Combating the Politicized Life
Among other wonders, 2014 gave us the Rob Lowe Directv ad campaign, in which the handsomest man on the planet humorously advocates for satellite TV service over cable. In one commercial, Lowe portrays himself, a satellite subscriber, as well as Painfully Awkward Rob Lowe, an alter ego who subscribes to cable.
Painfully Awkward Rob Lowe, among other social afflictions, can’t “go with other people in the room,” he proclaims while standing awkwardly in front of a urinal. This was a problem for someone.
Steven Soifer, president of the International Paruresis Association, demanded the ad be pulled for disrespecting those who deal with the real affliction of shy bladder.
“We don’t mind if people have a little fun with it,” Soifer told the Associated Press. “It’s a situation that a lot of people don’t understand. In this particular case, the portrayal is making it look ridiculous, that this guy is a loser for having a problem.”
THE CULTURAL FLOP
Soifer had executed a dramatic cultural flop. In the sports world, flop is the term given to a player’s theatrical fall designed to draw a referee’s attention to a rather minor or even nonexistent foul. Soccer is the sport most famous for its flops but the practice has enthusiastic practitioners in American football and basketball.
There is rarely any penalty for flopping, and there is great potential upside—yardage, free throws, possession—if a referee is convinced of an athlete’s performance.
When it comes to speech, America is turning into a country of floppers, figuratively grabbing our shins in fabricated agony over every little possible offense in hopes of working the refs.
Was anyone truly offended by Painfully Awkward Rob Lowe, even within the tiny subset of Americans who suffer from shy bladder? Was any real damage done? Of course not, but there was no penalty for Soifer grabbing his emotional hamstring and writhing on the floor dramatically. Indeed, there was a tremendous upside—all of America talked about his shy bladder support group for one day.
In this case, Lowe and Directv responded appropriately. Directv declined to remove the ad and Lowe tweeted, “[T]here are those who really need to lighten up” along with a crack about his own bladder:
@RobLowe: For those wondering, my bladder is gregarious.
If an organization as obscure as the shy bladder association can make national headlines for a perceived slight so tiny, the power of the cultural flop to monopolize the nation’s attention is immense, and many have learned how to use it.
Imagine a basketball game in which thirty-eight minutes are just LeBron James lying on the floor getting awarded call after call.1 That’s what living in a culture of constant outrage feels like. These people aren’t making plays; they’re trying to win via constant finger-pointing and insincere whining.
This phenomenon has gone by many names as cultural observers have tried to put their finger on what is changing: the “politicized life,” the “culture of shut up,” the “extinction of context,” the “outrage economy.”2 Slate assembled the “Year in Outrage,” an exhaustive and exhausting compendium of everything Americans were angry about in 2014, which illustrated just how pervasive outrage has become in the news cycle and, consequently, our daily lives.
Instead of engaging in the rich American tradition of a loud, raucous, messy, free speech free-for-all, we have begun to spend a disturbing amount of our speech just flagging the speech of others. The object is no longer to argue one’s own side of any issue passionately, but to argue that the other side should not argue. What used to feel like a national experiment (and source of national pride) in joyously pushing limits now feels like an exercise in imposing new limits. That’s why we call it the End of Discussion, because ultimately, that’s what it is designed to do. And far too often, it works.
This is not healthy for the country. It is demoralizing, and it’s creeping far beyond discussions of public policy. While politics is the natural home of the cultural flop and the stultifying debate it produces, America seems to have decided exporting that way of doing business to every other conversation in our lives is wise. It is not.
With a nod to a form of communication to which so many in our generation are receptive, the listicle, we now present: Six Ways Outrage Culture Is Turning Your Entire Life into a Political Campaign.
1. Every Person a Public Figure
The U.S. Marines have a famous saying that governs their training—every man a rifleman, meaning every single marine regardless of his ultimate job is trained as a rifleman. In our outrageously outraged culture, all individuals have the potential to be treated as public figures regardless of whether or not they’ve volunteered to run for office.
The mere existence of a personal website, Facebook page, or Twitter account, even protected or private in nature, has made the ruminations of regular citizens plausibly “public” in a way they’ve never been before. But just because regular citizens have the amazing power to publish independently any thought that’s in their heads doesn’t mean they should have to answer for those remarks in exactly the way a political candidate would. Yet increasingly, that’s what our culture asks of every single one of us.
As duly noted earlier, your humble authors signed up for this game. Our thoughts are generally geared to public consumption, delivered with the expectation that they’ll be subject to criticism, ridicule, and possible professional and financial consequences if ill-considered. We are compensated for wading into the discourse.
But what about someone like Justine Sacco, who was working a decent job in tech PR before she tweeted the wrong joke, jumped on a transatlantic flight without Internet, and landed to find she was an internationally hated pariah with no job? It was the doldrums of the Christmas news cycle in 2013 when Sacco tweeted this before boarding a flight to South Africa:
@JustineSacco: Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!
Gawker blogger Sam Biddle published the tweet, treating it as if it were a racist statement meant to be taken at face value instead of a satirical skewering of what a racist would say about AIDS in Africa. Before Sacco landed, the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet was trending worldwide. Companies were using her international humiliation for their own PR, and AIDS charities were fund-raising off the perceived gaffe. She landed and promptly deleted all her social media accounts, provoking even more Internet ire. Things got so bad, her company’s press release announcing her firing included a request that the world avoid “wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core.”
Sacco released a sincere apology to international media and promptly faded into obscurity as the culture moved on to another outrage.
Granted, Sacco was a person whose job required some Internet savvy and attention to words, but there is no credible argument that her willfully misunderstood or bad taste Twitter joke should have made her the center of an international firestorm. Rarely do even a presidential candidate’s tweets get such a high-profile dissection and demonizing.
A year after Biddle somewhat unwittingly set off this firestorm, he wrote about Sacco again, this time after meeting her. In a piece entitled “Justine Sacco Is Good at Her Job, and How I Came to Peace with Her,” he explained the phenomenon that caused the row and ruined her life:
Twitter disasters are the quickest source of outrage, and outrage is traffic. I didn’t think about whether or not I might be ruining Sacco’s life. The tweet was a bad tweet, and seeing it would make people feel good and angry—a simple social and emotional transaction that had happened before and would happen again and again. The minimal post set off a 48-hour paroxysm of fury, an eruption of internet vindictiveness…Jokes are complicated, context is hard. Rage is easy.
A year later, in a twist of outrage karma, Biddle himself got into a similar situation over a dashed-off tweet. Sacco—who it turns out is a kind person, not a racist monster—offered him advice and support as he made his way through the storm. Both of them remain employed.
Theirs is a rare story of redemption in outrage culture, but that story will never reach as many people as #HasJustineLandedYet. How many people watched Sacco lose her job and become a famous racist and decided just to shut up lest they risk a similar fate?
2. An Ever-Shrinking Sphere of Privacy
As soon as everyone can be plausibly treated as a public figure, they are also granted a constricting sphere of privacy. We do some of this to ourselves, of course, posting blithely to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter our locations and pictures of our kids and beer-pong tournaments.3
But more and more, even the most private of exchanges are fair game for national consumption and condemnation as long as the perpetrator can be shown to have acted like a jerk in said private exchange.
Though a billionaire racist is surely an unsympathetic figure, many were nonetheless disturbed by the implications of the way former Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s offending comments came to light. His girlfriend/assistant recorded them in his home without his knowledge and they were released to the media.
“Ultimately, I don’t think he should have lost his team,” comedian Dave Chappelle told GQ in the aftermath of the Sterling story. “I don’t like the idea that someone could record a secret conversation and that a person could lose their assets from that, even though I think what he said was awful.”
In the Sony hack of 2014, possibly perpetrated by agents of the North Korean regime, private e-mail exchanges became public fodder regardless of how they were obtained or their newsworthiness. Though the media had lectured all of us righteously about the dissemination of illegally obtained nude photos of female celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence just months prior, there seemed to be no such consideration given to e-mails that were just as private and wrongfully disseminated.
Why? Because a couple of Sony executives made insensitive racial jokes about President Obama, and the e-mails revealed juicy gossip and salary information about famous people. Leaks are nothing new. They’re sometimes justified and genuinely newsworthy. But outrage by outrage, we shrink our space to be candid, real people, even behind closed doors.
As comedian Neal Brennan put it, arguing with Jon Stewart about the Sterling case, “George Orwell predicted a future in which the government polices our every word and thought. But we don’t have Big Brother. We have millions of Little Brothers…using their phones to record our every misdeed.”
3. Everything Is a Thing
Do you have a position on every single story in the news on any given day? Do you have a clear understanding of the political implications of every product you use or buy? You’d better. To steer clear of the outrage merchants, you must choose the correct opinion on every subject under the sun and profess it loudly. The thirst for outrage, and the surge of Internet traffic and self-satisfaction it provides, means new fronts for potential “wrongdoing” open every day. Did you know you can choose the wrong pasta or hand soap to pass muster? Not to worry. There’s an app for that!
“Bet the last time you were sipping Campbell’s soup or popping Pringles chips it never occurred to you that your eating habits could be political,” writes Al Kamen in the Washington Post, introducing the BuyPartisan app.
Matthew Colbert, a former Capitol Hill staffer, built the BuyPartisan app to allow users to scan the barcodes of any product they buy to determine just how “Republican” or “Democrat” that product is. For instance, scanning the code on a lotion bottle, as Kamen did, will bring up the political contributions of the lotion’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson (slightly more Republican than Democrat), its employees (about even), and its board. Weirdos can then make buying decisions about a beauty product based on whether they can countenance the personal politics of the people behind the product that moisturizes their countenances. After all, it’s hard to put on lotion if you can’t look yourself in the mirror, amirite?
The goal of the company, Colbert told the Washington Post, is to make “every day Election Day” through “spending choices.” Well, that sounds terrible. One writer took the challenge, using the app to determine “How Republican Is Whole Foods?” in Fast Company magazine. In a piece that is mostly tongue-in-cheek, the writer seems nonetheless quite surprised and perturbed to find that, in a country that is split evenly between two parties, many products at a grocery store are made by a diverse group of people who give to both parties. “Spoiler: it’s almost impossible to buy anything in Whole Foods without, in a roundabout way, supporting the Republican Party.” Quelle horreur!
“Down this path lies madness,” the writer John Brownlee rightly concluded after his attempt to shop in this assiduously politicized style. And, yet, this kind of life is encouraged as a reasonable, even a virtuous choice, according to many of our cultural and political leaders.
First Lady Michelle Obama famously gave a speech at UCLA asserting as much on the campaign trail before her husband was elected in 2008:
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
Again, that sounds terrible.
In a political campaign, there is a paradoxical demand for immediate commentary on every little thing, paired with a strenuous requirement that speech be perfectly calibrated in both position and tone. Political candidates have entire staffs of obscenely paid consultants and volunteering college students to help them navigate these minefields. It’s a constraining, exhausting, and demoralizing system, even for a candidate. But at least there’s some ostensible reason for it. The electoral system is built to evaluate people who may have an impact on policy and our lives, so assessing their views on issues becomes important. But to what end are we making regular citizens live by this standard?
The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg wrestled with this notion upon realizing that when she writes about art and culture, she increasingly finds she can’t escape politics: “When we criticize politicians for similar slips of temper or public statements, we do so in part because we believe they have revealed something about how they will make policy and enforce the law. But artists do not behave like politicians.” She also noted, “We treat people whose interpretations differ from our own as if they are acting in bad faith. We focus on gaffes and supposed gaffes. And we demand that significant figures in cultural commentary have something to say about every big event so we can check their reactions against our sense of what they ought to feel to remain in good standing.”
Regular citizens shouldn’t be required to live this way. When we demand as a culture that everyone’s life be run like a campaign, we will get the conversation of politicians—stilted, rehearsed, black-and-white, and adversarial. Sonny Bunch, a conservative writer and cultural critic with the Washington Free Beacon, calls this phenomenon “the politicized life”: “It treats politics as a zero sum game or a form of total warfare in which the other side must be obliterated. It alters every aspect of your being: where you shop; what you watch on TV; what sort of music you listen to; who you associate with.” Once more, that sounds terrible.
4. Every Choice Is Between Good and Evil
Not only is everything a thing, but everything is binary. There are not merely two sides to an argument but a Good side and an Evil side, and making clear you’re on the Good side is vital.
Writer Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist uses Václav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless” to address this tendency. Her subject is gay marriage, which having undergone a sea change in public perception over recent years has left many of its opponents unsure of how to voice their opinions in public.
To explain how dissent works, Havel introduced the manager of a hypothetical fruit-and-vegetable shop who places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” He’s not actually enthusiastic about the sign’s message. It’s just one of the things that people in a post-totalitarian system do even if they “never think about” what it means. He does it because everyone does it. It’s what you do to get along in life and live “in harmony with society.” (For our purposes, you can imagine that slogan is a red equal sign that you put up on your Facebook page.) The subtext of the grocer’s sign is “I do what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me.” It protects him from supervisors above and informants below.
Those who assume all opposition to gay marriage must be rooted in dark bigotry are surely playing the world’s smallest violin for their counterparts in this debate, but the concerns of gay marriage opponents aren’t exactly unwarranted. As we will discuss later in more depth, Josh Barro, a writer for the New York Times, declared that those who disagree with his liberal position on gay marriage ought to have their attitudes “stamped out, ruthlessly.” Brendan Eich was briefly CEO of the company he founded and had run with no indication of any discrimination against coworkers before being pushed out. His sin? He donated to Proposition 8 in California six years before his promotion, and he declined to recant his views on the matter once they were brought to light. Even passionate gay marriage advocates expressed concern over the precedent set and the message sent by Eich’s raucous, public demotion.
The message to regular citizens was clear: If you hold a minority view on a policy, zip it, because there are plenty of people who think your point of view should make you lose your livelihood.
There’s a term for this. Researchers call it the “spiral of silence,” “the tendency of people not to speak up about policy issues in public—or among their family, friends, and work colleagues—when they believe their own point of view is not widely shared,” according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. The phenomenon was established before the rise of social media, but a 2014 Pew experiment found that despite hopes to the contrary, social networks like Twitter and Facebook haven’t conquered the problem and may have reinforced it. Pew surveyed 1,800 adults about Edward Snowden’s leaked revelations about NSA surveillance programs—an issue on which the American public was about evenly split, according to the organization’s other polls.
They found people far less willing to discuss the Snowden case online than in person, with 86 percent willing to discuss it in person, but only 42 percent online. Pew found, despite a hopeful hypothesis, Facebook and Twitter were not giving those unwilling to discuss the issue in person an alternative “discussion platform.” And a person’s perception of whether his or her view is in the majority or minority drastically changes that person’s willingness to engage.
“For instance, at work, those who felt their coworkers agreed with their opinion were about three times more likely to say they would join a workplace conversation about the Snowden-NSA situation,” Pew found. Further, social media use seemed to lessen the likelihood an individual would discuss this issue in person. This kind of self-censorship can be detrimental in a system that depends on an informed citizenry where an “informed citizenry depends on people’s exposure to information on important political issues and on their willingness to discuss those issues with those around them.”
Pew theorizes on several reasons people might not be open about what they believe to be minority views—they don’t want to lose friends, disappoint family, or create a searchable record on the Internet of such thoughts. One of the theories is experience with the Outrage Circus itself:
[W]e speculate that social media users may have witnessed those with minority opinions experiencing ostracism, ridicule, or bullying online, and that this might increase the perceived risk of opinion sharing in other settings.
It would be hard not to have witnessed it. And, as the Havel essay relates, when the stakes are high, it’s often not enough to simply keep quiet. Lest one be mistaken for a dissenter, one must hang one’s sign. One must change one’s Twitter avatar to green or slap an asininely named twibbon upon it, lest the rest of the world might assume you hate the troops, or the transgender, or both.
In 2014, in the wake of the Sony hack, this tendency resulted in a particularly ludicrous spectacle in Hollywood. George Clooney, one of the most powerful men in a town allegedly dedicated to art and free speech, could not get anyone to sign onto a petition to support Sony if it decided to release The Interview. The Seth Rogen vehicle had upset North Korea enough to launch the hack against the company. Though it seemed a clear-cut issue of protecting artistic expression against assault by foreign despots, no one would join the petition. Clooney explained to Deadline:
Here’s the brilliant thing they did. You embarrass them first, so that no one gets on your side. After the Obama joke, no one was going to get on the side of Amy, and so suddenly, everyone ran for the hills. Look, I can’t make an excuse for that joke, it is what it is, a terrible mistake. Having said that, it was used as a weapon of fear, not only for everyone to disassociate themselves from Amy but also to feel the fear themselves. They know what they themselves have written in their emails, and they’re afraid.
Again, this is exactly the way a political campaign functions. Candidates must constantly signal their social acceptability to a diverse group of consumers. Neither silence nor a lack of an opinion is an acceptable answer on any subject. And, in order to reduce the chances of losing their livelihood for transgressing, they default to shallow, safe, rehearsed, and socially approved messages. It’s not a question of whether you sympathize with gay marriage opponents, who up until very recently made up the majority of this country. It’s about what you lose if you cross the line. We have this wide-ranging Internet of infinite possibilities at our fingertips, but we’re intent on shutting many of those possibilities down. First, the spiral of silence came for the gay marriage opponents, and I did nothing, for I was not a gay marriage opponent, etc.
5. Vetting Yourself
To be properly engaged in the outrage culture, one must pick one’s side and then cull all associations that would taint that allegiance. In the way that a candidate must drop problematic board positions and investments before running for office, outrage culture demands regular citizens vet their own likes and dislikes to remain in good standing.
For writer Kevin Blackwell, a self-professed “black, male geek,” vetting himself meant publicly disavowing his former hero Dr. Ben Carson. Carson, you see, cannot both be respected for being an incredibly accomplished pediatric brain surgeon who ascended to the top of his profession and also profess conservative views. No, according to Blackwell, Carson, who previously was a paragon of high-profile black intellectual achievement, is now a man who just says what the right-wing nuts tell him to so he can bring home some extra cash and hold court every now and then. On the blog Ordinary Times, Blackwell fumed, “Dr. Carson’s willingness to sell out the truth for some media appearances and/or a political career is a sign of severe moral bankruptcy…To my mind, this outs him as a craven, opportunistic hack willing to compromise his integrity for a little money, attention, and power.” Of course Blackwell would never assume that Carson assessed the facts and simply came to a different conclusion from his. Instead, the guy who is so successful that he was played by Cuba Gooding Jr. in a television movie about his life is probably just bowled over by the chance to rub shoulders with the likes of Representative Louis Gohmert (with all due respect to Congressman Gohmert).
There are probably some things we would put on our list of disqualifiers for mentorship and admiration—the attempted bombing of American citizens and soldiers on the soil of the United States of America among them,4 but we digress. Mere disagreement with the other half of the country on some policies does not discredit someone’s stature. If either of us tried to purge our idea or media consumption of all traces of left-leaning bias or influence, we would consume nothing but think-tank podcasts and Toby Keith (the boot-in-your-ass era, obviously, not the touchy-feely stuff of the later aughts).5 Perhaps because so many of the people who provide the music, TV, movies, pop culture, and news in this country are liberal, conservatives are typically better at compartmentalizing their outrage. It’s a survival mechanism of sorts.
Guy here: I once got into a Twitter dispute over poverty rates in the Reagan era with acclaimed chef Tom Colicchio, the chief judge on the Emmy Award–winning reality series Top Chef, of which I am a longtime fan. Colicchio and I had a productive, if slightly adversarial exchange, concluding with some quasi-obsequious fanboy tweets from yours truly. Some of my Twitter followers who’d witnessed the back-and-forth demanded to know why I kept watching a “liberal show” like Top Chef and encouraged me to boycott Colicchio’s Craft restaurants. I’ll pass, thanks. The show is enjoyable, and the man cooks one hell of a steak. As I wrote at the time, “living an intensely partisan life is exhausting and limiting.” I also gained an entrée, so to speak, to honestly communicate conservative ideas to Colicchio, who’d likely never heard them framed in that way before.
Liberals profess tolerance but often have no occasion to practice it in everyday life, as conservatives do. Hence, Blackwell’s rejection of Carson, or Steven Lloyd Wilson’s rejection of Orson Scott Card. Card, the author of one of the most universally loved science fiction works of all time—Ender’s Game—has written (sometimes harshly) against same-sex marriage, and homosexuality generally, in the decades since his masterpiece and its sequel were published. Upon the long-awaited announcement of a movie version of Ender’s Game, the sci-fi nerds who would normally be weeing their pants at every behind-the-scenes glimpse and trailer leak decided to mount a boycott. “Card’s political views have come to the forefront over the last year, as a film adaptation of Ender’s Game has gotten under way, and especially in the last month when DC announced that Card would be writing for the Superman comic,” Wilson wrote in his official denunciation of a formerly favorite writer.
Card’s views on gay issues became problematic enough that “DC caved to pressure…and announced that Card’s story had been scrapped.” Almost like when a political candidate advances far enough to run for high enough office, and suddenly the vetting process makes every foible an issue.
Sure, you have the right to boycott all day long. If you desire to deprive yourself of an artist whose work you enjoy, and that artist of a living, because you disagree with her political views, it ain’t a freedom of speech issue. You can use PR and market forces to punish people who disagree with you to your heart’s delight. What we are saying is it may make you miserable.
Not all conservatives shrug off political differences in their day-to-day lives either. We often get blowback when we tweet or write about anything outside of conservative politics as if mere engagement in the culture at large—with which one must connect to win elections, mind you—is a betrayal of conservative values in and of itself. 6
In the days following Obama’s reelection, the Washington Times reported on a libertarian Romney voter who decided to excise all the Democrats from his life. Eric Dondero will not speak to his brother. He handed out Halloween candy under the banner REPUBLICAN FAMILIES ONLY. When it comes to music, Dondero had to give up Bon Jovi, but was still evaluating John Cougar Mellencamp, producing one of the saddest sentences we’ve ever read: “John Cougar Mellencamp is an interesting situation. He is a big-time Democrat, and I absolutely hate him. But a couple of years ago, he had some nice things to say about Sarah Palin. So, he is kind of dicey.” He also told the Washington Times he’s ashamed to drive a Chevy truck, but he grandfathered it in because he bought it pre-bailouts.
Seek help, we whisper gently.
6. The Professionalization of Outrage
The Internet has given us many great things, among them the ability to join together with those of similar interests in ways far more varied and tailored than the Rotary Clubs and Ladies Who Lunch groups of days past.
The Web also allows these groups to quickly mobilize via e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook. We hope they would choose to lift up humanity, but they can also use the technology to register offense. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people interested in orchestrating such action, for attention, for social capital, for entertainment, for catharsis, and for political ends.
So, just as an Internet campaign can bring much-needed attention to kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, or create pro–free speech flash mobs in France, or move a school board to examine its zero-tolerance discipline practices, it can also be used to get a college DJ fired for playing a Top 40 hit.7
The point of politics and advocacy is to slice and dice the electorate, identify and get as many people as possible into a camp, moving from casual observer to engaged volunteer to insufferable proselytizer. That’s why Michelle Obama declared her husband will not let you go back to your life as usual. Politicians need you living as an activist so that they can thrive. Our society is very skilled at the business of politics, for better or worse. Other countries come to our consultants to learn how to slice and dice their own electorates and hone their messages. Our media is also very happy to cover political campaigns, or anything it can squeeze into that template. It creates a vicious cycle: Have something that needs attention? Well, the media covers epic, emotional, good-versus-evil fights heavy on outrage and run like professional political campaigns. Therefore, make your issue into a political campaign so the media will cover it. The media then covers your issue in the style of a political campaign, thereby amplifying all the negative attributes of politics mentioned above.
This is bad for our brains. Literally.
OBSESSIVE POLITICS WILL BREAK YOUR BRAIN
There’s a growing body of research that suggests partisan politics, that American tribal pastime, actually makes one unable to discern facts accurately. Here’s the deal, as explained by National Journal’s Brian Resnick, who had his head examined in an MRI machine to determine the extent to which politics had ruined it:
Research at NYU and elsewhere is underscoring just how blind the “us-vs-them” mind-set can make people when they try to process new political information. Once this partisanship mentality kicks in, the brain almost automatically pre-filters facts—even noncontroversial ones—that offend our political sensibilities.
In experiment after experiment, once you cross the partisan threshold “it’s almost like the whole brain becomes recoordinated in how it views people,” NYU researcher Jay Van Bavel told National Journal. For instance, in one experiment, Democrats and Republicans were asked about the same, concrete, indisputable fact—the trajectory of the unemployment rate—in two different ways. “Would you say that compared to 2008, the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse?” and “Would you say that the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse since Barack Obama was elected president?”
To the first version of the question, partisans of both sides answered about the same. When the president was added to the question, the responses split on party lines. Even when Democrats in the room were given the raw numbers in the sentence directly before the partisan-primed question—unemployment had gone up, according to the raw numbers at the time—60 percent answered in the president’s favor anyway. Gloat not, Republicans. This is not a phenomenon limited to Democrats, of course.
When Resnick asked the researchers what can fix the problem of the partisan brain, the answers that showed promise were all about jarring the brain out of its tribal political reflexes. For instance, a 2013 study at Princeton found “all it took was $1 or $2 to dramatically improve the chances of a right answer.”8 Another experiment required partisans to ruminate on their own humanity and individualism before watching a political debate, which led to a more accepting attitude toward the opposing candidate.
After his somewhat depressing quest to understand the partisan brain, Resnick asked, “Can we reshape our political environment to access the better angels of our neurological nature?” Instead, what we’re doing increasingly is reshaping our cultural environment to access the nastier devils of our neurological nature.
This is the opposite of what we should be encouraging, as Jon Lovett explains in his “The Culture of Shut Up” piece mentioned earlier; it was adapted from a speech at Loyola Marymount University’s First Amendment Week:
We need to learn to live with the noise and tolerate the noise even when the noise is stupid, even when the noise is offensive, even when the noise is at times dangerous. Because no matter how noble the intent, it’s a demand for conformity that encourages people on all sides of a debate to police each other instead of argue and convince each other. And, ultimately, the cycle of attack and apology, of disagreement and boycott, will leave us with fewer and fewer people talking more and more about less and less.
In short, in a culture suffused with politics and smartphones, every citizen must become a minipolitician, to one degree or another. Here’s what happens when everyone starts to act like a politician. Jon Lovett again: “It replaces a competition of arguments with a competition to delegitimize arguments. And what’s left is the pressure to sand down the corners of your speech while looking for the rough edges in the speech of your adversaries. Everyone is offended. Everyone is offensive,” precipitating “cycles of pearl-clutching followed by either abject sorrow or banishment.”
When we police the speech of people who care about what others think about them so intensely that they don’t want to talk about anything of importance, we cede the debate to those who don’t care whom they offend. And the fate of the country is too important to be left exclusively in the hands of trolls and floppers.
1 Or just rewatch Game 6, 2013 Eastern Conference Finals, Pacers vs. Heat.
2 Those terms were coined by Sonny Bunch (Washington Free Beacon), Jon Lovett (the Atlantic), Alexandra Petri (Washington Post), and Alyssa Rosenberg (Washington Post), respectively.
3 Preferably not in the same picture.
4 Bill Ayers didn’t ghostwrite our book, we’ll have you know. Yes, we’re trolling here. But Barack Obama really did launch his political career with a fund-raiser in the living room of two unrepentant domestic terrorist bombers. That really was a thing. We’re sure the detail that a Republican presidential candidate hosted his first political event at the home of an unapologetic abortion clinic bomber would elicit shrugs from much of the media, right?
5 Tragically, even Toby Keith is tainted. His record company for most of his career was founded by Democratic megadonor Jeffrey Katzenberg.
6 If this book had a comments section, roughly half of the comments would be some variation of, “STICK TO THE ISSUES!!!1!!1!!”
7 We’ve now alluded to this twice, and it really did happen. We’ll discuss it in chapter 4.
8 Don’t ever change, Americans, you beautiful, capitalist bastards.