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How Long Can We Sustain Permanent Outrage Culture?
The world isn’t made of blood allies and nemeses
I’m a reporter by trade, so I’m used to strangers calling me an ignorant liar . What I will live and die and never, never understand, though, is why we get so much glee from attacking people we otherwise agree with. I know it happens a lot, but I want to tell a quick story and take it apart.
I have a Substack (please subscribe!) where I try and write something short every(ish) week and link to other stories I’ve written or podcasts or whatever. Last week I wrote this:
Increasingly I want to grab friends and shake them and tell them that I pretty intentionally don’t watch Rachel Maddow and certainly don’t want to hear a recap from them. This isn’t a dig at her in particular, but polemicists aren’t good for politics. Listening to them is a step below reading the headlines and feeling as if you’re informed.
It was part of (what I thought was) a larger point about whether politics should be for forcing people to do what you want or for finding a better way to live together. I think it should be the latter.
I chose Maddow because my readership skews liberal and I hate television news and political commentary. It runs on the kind of permanent outrage that I think is counterproductive at best.
Also, I was being a little polemical myself. Writing that I don’t need to hear people rehashing, say, Sean Hannity would have just gotten nods of agreement. My aim was to undermine scorched-earth thinking. Still, I was surprised by an angry email.
The Poor Ain’t So Bad
It started with this: “When we call Rachel a polemicist on a par with liars like Tucker Carlson, we do the truth and ourselves a terrible disservice.”
“Rachel?” Also: why Tucker Carlson? He wasn’t mentioned anywhere in my story. Are those the only two lenses for viewing American politics?
