One widely held belief is that America is so divided today because people from different camps are looking at different sets of facts — some they get from legitimate but biased news sources, such as Fox News and CNN, some they get from websites that traffic in lies and misinformation, some they get from their social media friends who share the lies, misinformation or opinions disguised as news.
The solution, believe those who subscribe to this theory of polarization, is to attack the misinformation and make sure people across the ideological spectrum are basically looking at the same set of verifiable facts.
John Wood Jr., a columnist for USA Today, doesn’t disagree that misinformation is a huge problem, compounded by the ease with which it is widely spread through the internet. But, he says, polarization is rooted in differences much deeper than a failure to recognize the same facts.
“It is a problem of interpretation, identification and tribalization. We see things differently, identify ourselves differently and group ourselves together (and in opposition to each other) according to the ways in which we see the world. Misinformation and information silos exacerbate these deeper problems and in turn are exacerbated by them. But our crisis is deeper.”
To illustrate his point, Wood cited a time, not all that long ago but before the social media explosion, in which Americans were heavily polarized — during the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Liberals and conservatives, he said, both agreed as what Obama was doing — increasing government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
“What was polarizing was not the fact, but the interpretation of the fact,” writes Wood.
“Liberals believed that Obama was making necessary investments in the welfare of the American people that demonstrated his patriotism.
“Many conservatives believed that Obama was engaged in fiscal irresponsibility in a deliberate effort to undermine the American economy.”
Coming to different conclusions about the same set of facts is not new in American politics. That’s been around as long as America has had political parties. What is new, argues Wood, is the belief that a person’s moral character can be determined by which party he or she chooses to associate. Instead of acknowledging each other as noble opponents, we place tags such as racist, communist, elitist, nativist on whoever is on the side opposite of our own.
In the process, says Wood, we are losing our shared identity. Absent a grave external threat, such as World War II or the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we become distanced from, distrustful toward and demeaning to the other side.
If facts won’t cure the current polarization between Americans, what will? According to Wood, it’s trust, not so much in each other’s information but in each other’s intentions.
“Too many of us have come to believe that only bad — or at least willfully ignorant — people could vote Democrat or Republican as the case may be. If we can come to understand how it is that good people see things the way they do, then we can begin to trust each other’s moral intentions in a way that can allow us to live together in democracy once again.”
