Vinoth Ramachandra was speaking at an American university about ten years ago on the theme of justice and he told his audience that “the three most important contemporary justice challenges that American society faced were (a) the massive wealth inequalities (which translate into power inequalities); (b) global warming and climate change (which affect millions of people who are not responsible for greenhouse emissions); and (c) protecting the lives of foetal human children who are the most voiceless and vulnerable persons in our human community.”

Afterwards, he recalls “Many students told me that they had heard “conservative” speakers address the third topic, and “progressive” speakers address the first two, but that they had never heard anybody bring all three issues together in a single talk on justice. I found this both revealing and disheartening. It expresses the utterly unintelligible polarizations in American society” (emphasis added).

I can understand why he would be perplexed but what we are witnessing in America now is, perhaps not so difficult to understand but it is vital that we do. We should not see the truth and trust crisis the US is experiencing as an anomaly that can only happen there but instead as a canary in the mine that should serve as a warning to the rest of us about where we are headed.

In 2016 the left and centre-left in the West received the double jolt of Brexit and Trump and that served as notice that not everyone was happy with the way the culture was heading. Since then, everything that everyone has done has made things worse. Irrespective of what you, or I, think of President Biden’s policies and actions, everything he has done since taking office has also made everything worse because the polarizations have essentially been ignored.

A loss of trust

Notice I said ignored and that has been deliberate. The evidence has been available for quite some time. In 2011 Felix Salmon could write, “Most fundamentally, what I’m seeing as I look around the world is a massive decrease of trust in the institutions of government” and that was a moment decades in the making.

Consider the results of this poll on trust in the media in the US:

• 56% of Americans agree with the statement that “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
• 58% think that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.”
• When Edelman re-polled Americans after the election, the figures had deteriorated even further, with 57% of Democrats trusting the media and only 18% of Republicans.

Just to put that into perspective that is about 120 million Americans who don’t trust the people, companies and institutions tasked with accurately reporting on the world to them. That’s not a small number and it is only going to get bigger.

Chris Stirewalt, who used to work for Fox News as an election analyst says, “Having worked in cable news for more than a decade after a wonderfully misspent youth in newspapers, I can tell you the result: a nation of news consumers both overfed and malnourished. Americans gorge themselves daily on empty informational calories, indulging their sugar fixes of self-affirming half-truths and even outright lies. Can anyone really be surprised that the problem has gotten worse in the last few years?” (italics added).

As a consequence the rage from the right at the election was not at all surprising but instead completely predictable.

When I defended the call for Biden in the Arizona election, I became a target of murderous rage from consumers who were furious at not having their views confirmed. Having been cosseted by self-validating coverage for so long, many Americans now consider any news that might suggest that they are in error or that their side has been defeated as an attack on them personally. The lie that Trump won the 2020 election wasn’t nearly as much aimed at the opposing party as it was at the news outlets that stated the obvious, incontrovertible fact.

Stirewalt is confident that these troubles will pass. I am not. Damon Linker writing in The Week has given up on the extreme, making the mistake that this number is small.

The point is not to try and convince the most hostile Republicans to tune back into mainstream media outlets. Many of them are unreachable by this point, showing less interest in doing or seeking out better reporting than in using accusations of double standards and hypocrisy to help build support for the right and attempt to tear down liberal institutions. Some go even further, to use the failings of professional journalism as a justification for pedalling deliberate distortions on alternative platforms. Those who take this position view all so-called news as a form of propaganda or information warfare and defend the deliberate promulgation of lies as a tit-for-tat response to the actions of their enemies: “If the left does it, then so should we, and with even less restraint.”

The media has to do better than this

They are out to get you

But he then asks a key question, the answer to which shows why everything Biden has done so far has not helped at all.

Whether the right succeeds in persuading more and more people to join them in tuning out mainstream journalism will depend in large part on whether its accusations of dishonesty and bad faith look accurate to observers. Does the media seem fair-minded and scrupulous in what it labels news? Or does it seem highly invested in enhancing the power of one side in our country’s deep political divide?

The answers to those questions are No and Yes.

Which is why it was SO EASY for the right wing media, without a moment of hesitation to make the narrative this: ‘They’re coming for us’. So what do you think will happen over the next four years to people who believe that to be true? How do you think they will react to four years of government by the tone-deaf progressive left? It’s not going to be pretty.

Ramachandra thinks there is a silent majority who respect reason. “It is impossible, of course, to argue with conspiracy theorists and those who move only within their limited circles and see every issue in black-or-white terms. The latter include militant atheists as well as the militantly religious, the highly educated as well as the non-literate. One can only argue with those who believe in argument, reason with those who respect reason. But there are plenty of such men and women across the political and moral/religious divides in all nations. They may well be the “silent majority”; but, if so, their silence and neglect of genuine dialogue among themselves have ushered extremists on to the centre of the political stage.”

Who holds the high ground?

But no-one is interested in persuasion on the scale necessary to make a difference. The events of 2016 gave the left a jolt and persuaded them not to make their case better to press their gains harder and faster. And when it comes to institutions they have the high ground in the battle. Not necessarily the moral high ground I should hasten to add, but the power.

David Brooks says that one of the lies our culture has believed is ‘You have to find your own truth.‘ He’s wrong about that but he’s right about how ‘truth’ or values are formed.

The reality is that values are created and passed down by strong, self-confident communities and institutions. People absorb their values by submitting to communities and institutions and taking part in the conversations that take place within them. It’s a group process.

That is correct. And if you took the time to look into which schools, colleges, universities where the majority of the media, politicians and academics come from I’m happy to hazard a guess that it will not be stunningly diverse, at least from a political standpoint.

And this is where the left (where I should add on many issues I would place myself) keeps making things worse. As Ramachandra points out:

Outlawing difference of views in the name of respecting difference is hypocrisy. So, what is ironic in all these postmodern postures is that rejection of “essentialism” and “binary thinking” perpetuates new essentialisms (e.g. “colonialism”, “hetero/homo/bisexual”) and binary thinking (e.g. inclusivist/exclusivist, tolerance/judgmentalism, victim/victimizer). Moreover, satire is a powerful weapon when wielded against those who enjoy positions of political and economic power. But when used against defenceless and insecure people, it becomes simply another weapon of the powerful.

An easy way to test this will be to see who shows like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show make fun of now that Trump has gone. If I’m right it will continue to be the latest Republican idiot like Marjorie Taylor Greene, if I’m wrong it will be a Democrat or someone on the left as often as it is on the right. I’m happy to take bets.

Headed to the bunker

To make matters worse the large scale abandonment of both social media sources like Facebook and traditional broadcast and print media for private messaging services means large numbers of the American right are now almost completely out of reach.

Between January 6th and 19th Signal was downloaded 45m times and Telegram 36m, according to Sensor Tower, a provider of data. Pavel Durov, Telegram’s boss, called it the “largest digital migration in human history”.

Where everybody knows your name

I don’t know if this data is available or not but I’d guess the majority of those 81 million downloads were from the 100 million or so Americans who don’t trust the media. In trying to repair the truth & trust crisis Christians in America have a vital role not least because of the considerable overlap between those in churches and those who believe they’re being hounded in their own country.

Brett McCracken proposes four initial steps to rebuild trust (and they’re all points I readily support) but it is how people will apply the first of his remedies that will likely make things worse and not better. McCracken reasonably enough argues that, “Instead of listening to anonymous online conspiracy theorists behind unseen avatars, trust the people you can know and be known by; the proximate pastor or parent or friend; the realities you can see for yourself.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with this advice except for one thing. By now, the online conspiracy theorists are not only not anonymous they are the pastor, parent or friend. Trevin Wax called it right in the cautionary tale of Nikabrik that people will align themselves whoever hates who you hate, and show a willingness to sacrifice principles for pragmatic results. This is the result of the ditch that many Christians dug for themselves in voting for Trump in the first and then second place.

I don’t know if I have any answers to those uninterested in The Benedict Option but it most likely lies along the lines Ramachandra took ten years ago and that is to speak about issues in a way that confounds the expectations of both right and left. It is why in Europe we may need to push right and in America the churches may need to push left.