Beyond blood allies and nemeses

Based on How Long Can We Sustain Permanent Outrage Culture? on Medium.

Transcription:

Hi. I’m Tony Russo and this is A Bagel Manifesto, where I share stories about coming to terms with belief, culture, and the profound sense of loss that no one really cares about bagels anymore. In this episode, I want to talk about allies, or the weird lack thereof. Sometimes I worry that people of good conscience let tribalism limit the number of people they count among their friends because they confuse what could be a desire to be around like-minded people with the desperate need to be around same-minded people.

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 on matters of culture or politics. I know it happens a lot, but I want to tell a quick story and take it apart.

I have a Substack newsletter where I try and write something short every(ish) week and link to other stories I’ve written or podcasts I’ve been a guest on or whatever. Recently 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 what politics is for. Some people think it is and should be a way of forcing people to do what you want. I think it should be for finding a better way to live together. In fact, when people say, “I don’t want to get political,” they’re actually doing politics, negotiating to keep the peace rather than igniting a screaming match.

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, trying to provoke an emotional response from my readers. Writing that I don’t need to hear people rehashing, say, Sean Hannity would have just gotten nods of agreement. If I’m trying to do anything with this Bagel manifesto it is to take seriously that I am on the wrong side of things or at least, get a better understanding of why people believe I’m on the wrong side of things.

My aim with the Maddow crack was to undermine scorched-earth thinking. Still, I was surprised by an angry email.

This is how the email started:

“When we call Rachel a polemicist on a par with liars like Tucker Carlson, we do the truth and ourselves a terrible disservice.”

First off: “Rachel?”  It wasn’t as if the writer was a friend of hers, but if you’re among the people who got a little sore when I said Rachel Maddow doesn’t say anything worth hearing, think about what made you sore. If it is because you think she’s your friend, like first-name basis, monthly-brunch friend, I’m sorry to break the news.

If you’re mad because I am wrong, imagine how my wife feels, she thinks I’m wrong a lot too.

It’s important to add here that I don’t respect anything about the failed project that is cable infotainment. I don’t value it, and I remember that before we had Facebook to blame, cable news and the 24-hours news cycle were candidates for the greatest threat to democracy. The point is, I don’t have any skin in the game when it comes to who is doing infotainment “right.”

Second: it was weird that the correspondent thought I was comparing their pal rach to Tucker Carlson. Tucker wasn’t mentioned anywhere in my story. It made me wonder whether those the only two lenses for viewing American politics on television.

I guess they are if you watch infotainment, and I think we’d be happier if we just didn’t do that. I don’t want to participate in that part of our culture because I think it’s counter to being able to live together a little more happily.

I said as much in my response email, but it didn’t do any good. After way too many more exchanges, I just gave up and stopped reading. The last email I read ended like this: “When you say a reporter is the same thing as a shill you’re destroying journalism.”

Ouch. I didn’t know I had to choose between being preached at on MSNBC and destroying journalism. That’s a lot of responsibility for one guy.

What was disappointing, though, was the reminder about how love-it-or-leave it has crept into the left. It reminds me of “History of the World, Part I” where an aristocrat gets sent to the Bastille for saying, “The poor ain’t so bad.”

In recent years the notion of affiliation has given way to something much more tribal. For some reason, people seem to feel like we either agree completely on everything or we have nothing in common at all. I mean, just because it was and is a successful tactic employed by the imbeciles in the Moral Majority doesn’t mean it’s good.

I just wish we felt like there was an alternative between going to the matt to defend everything “Rachel” says and flying a Nazi flag. I’ve been struggling to find that middle ground for a while.

I am not saying anyone is in a cult.

I am not saying anyone is in a cult.

I am not saying anyone is in a cult.

In my book about an internet cult, I took a look at why churches are emptying out. This is a historical fact that pre-dates the 9/11 attacks but certainly has picked up steam in the last decade. I want to share a passage here:

Very few people believe everything their religion claims. They just believe enough of it that they would rather be in the church than not. It’s a tie to family, friends, and a wider spiritual life, even if you do have the occasional pepperoni pizza on a Lenten Friday. When people change churches or religions, it’s because the rules for participation require too much of them. I don’t think this is a novel insight, but when applied to [the internet cult] it takes on a different dimension.

It was easy for me to sum up the religious right this way. They don’t want to be among people who only believe most of what they believe. For some people, belief is an all-or-nothing proposition, and with eternal damnation on the line, that almost makes sense.

For me, it reveals the fragility of their beliefs. The closer a person gets to living in a black and white world, the harder they have to work to maintain it. Under those circumstances, it isn’t just easier to limit your point of view, it is critical.

All faith, whether it be in the power of God to smite a homosexual-accepting world or in the unfiltered truth from a television personality, takes more work than most people are willing to put in. Instead, we trade self-criticism for strongly held axioms. We list our beliefs so we don’t have to examine them. If someone else’s list is different from ours, we know they’re the enemy.

I honestly wonder sometimes whether my atheism is just rooted in intellectual exhaustion. I’ve always understood faith as a process of constant testing, of how hard a person is willing to work to be sure what they know in their heart is true.

I’ve said before that figuring out how to be good is dicey enough without also matching it up with what God supposedly wants depending upon who you ask.

Progressivism appealed to me because it seemed boxless. There was this notion (and maybe it was just in my head) that we were all people with fears and wants who should try and live together with a minimum amount of strife.

Labels were for the small-minded, as was appealing to God’s rules. For me, being progressive was about a constant running critique.

Progressive rhetoric started feeling a little self-righteous in the run-up to the War in Iraq. By the time Trump left office it sounded an awful lot like the reactionary moral certainty I always associated (maybe naively) with people on the far right.

It’s as if they (we?) recognized that building consensus wasn’t working and abandoned it for the up-or-down approach that had made the right so politically successful.

Watching people I thought were my allies give up the center and abandon critical faith for immutable truths doesn’t feel different from people changing churches rather than examining their beliefs.

We’re in real danger of becoming a culture that cannot and will not stand for critique or conversation. There’s this creeping desperation to be right on all counts and at all costs that appeals to the fascist in all of us. At the risk of sounding hypocritical, if that happens the right will have won, but at least we’ll still have television personalities to give us the gist on why they’re irredeemably evil.

So what do you think? Even though I’ve been the only one talking for a while, I’d love to get your impression. You can shoot me an email at ByTonyRusso@gmail.com. If you want to attach a voice memo I’d be happy to replay and comment on it.

You can support me and the show by buying my book, Dragged Into the Light... is available everywhere you get books. The audio version will be available very soon, if that’s your thing. You can also Sign up for the newsletter at  A Bagel Manifesto.com. Follow me on social media at ByTonyRusso on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

This show was written and produced by me, Tony Russo.