Rhetorica: Bloggers Cause Disease and Death!
Andrew Cline’s post title is wonderful. Captures the absurdity of what David Gregory said.
Even Andrew, sharp as he is, mentioned nothing about how politicians contribute to polarization. At least not the first time around. As I was starting to blog this, though, I went back & found he’d updated the post and made nearly the point I was going to make.
For him, though, the press is even responsible for how politicos polarize:
Various of the structural biases of journalism encourage them to view the actions of political actors as mere tactics aimed at winning rather than as possibly also sincere efforts to solve problems.
One way that polarization occurs: Political actors begin to believe this master narrative. So the actions of political opponents become mere tactics and the motives of political opponents become evil attempts to ruin rather than to build (or fix).
To give him credit, Cline also mentions our political system as a contributor to the problem. He could go farther, and mention how [$2 word alert!] adversarialism is built into most aspects of our culture.
For instance, the legal system isn’t usually what’s meant when people mention the political system. But it’s fully adversarial. Two sides lawyer up and duke it out in court.
Andrew is part of a wave of awareness that there are alternatives. His blog does a tremendous service in analyzing how we are taught to think, (an issue I deal with too). But the awareness progresses on other fronts. Take, for example, the innovation of family courts assigning a law guardian to look after the interests of children when their parents are facing off in a divorce.
As Andrew says, "Are there two sides to every story? Yes, if you stop counting at two."
There’s no need to stop counting.