A balm to heal nation’s divisions

At a recent panel discussion at Arizona State University, I participated in a lively back and forth about the state of the media and American democracy. Ultimately, I think we all agreed on one thing: The country is bitterly divided into two bubbles, with mutually exclusive political narratives and differing sets of facts — and both traditional and social media simultaneously mirror and exacerbate this divide.

Even stories that both sides care about — such as Donald Trump’s allegations of election fraud — often seem to have been reported from parallel universes with sharply divergent realities. With such different starting points, we can’t even really debate our problems, much less solve them.

Our panel spent most of the time discussing causes, but eventually an audience member asked the inevitable, inconvenient, important question: How do we fix it?

I don’t have a perfect answer. If it were that easy, universities would be holding panels on something else. Instead, I offer three possibilities.

First, one side might win the narrative wars outright, amassing enough political or cultural muscle to effectively banish the other team’s version from the public realm. Or one narrative might become so obviously untenable that even its partisans give up.

Yet I consider this the least likely outcome. For one thing, both sides have some part of the truth — including recognizing the inconvenient facts the other side prefers to deny or downplay. For another, false narratives can survive longer than you’d think. It’s easier to add a few more epicycles than admit that maybe the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth.

As to a brute force solution, well, we’ve been at that for years, with no signs of a final victory. The left wields cultural power far out of proportion to its numbers, and because rural districts are overrepresented in Congress, the right enjoys outsize political power. Neither advantage is large enough to force the other side’s unconditional surrender.

So another possibility: Maybe most people will get bored by the battles on social media and op-ed pages. A young student suggested that she saw this happening among her peers.

Much like cocaine or methamphetamine, anger provides a dopamine rush that feels terrific and distracts us from petty anxieties. It’s also a good way to bond with fellow partisans. So readers cruise both regular and social media looking for reasons to get angry. I’m afraid we oblige them to an unhealthy degree.

Yet fury is fundamentally an unrewarding emotion, even when justified; all you get out of it is bad memories and new enemies. So maybe our current frenzies will burn themselves out for the same reason that epidemics of drug use tend to wax and wane: Young people will look at their frazzled elders and think “No, thanks, I’ll find a different hobby,” while older folks start dropping out, unwilling to spend the rest of their lives in a semi-permanent rage.

The third, and most hopeful, possibility is we will start learning to like each other again.

In Mesa, Ariz., for a Trump rally earlier this month, I was surrounded by a crowd that booed and jeered the media on Trump’s cue — then turned around and pleasantly did its best to help me get back into the reporters’ pen, through a packed scrum with barely room to breathe. The same people who had been catcalling the liars in the “fake news” just moments before urged their neighbors to let me through.

That’s less surprising than you might think. In the 1930s, a social scientist took a Chinese couple around the United States to hotels and restaurants; one refused them service, but most did not. When the researcher wrote those establishments asking whether they would serve Chinese people, most who responded said they wouldn’t.

We’re accustomed to the idea that people often fail to live up to their ideals in their personal lives — talking a good game about antiracism while angling to keep their kids in majoritywhite schools. But the same can be true of our less lovely emotions. In abstract, we might be angry or fearful, while in particular being friendly and decent to the person in front of us.

So my most optimistic scenario is that remote work will help bring us back together, by reversing some of the economic forces that have been pulling us apart, sorting us by education and politics into the booming coastal megacities and the places that feel they’ve been left behind — or worry they soon will be. Maybe when we’re standing next to each other, we’ll be surprised to find that we get along just fine.