The bad news, though, is that this indicates how easy it is to whip those passions into a frenzy and how media sites benefit financially when that happens. More readers mean more views for ads on a site, which means more revenue for that site. It also means more individuals with distinct interests, which increases the number of advertisers who might want to purchase targeted ads to begin with. More eyeballs equal more money.
This simple calculus means it is in the monetary interest of all political media to dial up the temperature. Consumers of political news clearly respond to apocalyptic claims and sharp, abrasive personalities and conflict. The more people feel directly threatened or fearful, the more they want to read about what they fear and how to fight it. Feeding that fear is good for the political news world’s bottom line, regardless which side one caters to.
That type of intense frenzy, however, is extremely bad for democracy. Democracy failed in the ancient world because it couldn’t avoid an all-against-all battle between the many who were poor and the few who were rich. Even relatively stable republics such as Rome eventually fell due to this irrepressible conflict. People can’t live freely together when they see their neighbors as tyrants.
James Madison understood this, which is one reason he crafted the Constitution to discourage the formation of these passionate conflicts. The separation of powers and the division of Congress into two distinct houses were designed as brakes on the exercise of factional power. Seizing all those levers of government takes time and sustained effort, which passionate conflicts rarely provide. Madison believed the new nation’s size would also reduce the chances of politics leading to a lurid Götterdämmerung. What he called the “extended” commercial republic would lead to a multiplicity of interests being represented, which would make it harder to organize into two mutually antagonistic bodies. That alone would provide security for individual and political liberty.
We can see how Madison’s designs work even today. Senators such as Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) represent constituents with interests that are different from those of the bulk of their partisan colleagues. When they try to find common ground between the parties, they are acting as Madison intended. What progressives decry as the overrepresentation of small states in the Senate is a feature, not a bug, of Madison’s machine, as is the counter-democratic role of the Supreme Court. None of these features works perfectly in every instance, but each works against the ability of one faction to rule the country, irrespective of the wishes of large minorities. They also push toward reason rather than emotion as the basis for our laws.
Those barriers can only stand, however, as long as people treasure democracy more than satisfying their political whims. Democracy cannot survive once large numbers of people believe that only their side’s untrammeled rule is just. If the body politic divides into one side that believes the other side steals elections and another side that believes its opponents are unreconstructed racists bent on forcibly suppressing minorities, no parchment barrier can hold back the flood of hate that will drown our democracy.
Yet in times of intense acrimony, the media has every incentive to heighten these passions. It is reminiscent of an episode of the original “Star Trek” series involving an alien who fed off hatred. It trapped Klingons in the Enterprise and instigated both sides into open warfare. Captain Kirk and the Klingons finally expelled the beast when they realized that if they laughed rather than fought, the creature could not survive.
We can keep the republic only if we honor it and our neighbors above our own desires. Americans should remember this, ignore all provocations, and keep calm and carry on being free.
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July 06, 2021 at 08:10PM
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