Why are we yelling?

As a public space in which good faith and civil democratic debate can occur, the United States looks to be pretty much finished.

Cass Sunstein wrote in a recent column for Bloomberg that the problem with America is something much worse than polarized politics. He sees the country as beset by what he calls “Political Manichaeism,” where political disagreements are not seen as reasonable disputes among fellow citizens, but instead “as pitting decent people with decent character against horrible people with horrible character.” Basically, it’s good versus evil, with each side defined less by what they actually care about, and more by what (and who) they despise.

There is a good discussion to be had about why this is the case, and how we got here. Does the steady march toward polarization go back to Reagan, or Nixon, or Kennedy? Is it the fault of Republicans, or of Democrats, or is the whole political system to blame? Is it third-party financing, or maybe the media? And if it’s the media, is it Fox News, or CNN? Was it the FCC’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine? Is it because of the decline of mainstream media, or is it the rise of the internet — and is that just tomayto/tomahto? Is social media the real culprit, or fake news? Is it adherence to “balance” in journalism that drives the appetite for partisan media, or is fair and balanced journalism a bulwark against it?

Poke around a bit and you’ll find arguments for and against all of those possibilities. What is not really up for debate is the reality of the situation. The election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 looked like the lowwater mark of partisanship in America. As bad as it is, what is more disturbing is how the situation has evolved here in Canada. We’ve long flattered ourselves that our politics is more civil than it is in the U.S., maybe because there’s less money involved, or the parliamentary system is better, or just maybe because we’re all so much nicer.

But as anyone who has followed the recent debates in the #cdnpoli precinct of Twitter is well aware, Canadian politics is well down the same path we’ve seen in America, perhaps irreversibly so. And what makes what is going on so unnerving, is that it is not a case of anonymous trolls or party hardliners dragging the moderate middle to the rough edges. Instead, the steady march into the pit of vulgarity, meanness, stridency and unrelenting bad faith is being led by experienced members of parliament, highlevel political staffers, and even cabinet ministers and their opposition shadows.

There is nothing to be gained by naming names or repeating verbatim exchanges — if you’re paying the slightest attention, you know what is going on. And arguing about who started it only underscores the problem: A line seems to have been crossed, where even those who have seemed most committed to resisting the tug of good-versusevil Manichaeism have decided to go all in on painting their opponents not as basically decent people with different views on things, but as horrible people with horrible character. Neither side is blameless in all of this.

At some level, we all know that we’re entering a pretty dark place. And there is a pretty broad consensus emerging that social media is a big part of the problem. The former journalist (and, it is worth adding, former speechwriter for Justin Trudeau) Colin Horgan wrote a nice thread on Twitter noting that the platform isn’t a medium designed for accountability. “It is built for bots. It is built for trolls. It is built for fake accounts. It’s built for all of those things, and more besides. And it’s built so that things you say don’t last. It’s built for not being responsible for what you say. That’s what it is.” And politics, he added, is supposed to be the opposite of that.

As a result, what happens when politicians and their cronies start using Twitter as their primary means of communicating with their audience is that it stops being communicative and deliberative, and it becomes more performative. There is a lot to be said for demanding of our MPs that they simply get off Twitter — it is hard to imagine any aspect of our politics that wouldn’t be improved by such a move.

But at the same time, we need to be wary of falling into a sort of soft technological determinism where we recite pidgin McLuhanisms as a way of avoiding assigning responsibility where it is rightly due. It’s true, the medium shapes the message. But the problem with blaming the media or the platforms for everything is it leads to blameshifting: if we only heckle The New York Times editorial page editors enough, or bully newspapers into calling Trump a liar, or if enough of us complain to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about Twitter bots, or we hold a mass prayer for Facebook to be broken up by regulators, then things will go back to the way they were.

But it’s not going to happen. This is the world we’ve built. It reflects who we are, our hopes and fears, our biases and our values. There’s no business model, regulation, or filter waiting to be discovered that is going to save us. As University of Ottawa law professor Craig Forcese wrote on Twitter recently, “The problem stems, not from the medium, but from ourselves.”

And the ourselves who are most to blame for all of this are the partisans.

Look, many of us have good acquaintances, friends even, who are partisans. But as anyone who spends time with enough of them knows, there is something fundamentally wrong with the partisan brain. Decent, smart, educated people who seem to have their feet firmly planted in the realm of reason and logic, cause and effect, inference and deduction, suddenly lose their minds when faced with an issue over which there is partisan advantage to be had, or when a threat to their tribe’s hold on power looms.

Arguing with them doesn’t work. Appealing to their sense of fairness or better judgment is no good. When partisans are in the grip of partisanship, it’s like they are living in a different part of the galaxy where the familiar laws of reality don’t apply. They can only help themselves, and so in the interest of offering friendly but also urgently self-interested advice, here are three principles or guidelines partisans need to follow that will help guide them back to the comfortable gravity and welcoming atmosphere of Planet Sanity.

1. “What if my opponent did that?”

When it came to raw partisanship and control-freakery, Stephen Harper did a lot of things that made his opponents mental. So much so, that a strong case could be made that the overwhelming appeal of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015 was that they promised to just stop doing these sorts of things. Yet if you had kept a running tally of things the Trudeau government had done labelled “what if Stephen Harper did that?” you’d have a pretty lengthy thread by now. In a lot of ways — its control over Parliament, the lack of transparency and the abuse of process, the torquing of public policy and programs for partisan advantage — this government is in many important respects no better than the one it replaced.

Of course, they don’t see it that way. No one ever does, because people tend to interpret their own behaviour in light of what they see as their true motives. And because they see their motives as fundamentally good, the Liberals give themselves a pass for engaging in the behaviours for which they (and the press gallery) crucified Harper.

But here’s the thing: Harper almost certainly interpreted his own behaviour in exactly the same way. He no doubt justified his own control freakery and partisan gamesmanship on the same grounds — that it was in the service of the public interest.

THIS IS THE WORLD WE’VE BUILT. IT REFLECTS WHO WE ARE.