to do it again.
Having Conversations With Other People Helps Us Get Along With Them
When we have individual conversations, or when we get onto a platform like Facebook, we have this inclination to joust with each other. My dad has recently sworn off of buddies he’s been friends with for over twenty years due to political tension and I think that’s a thing we’ve all been through. But there are a few interesting trends emerging in my life that I think are fairly incredible. It’s a lot like the way racism dissolves when people from different races are forced to interact with each other.
We’re more similar than we are different.
We’re likeable.
We enjoy one another.
The antagonistic moments are caused by different environments we find ourselves inside of, which ultimately does include news media. In the contemporary media landscape, we have multiple narratives being created about the same events by people who have political affiliation with one another. People who, like Trump and Hannity, recently and famously, have phone calls with each other to talk about the future of the nation.
This is a major problem and not simply because of Washington’s old beef with political parties, but also because of the history dueling political narratives had in Germany that correlated so closely with the rise of the Third Reich. Everyone is up in arms these days because so many people are only getting half of the story.
Why Do We Feel The Same Way About Opposite Sides Of The Same Set Of Facts?
The odd thing about the show was a moment I had with Daryl, with whom I almost certainly have absolutely nothing in common with in terms of politics, when I actually took the time to listen to what the man had to say without simply dismissing him out of hand because I didn’t think the examples he used were factual.
When I took the time to search for the moral meaning Daryl was teaching me about, I realized that the structure of it was almost line for line identical to the moral of the message I had been trying to teach him about. And it struck me: We’d been sold a bill of goods by the same seller.
To some extent, there has to be division in the media because there are different viewpoints with respect to politics. To pretend that there are only two is a laughable farce. Republicans agree to disagree on a lot of things between one another and so do Democrats. Ideology rears its ugly head and we’re forced to throw all our helpful context out the window, begin shouting our “objective” arguments and close ranks to form the Party.
When this process happens among the electorate, that’s what we call politics. But in the past, after the 1987 gutting of the Fairness Doctrine, politics made its way from the electorate to the media. After Newt Gingrich’s 1995 changes to the structure of the Republican Party in Congress, Fox News was launched in 1997 and a toxic political environment got worse. Instead of division along party lines with respect to actionable policy goals, somehow it was now about the personal morality of every individual politician… until Trump came along, broke all the rules, and everyone had to acknowledge that we don’t actually care about having moral leaders. The real purpose of this narrative started out simple: to divorce performance accountability from voting behavior.
Of course, Trump also brought the world a life-shattering pandemic by being negligent, which is itself an immoral action, so perhaps the argument that we need a President to have strong moral character is now stronger than it initially was in 1998 during the Clinton scandal, but that’s all beside the point. Americans make their political choice when they choose a media source. And then the media sources we prefer cherrypick stories the other side cares about and present strawmen of them for us to attack. This is more effective among adherents of the religious right, who seem to think the greatest sin of all is holding their elected officials to account for literally any policy goal whatsoever, but if you’re being honest with yourself you probably have at least noticed a few times when your beloved media source tried to pull this crap with you.
Trump broke this trend as well, by dominating the media from the Oval Office and being absolutely awful. Even so, and especially after his appalling Jonathan Swan interview and his abysmally bad debates against President-elect Biden, the spin zone was in full force. Half of America saw positive coverage of the debates, the other half saw negative coverage.
To some extent, people switch around and try to see all the viewpoints on display. They do their research and try to outsmart the people who want to sell them an exclusive narrative. Online media has helped to cut apart the major party narratives, but the online outlets can be extremely misleading and there is less accountability than the major television networks manage to drum up for themselves.
But to some extent, the two party narratives mirror one another in terms of emotional appeal and the two camps are very much inclined to avoid any sort of agreement with one another. Politics is, in my view, not nearly fragmented enough. People aren’t being shown enough about the running of the nation. There’s too much marshaling of the base and not enough trust in the audience to figure out what’s important after being presented all of the facts. As a society, we’re putting the cart before the horse in terms of political decision-making.
And yet you also have to deal with the issue presented by Fox News, a network which engages in every form of devious treachery to paint Republicans in the nicest light possible, including but not limited to lying outright over the air. In a bad environment, the youngest network still finds a way to do it worse than its competitors.
Is There A Way Forward?
I believe it is of the absolute most paramount importance to legislate penalties under the law for media-situated parties who fabricate stories to defraud their audience into buying a bill of goods. Our nation cannot function at the level it needs to function at to solve the coronavirus problem if we have bad political actors poisoning the well and denying the public the information it needs to make qualified and informed decisions about how to run this government and keep individuals and families safe from a life-threatening disease.
But… the people. The mass of American bodies who filled the polling places and who cast their ballots. They’re still okay for the most part. I was worried that the Fox News narrative was poisoning their hearts and minds, but I feel strangely hopeful now, as though, given the information they’re given, these folks are perfectly rational and decent people making the best decisions possible in that environment.
That is what people are, after all. Like koi fish, we grow as large as our environments allow in terms of spirit, intellect, and understanding. America can heal. I’m not sure how to get us there, and I think taking the talking heads to court whenever they venture too far from the facts and into misleading content territory may be a great place to start, but after tonight I’m convinced that the problem here is a rhetorical one. The vast majority of the American people are capable of getting along with one another and even working beside one another to solve the most pressing issues of the day. When we’re all being presented with two major competing narratives about what’s going on, we end up constrained. We need to all work on consuming more variety in our media diet, and asking more questions of the sources we end up becoming involved with.
So thank you for reading — whichever side of the spectrum you fall on, politically. I appreciate you taking the time to understand my views and I have no doubt that I could learn a thing or two by reciprocating that effort. It is my deepest belief that, as a society, we will solve the problem of how to figure out what the facts are and from there, well, we’ll probably still disagree about what’s important, but maybe some of the basic issues like COVID-19 and healthcare and our rights as citizens of this nation can begin to become things we can find a good way forward together on.
Here is the podcast video, in case you’re curious about the conversation that inspired this.