Chuck Todd: What if we can’t unite?

Fox News has been especially aggressive in its programming the last few days, going out of its way to find cherry-picked examples of rhetoric from the left that, on its face, can sound like incitement. Of course, we’ve had so many run-ins with increased political violence over the last decade that perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the public has gotten a bit numb. There’s a part of me that didn’t even want to bother trying to write this column, because anything that attempts to rise above partisanship in any way gets ignored completely, pilloried as nave or dismissed as having been said by someone who simply “doesn’t know what time it is.” Let’s be honest: The current level of political discourse is unsustainable for this democracy. Maybe it doesn’t break us this year, maybe not next. But unless we choose to rise above it, either by electing de-escalators rather than purveyors of zero-sum political pugilism or by demanding that the big tech companies stop creating algorithms that are designed to incite and divide, we will break — and that break will be perilous. It has happened to this republic before, so don’t assume it can’t happen again. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. As a native of Miami, I saw firsthand similar attempts to dehumanize and otherize Haitians amid an influx of refugees from the country in the early ’80s. We didn’t have social media back then, which may be why the story of attacks against Haitians in the early ’80s didn’t travel outside the South Florida information ecosystem. Clearly, this isn’t the ’80s. Let’s remember who is at fault for sorting Americans and feeding them the worst examples of their political foes and the most righteous examples of their political supporters: the tech companies that control the flow of information we routinely receive. But sadly, because so much of our daily politics is argued online, it starts to change us — and change us for the worse, starting with the political leaders who spend more time online than the average American. Be honest with yourself — while the news was surprising Sunday, it sadly wasn’t very shocking. Spend 10 minutes doom-scrolling on your social media app of choice and you will be served up examples of outrage and demonization that can do one of two things: make you shake your head about the state of the country and leave the platform in disgust or anger you and get you to engage even more, usually by contributing wittingly or unwittingly to demonizing “the other side.” And, yes, I’m being intentionally vague with these descriptions because this type of behavior isn’t limited to one set of partisans. As social media rose and became the main distributor and facilitator of political information, our politics have become more combative and less collaborative. It’s why it’s hard to take seriously the outrage from some in Trump’s orbit that it’s the Democrats and their media allies who have created the more violent conditions in our political landscape. For every complaint the right surfaces about discourse it says could have been triggering, there is a slew of pugilistic personal attacks that Trump has made himself and directed at Americans by name, putting them in harm’s way. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Sadly, so much of our political discourse features people rationalizing their bad behavior by claiming the other side is worse. This doesn’t mean anyone is condoning the bad behavior of the other side, but it means that if you ask the voters to expect better, you should always behave better, period. It’s not always easy, but a good leader behaves well even when it’s hard. Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories. What concerns me the most is whether most Americans have been so distorted by how information travels through the social media funhouse mirror that we’ve forgotten about how much we all have in common. If we don’t find our way out of this maze of distorted reflections, this will only get worse. To paraphrase Churchill, here’s hoping once we’ve exhausted all the wrong ways to bring this country together, we’ll finally realize what’s truly been dividing us all along and seek a better path. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/chuck-todd-unite-nation-trump-harris-election-rcna171303