It’s impossible, at the moment, to follow political and religious threads on social media without running into lots and lots of hate. This is not something that started in the past two weeks or even during the 2016 race for the White House.
With that sobering thought in mind, I offer a Damon Linker essay at The Week as our weekend think piece. The headline: “Don't willfully ignore the complexity of what's happening in America right now.”
However, before we go there, let me share some sobering observations from an “On Religion” column I wrote in 2004 about the work of political scientists Gerald De Maio, a Catholic, and Louis Bolce, an Episcopalian, who teach at Baruch College in the City University of New York. The headline: “Stalking the anti-fundamentalist voter.”
This was one of the first times when I realized that “hate” was becoming a strong factor in public life — especially when driven by a loaded religious term like “fundamentalist.”
First we need some background. Bolce and De Maio:
… have focused much of their work on the "thermometer scale" used in the 2000 American National Election Study and those that preceded it. Low temperatures indicate distrust or hatred while high numbers show trust and respect. Thus, "anti-fundamentalist voters" are those who gave fundamentalists a rating of 25 degrees or colder. By contrast, the rating that "strong liberals" gave to "strong conservatives" was a moderate 47 degrees.
Yet 89 percent of white delegates to the 1992 Democratic National Convention qualified as "anti-fundamentalist voters," along with 57 percent of Jewish voters, 51 percent of "moral liberals," 48 percent of school-prayer opponents, 44 percent of secularists and 31 percent of "pro-choice" voters. In 1992, 53 percent of those white Democratic delegates gave Christian fundamentalists a thermometer rating of zero.
"Anti-fundamentalist voter" patterns are not seen among black voters, noted De Maio. Researchers are now paying closer attention to trends among Hispanics.
What about the prejudices of the fundamentalists? Their average thermometer rating toward Catholics was a friendly 62 degrees, toward blacks 66 degrees and Jews 68 degrees.
This brings us to a complex set of remarks by Linker. Here is the overture:
Over the past three months, I've repeatedly taken aim at the irresponsible reaction of some on the right to the pandemic. But now it's the left (including some journalists and academics) that's doing the country (and the world) a disservice — by abandoning even the pretense of perspective about what's happening in the United States. Understandably upset by the president's photo-op stunt and incendiary speech in Washington, D.C.'s Lafayette Park on Monday evening, journalists ran for the barricades, declaring the imminent end of American democracy and the advent of fascism in America.
The truth is more complex, and possibly even more disturbing, than that.
Americans are prone to the Christian heresy of Manichaeism, dividing the world into children of light and children of darkness. Now, thanks to intense partisan polarization that's encouraged by monomaniacal activists, a president who sees political advantage in fostering division, and the siloing effects of social media, this tendency has intensified. Journalists and other commentators aren't immune to the trend. They also contribute to it when they abandon any effort at capturing the complicated reality of what's happening in a fluid nationwide event and instead advance a story of righteous protesters engaged in a running battle with a malevolent president and police officers. Trump and other sinners on one side, civic saints championing the cause of justice on the other.
American reality isn't contained in either of those polarized, idealized or demonized, positions. It is found in the complicated interplay between thousands of variations on those mostly imagined pure forms.
Such as?
Prepare to be offended. All of you:
American reality is George Floyd's life being viciously snuffed out by the knee of a Minneapolis cop.
But it's also just nine unarmed African Americans being shot and killed by police last year in a country of 330 million people. That's nine too many, but not quite the evidence of systematic race-based police killings that one might expect given the rhetoric of the past week. (Nineteen unarmed whites were gunned down by police last year.)
American reality is the president of the United States ordering Lafayette Park forcibly cleared of peaceful protesters and threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act (as other presidents have done, for a range of reasons) to quell widespread looting and violence.
But it's also widespread looting and violence targeting everything from high-end shops and national chains in midtown Manhattan to minority-owned businesses in communities across the country.
American reality is police (and baseball-bat wielding vigilantes and freelance maniacs) attacking journalists and protesters.
But it's also cops being shot and deliberately run over in the street.
It's possible to try and freeze time around any of these events and affix blame for the unjust act. If you do this enough times around enough similar events, it's quite easy to construct a simple and satisfying narrative that will confirm your worst nightmares about evildoers on the other side. And sometimes that story will even be true, since there's always more than enough evil at large in the world.
“Evil” is a term with quite a few moral and religious overtones. However Linker is convinced that Americans have — for quite some time now — been building armed fortresses (including narrow, niche-media streams that tell us only what we want to hear) full of people firing their emotional guns into the middle of the public square.
The bottom line, he says, is this:
“We are a country tearing itself to pieces.”
What will happen between now and election day?
Will journalists and academics keep publicizing evidence that confirms their priors while ignoring facts that complicate them? Or will they work to capture the multi-sided complexity of a suffering nation?
Read it all. If you dare.