It is safe to say that we find less to laugh at together now, when, as the cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han wrote in In the Swarm, our unit of political events has become the shitstorm. The desire to cancel (or to cancel cancellation) is not a desire to win a discussion but to obliterate it in perceived response to Total Emergency. Our condition of permanent freakout consists in the inability to distinguish between exception and reliable rule—in the inability to judge the magnitude or significance of events relative to some common sense. Each extreme summons and creates itself in response to its compensatory extreme (such that, e.g., more registered Democrats than Republicans have heard of QAnon). It is true that more voices can publicly express their views than before, but it has come at the cost of the public conversation itself. Opinions are no longer “representative” because there are few or no remaining organs of the center’s representation. The idea of the center itself has been weaponized into the false equivalence that there are good people on both sides of every issue—never mind what it is. Not all disagreements can or should rise to the level of debate. But this is precisely pluralism’s Achilles’ heel—its inability to dismiss its enemies without contradicting its commitment to free speech—and the basis on which it continues to be degraded from within.
The journalist Ryszard Kapuściński wrote that television created the conditions for perestroika: Once TV revealed the workings of the Kremlin, a state built on terror, ignorance, and mystification melted away. So too did cable television first melt away the comity of the US Congress. Just as Supreme Court confirmations are now extended miniseries, the appearance of cable news and the televising of congressional proceedings changed the audience and therefore the practice of government, since representatives were no longer speaking to each other, but to the news. (It is no accident, in this regard, that the Supreme Court, the untelevised branch, remains the branch of government with relatively the most prestige.) Minute and partisan coverage is delegitimizing not because politicians and justices can no longer hide their sins, but because it selects for objects of attention that are widely and readily arresting (zingers, epic fails, the optics of personality). Our politicians must begin to act for us, and then we enjoy despising them for it.
Then we were digitized. The printed word was the center’s creative organ: In order to be widely read, newspapers educated and formed their wide readership. The digital word, by contrast, disrupts the center by casting our political life into specific kinds of polarized turmoil. Congressional gridlock has less to do with representatives’ orneriness than with their discovery that the performance of opposition is a more direct avenue to winning votes than watered-down, level-headed compromise. What’s more, reality partisanship—the operatic clash of franchised revanche—is fun, because it’s much spicier to school others than to learn anything from them. Say what you will, American politics is awfully entertaining. (Were you able to follow Germany’s recent elections in close detail? All those people who go to the same tailor making aggressively reasonable suggestions about the finer points of European fiscal rules? That highly efficient national process, the acme of whose wit is the phrase “Jamaica coalition”? Nor I.) When Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tub-thump, they do so with the intent of whipping their bases into righteous frenzy; they do not argue to persuade but For The Win. The one is an entertainer playing on our resentment; the other embodies the glamor brand of Instagrammed high ground. Both are political pornographers, prisoners of the roles they exemplify for our asking. The medium is the banter; the outrage is the message.
The conditions that govern communication also govern authoritative knowledge more generally. The notion of the center suggests overlap, cooperation, and accommodation; it demands a shared structure of authority to adjudicate differences. It is telling, by contrast, that the political struggles that most exercise us have settled on binary issues that are framed to admit of no compromise: the reality or unreality of climate change, the permissibility of abortion at any stage, the possession of guns of any kind, the effectiveness of vaccines or mask wearing, the need for reparations as a remedy for racial disparity, the funding or defunding of the police, whether the border should be completely open or completely walled off. I don’t say that these aren’t questions of serious moment to every citizen, but that their fault lines have been continually rewritten into a binary code that serves to aggravate difference. They have been reformulated so as not to be debated or responsive to new reasons. Discussion is possible only on the basis of partial agreement and common first principles, but where there are no widely acknowledged institutional umpires—either because such umpires have discredited themselves, or because our notion of credibility has become more exacting, or because there are too many alternative umpires—it no longer makes sense to speak of “public debate” or “public opinion,” or even to regard the emergence of bipartisan consensus as a good thing.
Even with the necessary disclaimers, the essay can tend, as almost all lamentations do, toward that false nostalgia. But it’s worth the entire read, all of which, and more, is infuriatingly easily summed up:
Every one of us knows at heart that it is better to persuade, to discuss, to befriend, to reach across the aisle—how else can we really know whether we are right? But it’s become too easy and too entertaining not to, to the point that a whole manner of political life has grown up to gratify the peremptory vindication of our view, to witness and to share our rage.