As the memes have pointed out, when the left’s hero overdosed, cities burned in the most destructive riots in American history; when the right’s hero was assassinated, there were prayer vigils. George Floyd’s family cashed in to the tune of millions, while Erika Kirk publicly forgave her husband’s assassin.
They are not the same.
But that would be an embarrassing admission too far for a midwit leftist like Waleed Aly.
In Waleed Aly’s column last week, he argued that “the left and the right have become one”, and that because each is increasingly intolerant of the viewpoints of the other, both are becoming more prone to political violence.
This is blatantly untrue, on both points.
Firstly, as multiple studies have shown, self-described leftists are vastly more intolerant of other viewpoints, both on and offline. Leftists are 300 per cent more likely to unfriend and block people who disagree with them online and to end friendships and ‘ghost’ people offline.
The claim that ‘right-wing violence is more common’ is also a lie, peddled by deliberately manipulated statistics. For instance, the ADL cites ‘anti-government views’ as ‘right-wing extremism’. How more anti-government can you get than left-wingers literally trying to assassinate a US president? Not once, but multiple times? The lie is also conjured by using instances such as a jailed neo-Nazi getting into a prison brawl as ‘right-wing violence’.
The left really are that deceitful.
But there is one clear causal relationship in political polarisation: the disjunct between the online and offline.
It’s no longer about left and right, it’s about online and offline. The greatest division is now between those of us who have become radicalised online – wherever we might fall on the old political spectrum – and those of us who continue to cling to the old ways of doing politics, which still prize moderation, compromise and consensus-building.
That sounds suspiciously like rose-coloured glasses. Never forget that the left reacted to Nixon’s 1972 landslide with a wave of bombings – as many as two a day at their peak – and assassinations. The Birchers were a ladies’ debate club compared to the Weathermen.
Not to mention that, in the globalist era, ‘consensus’ too often seems like the elites ganging up on the rest of us.
On the other hand, as a writer I have multiple online profiles. On my purely fiction-oriented ones I actively avoid politics, even muting certain political terms and declining to follow people whose feeds are all politics. It’s a completely different world to my Lushington Brady profiles and a much more pleasant and positive one, even with people who I know are politically opposite to me.
So, yes, online political discourse is uniquely toxic.
For a growing cohort of people, including Kirk’s alleged killer and other perpetrators of political violence, existence online seemingly takes precedence over offline relationships, spaces, values systems and even economic systems.
Such people are increasingly understanding and interpreting the offline world through an online lens. At a time when the online world is transforming into a vile cesspit of the most extreme viewpoints possible, promoting everything from torture pornography to incel culture, anti-vax conspiracies and neo-Nazi or Islamist terrorism, it becomes a problem for everyone’s offline politics.
It’s interesting to note the author’s own biases, here: no mention of femcel culture, pro-vax ‘Covid Nazis’ or trans extremism, for instance.
These are Americans and yes, Australians too, whose experience of politics is increasingly shaped via endless doomscrolling on TikTok, and who find they can no longer concentrate on mundane offline tasks such as driving, laundry or doing the dishes if not narrated by a three-hour podcast. Theirs is an information environment in which engagement, and therefore, profit, is generated by ever-burgeoning extremism fostered by algorithms purpose-built to keep us in siloed echo chambers reinforcing our worst political instincts.
This part is absolutely true. Algorithms are confirmation-bias machines, which we, the users, have to make a conscious effort to work around.
It’s also up to us to do better with the online-offline balance. As it happens, youngsters may be leading the way.
Indeed, the resurgence of board games, landline phones, Walkmans and offline dating events among Gen Z point to the fact that not all young people are comfortable mediating their lives via online spaces. Surveys have consistently shown that many teens support the concept of a “digital curfew” or a social media ban, and one recent UK study found “almost half of young people would rather live in a world where the internet does not exist” […]
Reining in big tech won’t be easy, but it’s a small price to pay for protecting our moderate political discourse, and with it, securing the future of Australian democracy.
Just don’t rely on the government to do it. Hell, don’t let the government anywhere near it.
When it comes to just about anything, ‘more government’ is almost never the answer.
