It’s become difficult to talk about politics.

That’s an understatement.

Reasons why it’s difficult (not a complete list):

1. The extreme tribalism of American politics

This is not the same thing as saying that the American people are divided on policy. While Americans do have differences of opinion on policy, of course, it’s surprising exactly how much the American people agree on. They would all like Medicare for All and a living wage, for example. They would all like Social Security to continue, and perhaps to be expanded. Many of them would also like to re-industrialize their country and spend less time and money running around the globe killing people. Among people under 45, there's even considerable support for ending the petrochemical economy.

Unfortunately, none of this agreement prevents the extreme tribalism of American politics, which has less and less to do with policy as time goes on. In fact, the 2020 election was often described by corporate media pundits as a post-policy election—Trump’s evil was so great that we couldn’t afford the luxury of policy concerns. (What Trump’s evil could consist of, if not bad policy, was not particularly clear). This example shows how loyalty to one’s political tribe can be used to direct people away from discussions of policy, and even to suggest that such discussions are faintly immoral. If you keep talking policy when we need to get rid of Trump, you must not really be loyal to liberals, the Democratic party, or democracy itself. There’s an evil man destroying the country! That’s all you should care about. You’d think that, if he’s destroying the country and you want to save it, all of that would play out through competing policies—so the most loyal thing imaginable, and the most rational, would be to talk policy. But apparently, you’d be wrong.

Tribal loyalty has actually begun to replace policy as the origin point of people’s politics. Not long ago, people would decide which politicians to support based on those politicians’ stated policy positions. Not that looks and charisma played no part in people’s choice of leaders—but even if you thought George W. Bush looked like a nice guy to have a beer with, it’s unlikely you’d vote for him in 2004 if you were against the Iraq War. Loyalty to political leaders was based on those leaders continuing to fight for desired policies. Loyalty was lost when those leaders abandoned their policy goals, or betrayed the values that underlay them.

Now people decide which political tribe they’re in, and give loyalty to the leaders of that tribe simply because *they are* the leaders of that tribe. Said leaders can do or say almost anything without losing the loyalty of their partisans, because their partisans aren’t basing their fealty on anything the politician does, but rather on who she is: Democrat or Republican? Progressive or mainstream? When identity politics is thrown into the mix, as it often is, it allows participants to imagine that they’re fighting a grand moral battle simply by defending politicians against their detractors on Twitter. A fight against bigotry that ignores policy, talks mainly about famous people, and resides primarily online is more like a Punch-and-Judy show than a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but don’t say so, or you will be called a Nazi. Or maybe a Russian agent.

2. An often unacknowledged but very serious impediment to talking politics in the U.S. is the forty-year assault on the American people’s time and energy, accomplished by reducing their spending power. If you are struggling every day to make your electric bill, you’ll have a lot less time to contemplate politics or anything else. Idle hands are the revolutionary’s playground. We wouldn’t want the people to actually reflect on the politics they’re living in. If they did, we might end up living in a republic.

3. The third factor that makes it difficult to talk politics in America is the forty-year assault on reason that began with the rise of neo-conservatism in the 80s. This assault was made on several different fronts:

a) Defunding education and then giving corporations influence over curricula (and school
food--and yes, that matters)

b) Gaslighting academics (this was done in many ways; “political correctness” was a
favorite)

c) Directly discrediting the notion of reason itself. This was primarily accomplished by
having prominent right-wing politicians and media figures ignore the rules of debate that
everyone else took for granted. Left-wingers and independents would use logic and
evidence to disprove neoconservative arguments, and the neocon in question would simply
act as if the debate wasn’t over and that, moreover, they were winning it. (This once
spurred Sen Moynihan to famously exclaim “You can have your own opinions, but you can’t
have your own facts.”)

Through these and other means, the eighties popularized the notion that using reason to decide what was true made you a stodgy boring loser at best or an ungodly atheist at worst. Either you were Alan Colmes or the Devil. Which it was depended on which kind of right-winger you were talking to. Unfortunately, over the decades, reason has gotten more discredited, not less. Irrational and fallacious argument has become more widespread. It’s worse now than it was in 2007 when Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason got published and described a lot of this. It’s getting to the point that ordinary people are losing the ability to make reasoned arguments, or even to imagine that they ought to.

As an anonymous White House staffer said during the Bush administration, “We’re an empire now, and we create our own reality.” Well, apparently we’ve now spread that attitude to the general public.

"EarthGov has promised a job to anyone who wants one. So, if someone doesn't have a job, they must not want one."
...
"And when exactly did all this happen?"

"When we rewrote the dictionary."

Even worse, the New Age fascism celebrated in those comments ("we're an empire, so we get to create our own reality!") no longer resides solely within the confines of the Republican party. Democrats, even progressive ones, are just as willing to replace rational discourse with authoritarian gibber as Republicans are--they just do it for different reasons. Better reasons, I suppose, at least if you're talking about ordinary Democrats rather than professional ones. But there is no reason good enough to abandon reason. In fact, neoconservative cultural norms seem to have infected both parties. That is the dismal legacy of the Trump era. That, and a lot of people unnecessarily dead of COVID-19.

These days, it’s hard to tell definitively what is true about the American public, which most of us encounter primarily through digital means or corporate broadcast media, but it certainly seems as if the reality-based contingent among us is in danger of becoming a minority. At the very least, we’re in danger of being drowned out by the noise pollution of irrational argument.

What does this noise pollution consist of?

4. Character assassination and “gotcha” moments, which have become a secondary currency of our culture. Politics is like a Hogwarts competition in which you garner points for your House by making the most successful character assassinations and coining the most circulated “gotchas.” Digital technology which I, at least, welcomed for its wonderful promise of revolutionizing communication—which, in fact, I believed would contribute to a broader and more expansive democracy—has played a terrible role in encouraging this behavior. Whatever I love about the Internet, I have to concede that it’s a very good tool for heaping opprobrium on a chosen target. Social media, in particular, seems to provide a fruitful growth medium for character assassination and flamewars.

5. Finally, it is difficult for me, personally, to talk about politics because I don’t assume that most of American politics is free-range, nor that most political groups are organic communities. I assume that a great deal of perception and opinion management is taking place in American politics. I don’t go quite so far as the old pro wrestling adage “If you see it, it’s a work (faked);” there are still authentic voices out there, by which I mean people who are saying something because they believe it, rather than because someone bullied or bribed them into saying it. It wasn’t that long ago that there were even a few federal politicians working off script (they’re mostly gone now, or parroting the same talking points as everyone else). However, the official “news” seems to be primarily a scripted affair, or, to cite pro wrestling again, a matter of talking points given to the performer, who is then allowed to improvise on a theme. Interestingly, a recent court decision openly acknowledges this:

an Obama-appointed federal judge, Cynthia Bashant, dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that even Maddow's own audience understands that her show consists of exaggeration, hyperbole, and pure opinion, and therefore would not assume that such outlandish accusations are factually true even when she uses the language of certainty and truth when presenting them (“literally is paid Russian propaganda").

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddows-viewers

Trying to talk to people who don't see that political discourse is largely engineered is like stepping out my front door, seeing troop movements on my street, trying to talk about it to one of my neighbors, and getting the response: "What are you talking about? Those are just some people out for a walk!"

It makes it difficult to have a conversation. ("But those guys are marching in lockstep! And they're wearing riot gear!")

The non-official news, mainly located in You Tube and Rokfin shows and podcasts? Well, that’s where the fight, such as it is, is occurring. It’s one of the few places remaining that isn’t entirely, or nearly entirely, scripted. The rationalists on these platforms are doughty, but the fight is not going particularly well, partly because the platforms themselves can be weaponized against users anytime the corporate board of Google or Twitter wants to—and partly because of the age-old problem of infiltration. Ringers.

I’m almost at 1500 words, so I will leave my discussion of infiltration for my next essay. It’s a doozy of a topic, anyway, which will probably take another 1500 words all by itself. Short version: infiltration works really well. Ringers tie movements and organizations into knots. That’s why bastards keep using them. But we might be able to identify certain patterns that would allow us to fall for their bullshit less often.