N DIVINE & CONQUER
The idea that we’re a split nation is a lie, pushed to spur clicks and profits
O matter your politics, your education, your income or where you live, Super Bowl Sunday is the one day, aside from Thanksgiving, when most Americans have a unified experience.
This feels all too rare now. Ever since the 2016 election, we’ve heard the same daily refrain: We are a dangerously divided nation. America has never been so fractured, democracy so fragile, the personal inseparable from the political and vice versa.
It’s infected the national conversation, such as it is, conducted on Facebook and Twitter — mediums that sold themselves as great unifiers, connecting hearts and minds globally, but now revealed as highly flammable tinderboxes for virtue signaling, socialjustice warring, reductive thinking and self-righteous hostility.
This narrative of America tearing itself apart is hyperbolic and ahistorical (Howabout the 1960s? The Civil War?) — a lie pushed by the media to keep us tuning in, the equivalent of apocalyptic weather forecasts stoking panic for ratings and clicks and ad dollars.
Just a few memorable causes of cultural outrage: Ellen sitting next to George W. Bush at a football game. Jimmy Fallon tousling Donald Trump’s hair during an interview. Colin Kaepernick’s Nike deal. Dave Chappelle making jokes about Michael Jackson’s victims on a recent Netflix special.
None of these celebrities suffered; Kaepernick and Chappelle actually profited. Nike recorded second-quarter sales of $847 million in 2018, credited to the Kaepernick ad campaign. Chappelle earned $60 million for his five Netflix specials and was awarded the esteemed Mark Twain Prize for American Humorlast December, months after his special began streaming.
As for Ellen and Fallon, they took their respective stances: Ellen defiant, Fallon apologetic, to no real downside.
No surprise then that when Oprah Winfrey, once America’s most powerful and influential unifier, landed herself in trouble this week for naming her next book club selection “American Dirt” — a novel quickly assailed by the online mob as gross cultural appropriation and stereotyping — she would not be bullied.
After 137 authors, including Tommy Orange and Viet Thanh Nguyen, posted a petition on Thursday demanding that Winfrey drop “American Dirt” from her book club — while hypocritically insisting that “this is not a letter calling for silencing nor censoring” — Oprah didn’t respond.
In fact, she’s doubled down, stating that she plans to use the controversy as content for her Apple TV+ show — the best thing that could have happened for her, because really, who even knew Oprah had an Apple TV+ show? (As for pulling support from a new #MeToo documentary about Russell Simmons, Winfrey maintains it wasn’t public pressure but personal doubts that led to her decision.)
In the wake of the “American Dirt” blowback, publishing house Flatiron Books quickly announced the cancellation of the book tour due to “specific threats to booksellers and the author” — then just as quickly announced a series of town-hall discussions. These are cynically and essentially the same thing, now guaranteed to attract even bigger crowds and more free publicity.
As of Friday, “American Dirt” was ranked No. 2 on Amazon’s best-seller list. It’s poised to be this winter’s biggest title.
But while division makes for great corporate profits, it’s unhealthy — and untrue — for us as a society.
Back in October, Barack Obama — who ran in 2008 on a pledge to represent not red- or blue-state America but the United States of America — called out cancel culture and the reactionary black-and-white thinking that has metastasized and calcified its way into the body politic.
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Obama said, “you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you.”
While the Twitterati and left-leaning writers criticized Obama — a New York Times op-ed by Ernest Owens wrote that he “gasped” at Obama’s Boomer wrongheadedness — conservatives including Ann Coulter and Tomi Lahren endorsed Obama’s warnings, as did Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard.
It’s a sexy, dangerous notion, this divided United States. But each time you hear it, remember these stats: As of 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that 70 percent of Americans think the economy is the nation’s number one issue. Sixty-nine percent said making health care more affordable should be a top priority. Fifty-eight percent said they didn’t trust President Trump to handle immigration policy.
On the issues that truly matter, we are more alike in our thinking than not — a boring, if reassuring, thought on Super Bowl Sunday.