Koutoulas: Can democracy survive amid this divide?
There was an intriguing development last week during the House Judiciary Committee meeting most of us scarcely noticed.
Four experts testified concerning whether or not President Donald Trump’s actions in the Ukraine affair amounted to impeachable offenses.
Three of the witnesses were there at the behest of House Democrats. All of them testified the charges were impeachable offenses according to the Constitution.
Not surprisingly, the one witness called by Republicans completely disagreed, testifying the deeds were not impeachable offenses.
This isn’t news — this is partisan business as usual on Capitol Hill.
The problem should be obvious. Whether or not you believe the president’s actions amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors” is not the point — although I happen to think they do.
This is a process that should not be tinged by partisan politics but looked at objectively and fairly by all parties. But no matter which way you lean politically, it’s hard to see much fairness or objectivity.
Our elected leaders are behaving much like many of us.
They are concerned about their personal ideology and party loyalty, to the detriment of truth. We’re left with a hyper-partisan liberal Democratic party and a hyper-partisan conservative Republican Party.
There’s no give and take, no compromise. There’s no playing out of ideas, no real debate anymore in Washington. Instead, we have people grandstanding for the cameras.
Everyone is talking, but no one is listening.
Why is party affiliation so important? Why can’t people be objective when forming opinions, rather than always towing the party line?
I sometimes think if we had more than two parties, that might break the hold the parties have over the system. I’ve toyed with the idea a parliamentary system might work better. But you see other nations with parliamentary systems, and they seem every bit as broken as ours. Look at Britain and Israel for two good examples.
Perhaps the problem is not so much the form of government itself but just this incredible ideological chasm that divides us. And it’s not only in the United States. You see it in most Western democracies.
It may be this is driven to a large extent by social media, which is intentionally sorting us into ever more divisive camps. It’s not a bug, but a feature of the system. Their algorithms intentionally lead us deeper and deeper into these chasms to keep us engaged with their products.
Go to YouTube, for instance. Watch a video, and you will be offered a suggestion of what to watch next. Ostensibly, this is to help you find similar content.
The problem is we get bored fast. To keep us engaged, YouTube has discovered it can suggest videos that grab our attention by being a little more provocative, conspiratorial or confrontational. The longer you watch, the more it escalates.
That’s what keeps people engaged. It leads us down a rabbit hole, and whether it’s true or what ideology it supports does not matter to them. All that matters is that we keep watching.
How do you fight a battle against not just misinformation but intentional misinformation?
It’s not that there’s a dearth of good sources of information and news. They are everywhere. There are sites where you can go and get peer-reviewed research papers on virtually anything.
There are excellent journalists providing objective, balanced and honest reporting.
It seems most people really want none of that.
High-quality content gets lost amid the algorithms because nobody’s looking for it. So by default, we’re fed the content they want us to see. The kind that keeps us watching.
I want to know what’s true. I don’t want to believe false information. I don’t want to believe conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality. I don’t want to believe things just because they are dramatic, exciting or titillating.
It seems many people just don’t care about the truth. They want to feed their egos, to rally around their tribe, to yell and point fingers at the other side.
So they just throw all kinds of ridiculous accusations and theories out there and hope a few of them stick.
Half the people will eat it up, while most of the rest just throw their hands up and say, “Who knows what’s true anymore?”
What’s the ultimate solution? I don’t know.
But the current situation is discouraging for the future of democracy.
Pete Koutoulas is an IT professional working in Lexington. He and his wife have resided in Winchester since 2015. Pete can be reached at pete@koutoulas.me or follow him on Twitter @PeteKoutoulas.