DETROIT – Three days after President George W. Bush was narrowly reelected over John Kerry, I was at a party filled mainly with affluent white liberals who were stunned by the result.
“How could this have happened? I’ve never even met anyone who voted for Bush,” one older woman literally wailed. Yes, you have, I told her, lots of them. You just didn’t realize it.
She refused to believe me. I found that both funny, and an unsettling hint that we were evolving from a country with two major political parties to a country divided into two hostile factions who essentially didn’t talk to each other.
What I didn’t know was that it was going to get much worse. Last winter, I was walking to my car in a crowded parking lot and needed to get around a man unloading his truck. I politely asked if I could squeeze by. “I shouldn’t let you with that sticker on your car,” he growled. I was puzzled, till I figured out he thought my car was one with a Biden/Harris bumper sticker.
We’ve come a long way in terms of our unity as a nation in the last few decades, and it’s mostly been a bad trip. The first presidential election I observed as an adult was in 1976, between Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, the Democrat, and incumbent President Gerald Ford. The candidates in that election actually tried to persuade people to vote for them, not just against the other guy. Sure, they made exaggerated claims and slammed their opponents, sometimes unfairly. But it was very gentlemanly compared to now.
Though that election was far closer than 2020, nobody claimed fraud. Nobody said either candidate was evil or senile. Many Democrats were outraged that Ford had pardoned Richard Nixon, but nobody chanted “lock him up!” There was bitterness after the election, but much of that dissipated when the new President thanked the old for “all he has done to heal our land.”
Could you even imagine that happening now?
So how did we get from that America to this one, a country where national elections seem less about persuasion and more about each side trying to get their voters to the polls, while demonizing and trying to demoralize the other side?
More importantly — how do we get beyond this?
It’s easier perhaps to understand how we got into this mess. Though newspapers like this one may try hard to give readers a fair, comprehensive and balanced summary of the news, the sad fact is from the 1960s until very recently, most Americans got most of their news from radio and television.
Since the airwaves are public property, they are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, which for decades, enforced something called the Fairness Doctrine. That required all broadcasters to adequately cover issues of public importance, to do so fairly, providing accurate coverage of opposing views. Stations also were supposed to provide time to discuss different viewpoints.
If they didn’t do all that, they could have their licenses taken away – and that sometimes happened.
But the fairness requirement ended in 1987 when the Reagan Administration scuttled the doctrine, and an attempt by Congress to make it law was vetoed by President Ronald Reagan.
Suddenly, one-sided ideological broadcasts and networks appeared. Soon, it was possible for Americans to live completely in a media environment that was tailored to their prejudices. As a result, those who watch Fox News exclusively see the world very differently than those who live on a media diet of MSNBC.
While some politicians have called for reinstating the Fairness Doctine, it almost certainly won’t happen and might not do much good if it did. It’s legally questionable whether it would apply to cable broadcasts, and even if so, television is no longer Americans’ preferred source of news. According to the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Americans prefer getting their news on digital platforms – meaning their smartphones, laptops and tablets.
Television and radio remained the favorite sources for 42 percent; newspapers, only five percent.
But if we are destined to be one nation divided by media, how can we get beyond the feeling that we are in two hostile camps?
The best answer I can give is that we have to do it ourselves — and only vote for leaders who do want to heal this land, as President Carter said of the man he defeated long ago.
If we don’t do it, we are probably doomed as a democracy.
This may be the most crucial question as we face today. If this trend continues, it is doubtful whether this nation can endure, at least as a democracy based on liberty and shared values.
Anyone who talks about settling this though a “coming civil war” or of dividing us into a “red state nation” and a “blue state nation” is spouting dangerous nonsense.
That would neither be geographically easy or politically possible. Millions of Americans who vote blue live in red states, and vice versa. Any “civil war” wouldn’t be like the North against the South, but would resemble the murderous Irish Civil War of 1922-23.
We might end up with some form of martial law, or worse.
There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a young congressman who made his first speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and referred to the opposing party as “the enemy.”
Afterwards, he was taken aside by a party leader and told, “Son, they aren’t the enemy. They’re the opposition.”
That congress would have neither imagined or tolerated a Marjorie Taylor Greene of any party. Getting back to a nation where we see those who disagree with us as simply wrong, not evil, may be the biggest challenge we face today.
Whether we do it that is entirely up to us.
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