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. . . Consider the fact that even the most innocuous expressions of dissent from hard-left identity politics have triggered violence and threats of violence on campus. There are reasons why conservative professors have called me from their office, closed the door, and shared their true opinions only in whispers. They knew their lives would be turned upside down if the wrong ears were listening.But we on the right are wrong and smug to think that only the Left is losing its sense of proportion or perspective. From the Bully Pulpit of the White House to the tiny pulpits of personal social media, amoral angry populists lash out with a degree of fury and rage that I’ve never seen in my adult life. The goals are similar, to “destroy” careers or to wage “war” on opponents, and it’s not just pundits fighting pundits or politicians fighting politicians. It’s neighbors versus neighbors . . .. . . Our political system is remarkably stable. It’s built to last through incompetent presidents and rudderless Congresses. The Founders erected safeguard after safeguard to prevent any one election or any one movement from toppling our constitutional republic. But I fear that our culture is less durable than our Constitution.Indeed, our culture has failed our Constitution before, most recently through the malice and groupthink of the Jim Crow South. An entire region built a system from the ground up that stood in direct defiance of not just our nation’s Founding documents but also of the Civil War–era constitutional amendments that were designed to remake the land.Our contemporary culture hasn’t yet failed to that terrible extent, but malice leads a nation down dark paths, and our increasing geographic separation into warring ideological bubbles creates fertile ground for extremism. In other words, the law of group polarization applies. I’ve written about this concept before, but it can’t be emphasized enough. Essentially, the law holds that “in a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments" . . .. . . [T]here’s a difference between debate and insults, between reason and malice. Our nation thrives in the midst of disagreement. It withers, however, in the face of unrelenting cruelty, and I fear that for now, cruelty is winning the day.
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Topic: ‘Get Tough or Shut Up’: The Malicious Spirit Loose in the Land (Read 273 times)
