KENNEY: Fighting For the Pale Blue Dot

The fight isn't between left and right, but whether the center can hold out against the extremists in both parties.

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by Shaun Kenney
COLUMNIST

Congratulations, citizens!

Now having nearly endured the bulk of the elections of 2023, you can now rest assured that it is all over but the shouting. Of course, there’s another solid three weeks of shouting one radio airwaves, television screens, and even social media designed to squeeze the very lifeblood out of the electorate — and perhaps well-heeled and hopefully out of state donors.

Of course, I have my predictions as to where things are headed.

Not that it matters if I share those prognostications or not. To those who think I am capable of independent thought based on that mythical and magical weapon known as math? You will agree with my sound and rational analysis. To those who believe me to be one step removed from Atilla the Hun? Whom would I ever convince?

Why We Can’t Talk About Politics Anymore

One of the great experiments when Marty Davis and I started talking about what was broken in the media today was whether or not Republicans and Democrats could even speak to one another anymore.

Cass Sunstein — certainly no man of the right — wrote about precisely this phenomenon in his book Republic.com back in 2001 where he worried openly about the problem of voters siloing their information.

Mr. Republican wakes up in the morning, reads the Wall Street Journal, turns on FOX News, listens to Sean Hannity on talk radio, flips through a copy of The Economist, comes home to get yelled at by Bill O’Reilly and meets his neighbor that evening.

Likewise, Ms. Democrat wakes up in the morning, reads The Washington Post, turns on MSNBC, listens to NPR on the way into work, flips through a copy of The Atlantic, comes home to get scolded by Rachel Maddow, and meets her neighbor that evening.

Not only can these two people not have a conversation, but they aren’t even working from the same set of facts.

Tempers flare, arms are folded, and both go back into their kitchens wondering why there are so many stupid people in the world. If only they were informed and rational consumers of information, we seethe under our breaths, then the other side would finally see things the way they are.

Sunstein’s solutions were quite rigid and heavy-handed at the time, and far different from his 2008 book Nudge which he published while working for the Obama administration — the so-called avuncular state as opposed to the nanny state. Sunstein had little hope for the center in the face of personalized news and information, believing that forcing Mr. Republican and Ms. Democrat into interaction was the only grand solution for saving democracy.

Boy, was he wrong.

Can The Center Hold? Is There a Center to Hold?

Of course, we all know how the story ends. The steady diet of old school journalism which had for far too long blurred the lines between editorialized news and outright propaganda was finally vanquished with the arrival of digital and social media. The personalization of news grew worse, ratcheted up by tech apparatchiks who drove consumers in self-sacrifice towards a trio of secular gods: engagement, viral media, and memes. Talking heads discovered that sneering could replace confidence, witticisms could be a substitute for thought, and worse discovered that if something could be funny then it must be true.

So we find ourselves in a sort of dumbed down trench warfare. Both camps have discovered the power of magic words to stop meaningful debate. Groomer is the new racist. Pedophile is the new homophobe. “My Body, My Choice” is good for abortions and vaccines now. Rioting is bad — unless it is a “mostly peaceful protest” in front of ______________ (insert location here) because of ______________ (insert just cause here).

Which is where my beef with how we talk about politics — and especially local and state politics — sits at present. Borrowing from William Butler Yeats’ all too abused Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

To some degree, our forefathers read this during the 20th century and suspected it. One fears that we are coming to know this truth all too well. Can the center hold? How is mere anarchy ahead? The best seem to have given in to cowardice; our worst seem so certain and sure and fanatical

Lacking horses, our donkeys trot.

Not Left and Right, but the Center vs. Extremes

Yet the real division isn’t so much Mr. Republican and Ms. Democrat, as if the opposition were that of left and right, red and blue. Rather, consider for a moment that the opposition is between the extremes and the center — the ones who in the name of some higher good attack the common good.

One can go through a very long list of offenses on the right and the left, I’m sure. Too often, that’s precisely how our discourse pans out. For every January 6th, there’s three dozen unanswered BLM/Antifa riots. For every Roe there is a Dobbs. For every Obama there is a Trump, for every Bush there is a Clinton.

Yet how does it devolve? Two camps of idiots screeching at one another over things that don’t matter to an audience which has already made up their minds.

Does it get boring? Do we even feel just a little bit ashamed over how we talk about things? Are the stakes really that high? Or are we watching two sets of extremes try to out-leverage one another in pursuit of what? Libertopia? Star Trek?

In my not-terribly-long years on this planet, I have yet to discover the Democratic way to build a road or a Republican way to build a school.

Yet what I have discovered is that beyond the extremes who seem to besiege our public square is that there exists a fundamental majority of people — the honorable middle — who doesn’t see every political question as an open invitation to blood sport, but rather is sick and tired of watching the extremes vindicate themselves over and over and over. They care — but only up to a point.

The problem is that decent people don’t want to be called racists, bigots, groomers and pedophiles just for raising a thought in public. So they stay home, watch sports, wrestle with the kids. How few are the good people willing to get slandered by bad actors who simply want to win arguments rather than advance the common good?

What is this common good? It’s not hard. Most people just want good schools, good roads, honest pay, education worthy of the name, decent health care, and a vocation — not mere employment — in a career they don’t hate — and someone who will listen to a citizen complaint and act upon it as if their children lived in this same community. Most people want to work hard and keep what they earn. Most people don’t need a handout; they want what we all want — an equal chance at the Four Freedoms: of speech, of religion, from want, from fear.

That is the American center, folks. That’s why people come here.

The extremes in both parties would rather have us at sixes and sevens fighting over a pile of absolute nonsense. There is a cottage industry making a bloody fortune getting us to turn on our neighbors, and if you’re lucky, you might win out — at least until the next election. Yet things keep getting worse, don’t they? Know why? Because we really don’t give a tinker’s damn about the issues (so called).

We just like arguing. About nothing.

Our Responsibility to Deal More Kindly

For myself, I am far more interested in why people believe what they believe. That’s the more interesting part — the part our politicians deprive us when they game mock debates (if they attend them at all), the part we reduce to slicks and memes and 30 second advertising, and how we talk to one another about anything.

Social media has conditioned us to be cruel, witty, performative and boring actors — and easily swayed. Sunstein was right about the silos with one alteration. We didn’t silo ourselves into two informative camps. We siloed ourselves into one uninformed morass where nuance is punished and brevity for its own sake — especially the cruel and dehumanizing kind — rewarded.

Take a taste of the political advertisements you will be swamped with over the next three weeks and tell me I’m wrong. Because I don’t believe my Democratic friends and neighbors are either evil or stupid. Nor should my friends and neighbors believe I am evil or stupid because my values — for the moment — are best expressed in the Republican Party.

Carl Sagan had a great observation about the Pale Blue Dot — this little place we call home. I share it every Christmas and with good reason:

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

. . .

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

. . .

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

But you’re not interested in that.

As of right now, Virginia Republicans are set to win the House of Delegates with 55 seats, and the Virginia State Senate with 22 seats — with inflation, parental rights, and outrage over the Hamas terrorist attacks driving conservatives and independents to the polls.

Now there’s something to argue about. Have at it.

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