Hey there! From now on I'll be recording all the newsletters so you can either listen or read. I hope this is a helpful and more personal experience for many of you. You'll have to put up with a little of my offbeat humor, but I hope you'll enjoy it at least sometimes.
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OUTRAGEOUS!
Our politics is fueled by outrage. Why? Because our parties and most of the media literally can't afford us not to be outraged. People on the other side can't just be wrong; they have to be outrageously, infuriatingly wrong and probably bad people as well. And why do our parties need us to be outraged? Because outrage, better than anything else, drives grassroots, online donors to give money and stay actively engaged in the fight. These grassroots donors and volunteers, right and left, are now the most potent force in American politics, fatter in power than the fattest cats.
Yes, there's plenty in our politics that merits genuine outrage. For example:
-QAnon's central tenets are accepted by 15% of Americans and 23% of Republicans. QAnon poll
-It has become a Republican litmus test to promote the proven lie that Democrats stole the presidential election. Rejecting Biden’s Win, Rising Republicans Attack Legitimacy of Elections The Big Lie
-California public schools may eliminate much of their accelerated math instruction to promote equity. Apparently equity now means forced underachievement. Math equity
-The House Democratic "Squad" either opposed or avoided approving better funding for the US Capitol Police in the wake of the January 6th insurrection due to concerns over "White Supremacy" and policing in general. Just as outrageous, not a single Republican supported the bill because, um, nothing that bad really happened I guess? Nice thanks for the people who, barely, kept the mob from swallowing the members. Capitol Police Funding
(The fact that white supremacy -- a term closely linked to the worst and most violent racism in American history -- is now applied by some as a blanket description for our whole country, is itself, at the very least, a misleading and insulting choice of term).
So there's plenty out there to infuriate us. But to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a difference of opinion is just a difference of opinion and needn't be fired off like a salvo in a war of worlds and words.
Could the heavily Republican pro-life movement possibly view the pro-choice community as people who weigh the legal rights of the mother more heavily than the legal rights of a fetus for a longer time -- and not as BABY KILLERS? (Note: a similar point could be made in reverse albeit without quite as acrid a smear as BABY KILLERS).
Could Republicans view higher marginal tax rates as, well, higher marginal tax rates and not as a Democratic party embrace of SOCIALISM?
Could Democrats describe the new Georgia voting law as not everything they would have wanted, but better than some more liberal states in important regards and within the mainstream of state laws across the country -- and not as JIM CROW 2.0?
When Joe Manchin supports the John Lewis Voting Rights bill that has bipartisan support but opposes one that lacks that support because he thinks bipartisan support is particularly important when it comes to something like voting rights which impacts the democratic process directly, could Democrats disagree -- even strongly -- and not call him a WHITE SUPREMACIST as Rep. Cori Bush did to wide Twitterverse acclaim?
The answer to all these questions is, in theory, yes. But in practice, the answer is no because neither party can afford the other's positions to seem reasonable. Why? Because you can't raise much money online for deployment against an opponent that is honorable but simply mistaken -- or anything even close to that. I can tell you from my own campaign experience, all-caps outrage moves the online fundraising needle better than anything else. The leftmost and rightmost segments of the electorate are the people most likely to volunteer and most likely to give repeatedly online. They are also most susceptible to the politics of outrage because they already feel the outrage on certain predictable issues. The parties know this and feed it.
The TV networks know it as well and serve us a diet of outrage to keep us tuned in. In fact, it is an interesting truism that Fox, for example, will do much better during Democratic administrations because there is more to be outraged at. Similarly, CNN and MSNBC will gain ground in the ratings during Republican administrations. When your own tribe is in office, there's less cause for fury, so ratings lag.
Let me be clear: there's nothing wrong in a thriving democracy with people holding a wide range of views including far to the right and far to the left. The problem arises when our political and media industries make those views the whole story and do whatever they can to blow them up into giant, enemy conflagrations.
Who benefits from this mess? Only the people who generate political content (the two-party political industry) and the people who convey that content to the wider public (the media). And the bottom line for both is money. For the media, more eyeballs equals more money. For the two parties, more money equals more votes. And outrage is the necessary fuel in both these equations.
Is there a way out of this? I'll be offering some thoughts in the weeks ahead.
Why Outrage Controls Politics