How media partisanship promotes braindead tribal divisiveness

Centrist and conservative voices continue to be shut down at labor-funded SJ websites, stoking the flames for a dumbed-down, Us v. Them framing of important political issues. Former Senator Ben Sasse, now president of the University of Florida, puts the development into perspective in the WSJ.

Modern media, through myriad outlets at our fingertips, all of them small and narrowly targeted, has transformed Americans' conception of community. As communications become more instantaneous, we've become siloed and more lonely. We know less about our neighbors and more about the viral nutjobs who reinforce our polarized political opinions.  Click-bait news amplifies the angriest voices. This is a casino business model, trying to captivate audiences instead of informing them. Social algorithms run on rage. Good-faith arguments don't go viral.

The stupidity of tribalism has made politics primarily about partisan identities, nor persuasion or policy. The screamers on the right and the left fuel one another. In a nation as big as ours, there is always someone, somewhere saying something stupid--but tribalism takes this fact as its lifeblood. And it's the excuse for otherwise civic-minded Americans to ignore the nuts in their own party and obsess only over the nuts in the other party. We're tempted to think that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It takes a genuine leader to remind us that most of the time, the enemy of our enemy is still a jackass. 

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Read the whole thing here (subscriber paywall).

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