So now the most partisan national voices on Fox News or MSNBC – or some polarizing influencers like Tucker Carlson – go straight from their national studios straight to small-town America, unbuffered by the impetus of a local newspaper or radio station to make a maintain community. where people feel a certain degree of connection and mutual respect. As in nature, the local ecosystem has fewer healthy interdependencies, making it more vulnerable to invasive species and diseases – or, in society, to sick ideas.
In a 2021 interview Along with my colleague Ezra Klein, Barack Obama noted that when he ran for president in 2007, “it was still possible for me to go to a small town, in a disproportionately white conservative town in rural America, and get a fair hearing because people had just never heard of me. … They had no preconceptions about what I believed. They could just fool me.”
But then Obama added: “If I were to go to those same places now – or as a Democrat whose campaigns are now taking place in those places – almost all the news comes from Fox News, Sinclair news stations, talk radio or some Facebook page. And trying to penetrate that is very difficult. It's not that the people in these communities have changed. It's that if that's what you're fed day in and day out, you go to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are very difficult to break.
Sadly, we have gone from not being supposed to say “hell” on the radio to a country that is now permanently exposed to profit-driven systems of political and psychological manipulation (and throw in Russia and China Light the fire today too), so people are not only divided, but be divided. Yes, keeping Americans morally outraged is now big business at home and war by other means by our geopolitical rivals.
More than ever, we are living in the “never-ending storm” that Seidman described to me in 2016, in which moral differences, context, and perspective – all the things that allow people and politicians to make good judgments – are being blown away.
Blown away – that's exactly what happens to the plants, animals and people in an ecosystem that loses its mangroves.
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