America is getting meaner | The Seattle Times

I recently went to see my doctor for a COVID-19 delayed exam. Instead of talking about what hurts me, he wanted to talk about what hurts us. A dystopian country. The Babel of Misinformation. The lack of confidence in everyone and everything.

“And how did Dr. Fauci to the enemy? ”He said. My doctor is politically moderate and ambidextrous. After a lot of steam was blown off, I wanted to say, Enough with American vital signs – what about my own?

Trust in institutions – government, press, religion, large corporations – is at or near record lows. My own profession, journalism, has been thrown into the basement of contempt. According to Gallup’s annual polls, nearly 40% of Americans have little or no trust in newspapers – up from 24% in 2000.

But the “press”, in which free expression and all its cacophonic chaos live, has been a sandbag for some time. Even more shocking, according to a Morning Consult survey, around 50% distrust our voting system. Declining confidence in the elections is one of the worst of former President Donald Trump’s many horrific aftermaths.

But underlying these cynicisms and suspicions is a really sad development: the United States is becoming a mean country.

Take the story of the passenger who knocked out a flight attendant’s teeth – part of a terrifying surge in the number of recalcitrant fliers. Or think of the man who shot and killed a supermarket cashier in Georgia when she asked him to pull up his mask. Lament the absurd sorrow of the Philadelphia Food Festival, designed to celebrate culinary diversity – then canceled after the decision to unload Israeli food into a food truck sparked controversy.

It was a truly shocking break when Rep. Joe Wilson, RS.C., shouted, “You are lying!” To President Barack Obama in 2009. Now an entire political party is shouting the Big Lie of Election Fraud and is going to punish those who do insist on the truth.

Tribalism and the corrosive hatred that goes with it have always been under the surface in the risky experiment of our multiethnic democracy. It’s been showing up in a lot of our daily interactions lately – and it makes up a lot of the meanness of this moment.

I attribute the disdain of the press to Rush Limbaugh, whose long-term goal was to promote what he called the “drive-by media” – i.e. challenged, overcompensated, partisan gas bags like him. It worked.

In the past, weirdos could only talk to themselves on bar stools; Now they have a huge community in the dark expanse of the web. That explains why up to 1 in 4 Republicans believe the country is under the control of Satan’s worshiping pedophiles as they sniff the fumes of QAnon. This is also the likely reason a third of Americans continue to believe the fiction that Joe Biden won the election by fraud.

The jump from a proven false premise to physical attack does not require skill. In the average America in January, nearly 3 in 10 respondents expressed support for politically motivated violence, if necessary.

Unfortunately, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol – so heartbreaking and so norm-shattering – was much more a reflection of time than an aberration.

The left is to blame for its abandonment culture, groupthink and identity politics – tactics now being adopted by the right (see the canceled Liz Cheney, Party loyalty to the falsehood Trump won).

Last summer, several protesters appeared at the homes of elected officials in Seattle, including Debora Juarez, a solid progressive and the only indigenous member of the Seattle city council. She said she felt they were there to “terrorize” her after being mocked with megaphone slurs and threatened with flashing car headlights. Their crime: Juarez did not support the goal of disappointing the police by 50%. The political class in the city was largely calm.

I was working on a book about the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, a time when up to 5 million Americans were the oldest hate group in the country. That was a mean decade of Jim Crow locked up, Prohibition the law of the country, and immigrants who weren’t white Protestants but locked out.

A popular tactic used by the clan in the 1920s was to drive to a person’s home at night to terrorize them.

The underlying theme of all this meanness is intolerance.

My own better angel taking a break now tells me that the majority of people today are not as terrible as they appear on social media, which greatly rewards hate. But who or what rewards courtesy and nuances?

It may be, as writer George Packer says, that the United States is “heading for a cold civil war that will further undermine democracy”. No nation can long survive as a guiding star without some self-evident truth.

There is an old saying attributed to the Sioux: A people without a history is like the wind in the buffalo grass. What is worse is a people without a heart, unable to see half of their countrymen and women as anything other than the enemy.

This story was originally published on nytimes.com. Read it here.