Tweeter and the monkey man: A short post on how to win back America

We hear a lot about the “echo chamber” phenomenon, where people only get their news from sources biased in their direction. It could be Fox News, but it could also be Rachel Maddow, The Globe and Mail, or your Facebook feed. I am of the impression that people’s points of view are becoming increasingly unhinged, from each other and from reality.

Canadians online speculate seriously about a second civil war in the United States. Here in Toronto, there is a debate scheduled this week between U.S. conservative David Frum and Steve Bannon, on the subject of populism. I was listening to a radio story about how groups are protesting the invitation to Bannon, saying that his views are hate speech and ought not to be given a platform. Rachel Epstein, executive director of the United Jewish People’s Order, was being interviewed and sounds respectable.

But when asked about Steve Bannon’s views and what they are, she just kept saying that we all know what Bannon thinks already—so she wouldn’t answer questions about them. And when directly asked if the way to deal with hateful ideas is to silence them, she answered, “Perhaps.”

Granted, this is Canada, which has a troubled history of free speech. But then I was reading an article from The Wall Street Journal, an august source that I seldom agree with but usually find reasonable. All of a sudden in the midst of his reasonableness, this author stated that the migrant “caravan” heading towards the U.S. border has been organized and coached by liberal activists. Huh? Why would they do that? It makes more sense politically for Tweeter (he who tweets) to organize it and march it towards the U.S. himself—not that I believe either conspiracy theory. After all, border issues clearly favor the Republicans, and the shooting won’t start till after Election Day.

Now, given the context of the synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, I completely understand the outrage against anti-Semitic and indeed any hate speech. I am also outraged by the gun availability that makes such murderous attacks (it wasn’t the only one even last week) possible. But to go online, as too many Americans did, and immediately blame Tweeter for everything that happens in that country is hysterical. 

He is a symptom; the fact that millions like what he has to say is the problem. Millions more (of the minority who voted for him) may not have liked what he said or how he said it, but held their nose for one reason or another. Two of those reasons are the prize of overturning Roe v. Wade (surely that explains some of the 80% of white evangelicals), or some of the same economic grievances that caused Bernie Sanders to win primaries, for example in Michigan.

The goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, which recognizes U.S. women’s right to an abortion, has animated many evangelicals politically for a generation. With the Tweeter-packed Supreme Court (Brett Kavanaugh, plus the seat that became vacant under President Obama but was held over, in defiance of all precedent), Roe will soon be history. For this dream of social conservatives, now about to come true, Tweeter was worth voting for. Public health evidence does not support an association between restricting abortion and reduced rates of abortion, and so I believe even foes of abortion would be better advocating “pro-choice” policies, but those facts play no role in the U.S. “pro-life” movement. If you believe, as they do, that the end of Roe is the same as ending a holocaust, then Tweeter is certainly worth it.

As for the economic issues, millennials and all of us who voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary were told that we were wrong, because Hillary Clinton could beat Donald Trump. Well. It was Bill Clinton who famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Millions of voters are now deciding, “Am I better off than I was two years ago?” Democrats who are competing for their votes had better know the answer to that question.

We might wish that the U.S. was a different country than it is, but we can only win with the people we have. Democrats do well when they talk about, dare I say it, Sanders’s issues (for example, his campaign helped bring universal health care into mainstream public debate). Democrats do not do well when they talk about how awful Tweeter is or how awful you are if you vote Republican. If Tweeter being awful was enough, he would never have been elected. 

Democrats have to get it right on people’s “kitchen table” issues, or they will continue to lose. That is also something Steve Bannon has said. There is indeed hate speech, but there is more to the populist streak in American than that. Refusing to contest populism is not going to make it go away.