I read this with interest as an Aussie because we have many of the characteristics described as causing the US political polarisation , yet have not had anywhere near the same extent. Australia has huge racial diversity (30% born overseas vs US 14%), we have no end of space and low density of people, we are rich, are mostly knowledge workers. Also have very strong geographic variation in voting, eg country vs city, liberal parts (Melbourne and Canberra), conservative parts (Queensland). So I don’t think Noah’s arguments quite stack up - is there something else unique about the US that has driven the politics?
Could the difference be that Australia has compulsory voting and preferential voting?
Same for Canada, and its even more akin to the US, yet doesn't suffer anywhere near the level of tribalism.
Both Australia and Canada are higher-trust societies, and so the anti-institutionalists have a harder go of it.
In Canada's case, it has always had to accommodate two solitudes (English and French), and although it too has experienced geographic sorting along language lines, there hasn't been nearly so much regional sorting along lines of political economy. Hence the 3 main Canadian parties largely peddle remarkably similar policies.
Also, the US somewhat got unlucky, because it's electoral college helped Trump win a reverse plurality election, which turned up the extremists on both sides to 11, and accelerated the process to a much faster pitch than in Australia or Canada.
Canada, though it is in much less dense on average, has a significantly higher urban share of population than the US, which probably lends itself to a liberal tilt. Metro Toronto + Metro Montreal + Metro Vancouver adds up to a huge population share. (I don’t know if the same is true of Australia.)
The urban pop shares of the US and Canada are actually quite close (i.e. 81 vs. 85), but 'urban' in both cases includes what many might consider small towns. Canada does have a higher share of pop living in metros (settlements>1M). Approx 17M/43M live in its 6 metros.
Thanks for the fact check. I made that claim without looking up exact stats. I think the census definition of “urban” is quite broad, whereas I had more in mind people who live in the center or suburbs of a big metropolitan city. In the US, small town folks tend to vote Republican.
I would add that the other big difference is the presidential system. Our overgrown imperial presidency makes every presidential election existential in a way no election should ever be. That was a problem even before Trump-- no parliamentary system would ever have had the mess that was our 2000 election, for example.
Key differences as I understand them, please correct me if wrong:
-- the prime minister isn't separately elected-- there is no "ticket splitting" and no difference between legislative and presidential elections;
-- the prime minister can be deposed at any time by a simple majority of the legislature, which is a much lower bar than impeaching and removing a US president;
-- the provinces have more power relative to the central government than US states do relative to the feds, which lowers the total policymaking stakes of a change in prime minister.
That’s a really insightful point. I’ve wondered the same. Why countries like Australia, with arguably more racial diversity and similar urban rural divides, haven’t hit the same level of polarization. I think you’re right that compulsory and preferential voting help a lot. They seem to blunt the extremes and make people feel more represented. But I also think U.S. polarization is partly cultural. We have this deep rooted individualism, fragmented media, and more distrust in institutions. Our history with race and inequality probably adds fuel too. Social media didn’t help, but it’s like we were primed for combustion.
There is pretty strong reason to believe that the US two party doom loop has been a distinguishing factor. Splinter movements don't have the third party vehicle to let off steam, so their anger and craziness undermines the big parties instead. Compulsory voting I don't think is so big a factor-- if we had it we would just have a larger percentage of low information, low engagement voters, and those voters have recently been more, not less, inclined toward "burn it all down" extremism.
I think you have nailed it. In Australia we have One Nation who absorb the right wing crazies and the Greens take in all the lefty nutters, both getting a 5-10% of votes and leaving the two main parties to focus on the centre. From time to time extremists in the main parties defect to the smaller ones to great fanfare but are soon forgotten.
This comment and the one on the level of presidential power (as opposed to a Prime Minister) strike me as significant on "why worse in the US"? Sorting occurred in other places, polarization exists, fear of the "other" (migrants), etc. But what accelerates this in the US - perhaps as noted here, there is simply no escape valve.
Imagine a sports league with only 2 teams - the viciousness gets bad even with existing sports leagues all over the world, but at least there are multiple teams to root for.
Do you Aussies look at the turmoil of the discourse online and think of it as centrally America's problem? Americans are so self-centered (as a country) that we see every problem in the world in an America-centric way, and I imagine other countries aren't like that.
There is a lazy/simplistic tendency in the US to assert that ‘this is the greatest nation on Earth’ and to use this an excuse to ignore obvious domestic failings.
Healthcare is an obvious example. Every other developed country gets better results for a smaller share of national resources. But the US population is remarkably disinterested. Anything that looks like coordination from the state is denounced as ‘socialism’ and political candidates run in fear. The international evidence does not register in the American consciousness.
Australia is almost the opposite. Objectively, most things in Australia are wonderful, but the population is generally convinced that we’re failing in all sorts of ways.
But don't AU and CA have far less actual true religious conservatives like exist in the US? Because honestly, the Evangelicals and other conservative Christians versus the nons was kind of the start to all of this and it goes back decades. Also, we DID have a civil war here once that was kind of a big deal. ;) One which the losing side barely seemed to have fully gotten over as recently as the 2000s.
Nowadays the things to fight over and increasingly individualistic little subcultures and discrepancies in values have of course proliferated, but at base it started with, and still is to a certain extent, the religious conservatives versus the heathen and hippy northerners. I get the impression that there has never been a strongly and deeply religious contingent in either Canada or AU, am I wrong?
This is another excellent point. Australia is far less religious than the US and there is very little evangelical influence. We have had multiple agnostic/atheist prime ministers. There are of course a few deeply religious politicians but it tends not be front and centre.
I was in the US last year in Oct/Nov and confidently predicted Kamala would win. Everywhere I went was incredibly prosperous, safe and seemingly full of confidence. I saw no sign of the crime or immigrant epidemic Trump was always going on about. I thought Americans would recall the chaos of Trump 1 and say no thanks.
Trump 1 had relatively little chaos if you wanted to avoid it, because the formerly mainstream Republicans in the administration were working hard to keep our would-be Mad King from doing anything too stupid. This time around, he has his own group of loyalists, lackeys, and yes-men to fill the positions that he used to need the pre-2016 Republican Party for, so he's free to fuck things up as much as he wants...
Noah dates this to the 2010s but I remember thinking society was fracturing earlier than that. During the 1990s, Republicans turned scorched-earth under Gingrich. By the 2000s, key political taboos began hardening. For example, it was then that it became impossible for a national Republican politician to admit man-made climate change was real (“I’m not a scientist.”)
I think that one significant driver of education polarization may have been Republicans becoming the anti-science party; they'd always had to suck up to the anti-evolution religious people, but then they also became the party of climate change denial...
I think the point about Australia is that the population overwhelmingly wants to live in the major cities around the edge - there is little incentive to move elsewhere. So though it is large in total it is not a continent that has been conducive to dispersed settlement. In this sense it is the opposite of the USA. So I think Noah's argument does stack up.
Yes, preferential voting especially, but also compulsory voting, means that political candidates need to appeal to a wide audience. So you don’t get as many kooky/dangerous elected politicians.
It seems that in the USA, the worst kind of political candidates can exploit culture wars and misinformation and get elected fairly easily. And they stoke further division to keep themselves relevant and interesting to a minority base, rather than trying to fulfil their oaths of office.
Of course, this is a separate issue to why the USA is so susceptible to culture wars in the first place. Australia (thank goodness) has traces of the same thing, but most people seem to find US-style culture wars too silly to take seriously.
Primary elections are also kind of a big deal - they're how Trump pulled off his hostile takeover of the Republican party.
As to why the US has culture wars that other countries don't, I mostly blame religion. For example, the arguments against homosexuality came down to "I don't like it because eww gross", "it has bad consequences", and "God says no." The bad consequences arguments have basically been shown to been false in practice (children raised by same-sex couples do fine, etc.). Now, to be fair, "I don't like it because eww gross" isn't always a bad argument - consider bestiality - but it's not convincing to someone who doesn't already feel that way. That leaves the religious argument, and it's really, really hard to change someone's mind about their religion (unless you're the Pope or something and the religion itself gives you the authority to do it). And the US is also unusually religious for a rich country - European Christians that take their religion very seriously are much rarer than American Christians that do.
There are other factors, but they've cooled down a lot. There are still racial divisions in the US, but the segregationists lost badly in the 1960s and it's taboo to admit that you're motivated by white supremacy. Gender and feminism still make something of a fault line, but in this case, I don't think there's anything uniquely American about it other than religion's influence.
I think severe political polarization was explicitly the project of Newt Gingrich and it was the 1994 midterms (and Gingrich's approach to them) that mark the beginning of the politics we are enjoying today
No doubt his decision to demonize his political opposition was the seed that laid a lot of our current division. I do think social media and the changing ways Americans consume media was the water that allowed it to bloom. Would we be this divided if there were still just three news networks required to air “unbiased” news?
Reagan abolished the "Fairness Doctrine" that required broadcast radio and TV to dedicate time to fairly presenting both sides of "matters of public controversy". This made it legal to air right-wing talk radio in the style of Rush Limbaugh without having to give the political opposition airtime for rebuttals, so I think the seeds of polarization came even before Gingrich.
I would note there is one chart in this post that doesn’t line up with Noah’s thesis - the Gallup poll on Satisfaction which falls off in the early 2000s. That is long after peak Gingrich. I think it reflects 9/11 and the spasm of jingoism that it spurred on which the Bush administration built a reality distortion field that served as a template for polarized discourse.
I can't help but feel American's national mythmaking has left them uniquely vulnerable to setbacks. It's like Patriots fans, back when they had Brady and Belichick, where anything other than winning the Superbowl every single year was considered a catastrophic failure requiring months of off-season soul searching.
Random other country hits roadblocks: eh, shit happens in life, eh?
Things don't turn up roses for America literally every single time: OMG the system is fucked burn it down!
Totally agree with this. I think the U.S. has this deeply embedded idea that it's supposed to be exceptional at all times, and that makes any failure feel existential. There’s no cultural muscle for shrugging and saying yeah that sucked but we move on. Every stumble turns into a crisis of identity. It’s like we’ve forgotten that ups and downs are normal, not proof that the whole thing is broken.
I earnestly believe we will look back on social media as immoral, akin to gambling, smoking or drinking. It's a new kind of information hazard, and our stories and ethic (our social immune systems) have not updated yet. The faster the better...
I think you're on the right track here, but two objections.
First, your claim that America is unique is not convincing. It's true that the hard authoritarian turn that has occurred here has not quite turned anywhere in the European Union, except maybe Hungary. But that's an accident of personalities and procedures. The movements and the pressures are very similar, and populist demagogues have come very close. Of course, that social media is the cause.
Second, The idea that there's no exit is a little odd, since social media actually makes it particularly easy to exit. Any conversation you don't like. Just unfollow the guy who makes you mad. Unfriend the guy on Facebook who posts political anger all the time. And you could just stop using Facebook and Twitter. Some people do.
Years ago, I published a paper called "From Printing Press to Nation-State, from Internet to Neo-Medieval Globalism." It used a theory of the economics of text to undergird Benedict Anderson's explanation of the rise of nationalism as a result of the printing press. Then it applied the same analysis of the economics of text to make a few predictions about how the rise of the internet, as a new text technology as revolutionary as the printing press, would transform the conversation of mankind and people's feelings of community and identity in as dramatic a way.
I think we're seeing that now. At bottom, the nation-states as a political institution is just not at home in the age of the internet. The way print media was produced and circulated fostered national communities that in due course came first to aspire to, and then to achieve, political unity and Independence. Now communities are being reshaped. They are turning many of our fellow nationals into a kind of foreigners, but that's the flip side of people finding, largely through social media, richer, more intensive, more authentic and sincere forms of community. People are able to be themselves with others more than they could before, and that makes the legacy institutions of national solidarity more frustrating and oppressive.
The solutions to this are very old: faith, family, and virtue. But also, a big part of the solution is simply not to look backwards to the nationalistic past. The desire for national unity is widespread but divisive, because everyone wants national unity on their own terms, and that involves forcing other people into their own mold. We need to learn to live and let live, and let the new forms of community and identity work themselves out. We should expect national identity to keep weakening as a component of people's overall identity.
A smaller government would probably help with that.
Some people also just quit smoking, but for many nicotine was basically impossible to kick until society taxed it into oblivion, made it illegal everywhere to smoke, and shamed the shit out of anyone who still did as horrible smelly losers. Seemingly social media is even more addictive than nicotine. Everyone has been talking about how bad it is for a dozen years now, and it's just worse every year. I don't see it stopping unless/until similar countermeasures are implemented, like a tax on rate bait. In fact now it's it's even worse bc so much of the rage bait isn't even real, it's AI generated.
I'd add that it's not nearly harsh enough on tech companies or their impact on journalism. Companies that were founded to connect people started optimizing for engagement, and found that nothing engaged people like outrage. This gave the smallest most outrageous voices a big audience and allowed the fringes to grow - all the incentives were to be outrageous. It also organized journalism around what outrageous headlines will draw clicks (remember BuzzFeed?). It seems like the entire 2010s was designed to make us angry, stressed and upset.
I don't think these were knowingly evil decisions but they were careless ones made by people who thought in the very short term and only cared about lining their pockets. Everyone has sort of realized this, I wonder if in the next 5-10 years we might reach to "I work at facebook" in the same way we do to finding out someone works at a cigarette company.
There were some interesting experiments against this that failed - remember Upworthy? Their goal was to create viral heartwarming news stories. But all that we have left is the “you’ll never believe what happened next” style of headline.
I feel this is like complaining that TV news runs constant crime stories. Most in the business aren't particularly happy about it, but people pay more attention to negative things than positive, and going too strongly against that tendency will get you outcompeted.
I think the difference is network effects. It's very easy to flip from one network to another, harder to go from one social network to another where you don't have a network.
Facebook got people in promising to connect them then turned them against each other.
We can also look at tiktok that was able to break in by being a fun place to share dances rather than an outrage machine.
I guess I blame the nature of people, not the companies. I doubt social media will change much in the future unless there's some big regulatory shift.
Any improvement will come as we develop the norms/stereotypes that lead to people thinking less of you if you are 'too online'. Similar to how we sort of denigrate/make fun of old people conspiracy theory email chains or tv-fried alien-pyramid brains or punk rock anarchists. Already kind of happening.
I wouldn't say it's the paywalls. The same kind of things existed on individual blogs hosted on other platforms before Substack. (The paywalls just make it easier to make a living by being an interesting writer.)
While the algorithm forces appear to have helped to radicalize my previously balanced relatives, it was their constant exposure (to the tune of 10 hours a day) to FOX News that really sealed the deal. I can tell that additional relatives are now dipping into FOX when they mention an obscure story which suddenly is filling their world. FOX is especially appealing to the elderly folks who may be declining intellectually due to aging. These last folks are drawn to the repeated stories and messages devoid of nuance, and FOX is their background noise.
I will never for the life of me understand the people who have to have yammering news voices on as constant background noise. Music, yes. A crackling fireplace or cozy cafe scene, yes. Nature programs, yes. But news? Why would anyone want to subject themselves to that 24/7? I know my grandma in the pre-Fox era would watch soap operas and the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and stuff like that (she would have LOVED David Attenborough). What ever happened to old people watching soap operas, I wonder? What IS it about news that is so alluring?
My mental health takes an upswing when I think of no news as good news. And I’m edging into the “old” category pretty soon!
And then when they “do their own research” they get drawn into the web of right wing YouTube. Sometimes even pulling them away from Fox as too mainstream (I’ve even heard “too liberal”!)
What is unique to the United States is the structure of our government. Almost nowhere else do countries have a Presidential system. No one else has an electoral college and I can’t think of anywhere else with State legislatures having such outsized ability to gerrymander districts. The senate is a ridiculous structure that gives outsized power to rural states. Some of these issues may not have been as problematic when there was less geographic sorting, but now we are pushing the envelope on the limits of what the out of power will accept. The red blue divide is almost even, but the last election has given Republicans the power to govern without regard for the wishes almost 50% of the population. Anywhere else we would have more parties and would probably be governed by a more centrist coalition.
Lots of countries have elections where the majority is determined by seats (winning districts) rather than by overall majority vote. Labour in the UK won nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament despite winning only 33 percent of the vote.
The EU has 27 countries- each one has a veto.
Federal republics aren’t easy to form and regional compromises are a necessary part of the process.
Even nations like Canada, Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK have devolved powers to regions.
Is the us that much worse on these points? When I look at uk politics over the same timeframe it doesn’t really seem placid. Yes only we got Trump but that seems as much of an effect of the weak parties strong partisans effect.
Also It seems geographically sorted populations and social media are even worse than living with a lot of people you don’t like. Like teaching has exposed me to a lot of kind Christians who’ve made me much less of a strident new atheist type.
I know so few Trump voters that I’m never really asked to develop a modus vivendi with them.
And since it is relevant here, I am going to exactly quote a comment I made today on Slow Boring:
"It seem that it is almost conventional wisdom that social medium and online gambling algorithms are bad in promoting excess engagement. Yet I've heard almost no suggestion that we just tax it. I don't mean it's obvious exactly how to do this, but THAT is not the problem. Look at how hard it is to get phones out of schools. Teachers have known from day one that they add nothing but distraction."
How about outlawing ad revenues and selling of personal info? Subscription fees only. And sure, apply sales taxes to it (in addition to the existing corporate taxes on the revenues).
It is a bit worse. Social media also create the impression that we disagree more than we actually do.
Also (but which is chicken and which is egg?) the nationalization of politics. A Texas Democratic politician tends to be perceived to be more like a NY Democrat and a NY Republican is perceived to be like a Texas Republican.
Yep. Explains why I get random texts asking me to donate to some political candidate I’ve never heard of involved in a race 1,000 miles from where I live.
Haha, yes, you donate to ONE candidate and then you get those “urgent” emails from across the country! For Pete’s sake. I think campaign outreach needs an overhaul, even if it is easier to donate to a candidate not in your area now (which someone might want to do). And those “this is an emergency” “last chance” etc. apocalyptic phrases have to goooooooo.
The problem is not the phrases, it's the inflation in using them. Otherwise you can't tell the difference between Bush and Trump, or FDR and Huey Long...
While I agree wholeheartedly, the commentariat here is turning a blind eye to the overreach from left of center institutions, and yes, dare I say the “woke” social hysteria.
Whether it was a counterattack or not, this added fuel to the fire and academia, journalism, and medicine have done plenty to undermine their own credibility.
O sancta simplicitas! The idea that there is one “original sin” that poisons us is itself poisonous—and so much easier than having to do the work of mucking through the complexities of history.
At some point, hopefully one starts realizing that, just like how haters gonna hate, extremists gonna extreme and cranks gonna crank. Usually you can ignore these people and just let them embarrass themselves, but when, like Alex Jones or Curtis Yarvin, they start attracting a following that takes them seriously, you might have a problem.
I have much to say on this subject due to living through the 60s and 70s. I do not disagree that the smartphone has affected society. I believe social media has been a cancer.
Our political divisions that started in the 60s have become worse. These days, each side sees the other side as the enemy. Each side denigrates our institutions when it becomes politically expedient. Each side foments anger to drive up small-dollar donations and voting.
Democrats excoriate the Supreme Court for a decision they do not like, and the GOP does the same. Trump has spent almost ten years telling Americans the government acts criminally, that there is a deep state of woke Federal workers who implement woke policies. Foreigners and Foreign Aid are bad. Democrats have been telling Americans that we are a racist nation, that you cannot get a fair shake in this economy, and both sides use hyperbolic language to campaign on.
Our culture has become toxic through our own making. We are coarse and crass. We no longer exhibit shame for anything we do. Cheat on your wife, have an affair, it's ok. Commit a white collar crime, no big deal. Display a lack of ethics or morals, no problem. Our President is actively asking for bribes through his Bitcoin scam. Need a pardon, drop a mil in my donation box.
Flaunt the law? Joe Biden and Obama did it. Compromise is now a dirty word, so Congress no longer attempts to do big things; compromise means selling out. We can’t build anything, and when we do, it takes forever. Cities with homelessness and public drug use are ungovernable. No one likes it, yet Democrats cannot seem to figure it out even when they have total power.
We no longer share a vision for the country. Noah, let me ask you this. Do you think you could write a mission statement for our country that the current Democratic and Republican members of the House could agree on?
I know I couldn’t unless it was some bland, obscure thing like: To make for a prosperous, secure nation. Even then, I’m not sure they would agree.
So yeah, the smartphone and now everyone is a video journalist along with TikTok has scrwed up the nation....But our problems have other causes that have nothing to do with a smartphone.
I see political polarization taking off over a much longer timeframe. The rise of talk radio and the 24 hour cable news cycle really started the process in the 90s. My father still has a “Proud Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” mug in his cabinet (hard to believe how long ago Hillary was making enemies on the right…).
I also think that the loss of shared in person spaces has been a real loss. It is much harder to hate someone over a political difference if you’ve gotten to know them and like them before the difference is known. Shifting so many things online has been great in many ways, but it also allows a dehumanization of the political other.
I have friends I refuse to listen to online because they are jerks about politics there (even when I agree with them…), but will still hang out with them in person because they behave very differently.
I read this with interest as an Aussie because we have many of the characteristics described as causing the US political polarisation , yet have not had anywhere near the same extent. Australia has huge racial diversity (30% born overseas vs US 14%), we have no end of space and low density of people, we are rich, are mostly knowledge workers. Also have very strong geographic variation in voting, eg country vs city, liberal parts (Melbourne and Canberra), conservative parts (Queensland). So I don’t think Noah’s arguments quite stack up - is there something else unique about the US that has driven the politics?
Could the difference be that Australia has compulsory voting and preferential voting?
Same for Canada, and its even more akin to the US, yet doesn't suffer anywhere near the level of tribalism.
Both Australia and Canada are higher-trust societies, and so the anti-institutionalists have a harder go of it.
In Canada's case, it has always had to accommodate two solitudes (English and French), and although it too has experienced geographic sorting along language lines, there hasn't been nearly so much regional sorting along lines of political economy. Hence the 3 main Canadian parties largely peddle remarkably similar policies.
Also, the US somewhat got unlucky, because it's electoral college helped Trump win a reverse plurality election, which turned up the extremists on both sides to 11, and accelerated the process to a much faster pitch than in Australia or Canada.
Canada, though it is in much less dense on average, has a significantly higher urban share of population than the US, which probably lends itself to a liberal tilt. Metro Toronto + Metro Montreal + Metro Vancouver adds up to a huge population share. (I don’t know if the same is true of Australia.)
The urban pop shares of the US and Canada are actually quite close (i.e. 81 vs. 85), but 'urban' in both cases includes what many might consider small towns. Canada does have a higher share of pop living in metros (settlements>1M). Approx 17M/43M live in its 6 metros.
Thanks for the fact check. I made that claim without looking up exact stats. I think the census definition of “urban” is quite broad, whereas I had more in mind people who live in the center or suburbs of a big metropolitan city. In the US, small town folks tend to vote Republican.
I would add that the other big difference is the presidential system. Our overgrown imperial presidency makes every presidential election existential in a way no election should ever be. That was a problem even before Trump-- no parliamentary system would ever have had the mess that was our 2000 election, for example.
Canada has an imperial prime minister though, so that isn't really a differentiating factor.
Key differences as I understand them, please correct me if wrong:
-- the prime minister isn't separately elected-- there is no "ticket splitting" and no difference between legislative and presidential elections;
-- the prime minister can be deposed at any time by a simple majority of the legislature, which is a much lower bar than impeaching and removing a US president;
-- the provinces have more power relative to the central government than US states do relative to the feds, which lowers the total policymaking stakes of a change in prime minister.
That’s a really insightful point. I’ve wondered the same. Why countries like Australia, with arguably more racial diversity and similar urban rural divides, haven’t hit the same level of polarization. I think you’re right that compulsory and preferential voting help a lot. They seem to blunt the extremes and make people feel more represented. But I also think U.S. polarization is partly cultural. We have this deep rooted individualism, fragmented media, and more distrust in institutions. Our history with race and inequality probably adds fuel too. Social media didn’t help, but it’s like we were primed for combustion.
There is pretty strong reason to believe that the US two party doom loop has been a distinguishing factor. Splinter movements don't have the third party vehicle to let off steam, so their anger and craziness undermines the big parties instead. Compulsory voting I don't think is so big a factor-- if we had it we would just have a larger percentage of low information, low engagement voters, and those voters have recently been more, not less, inclined toward "burn it all down" extremism.
I think you have nailed it. In Australia we have One Nation who absorb the right wing crazies and the Greens take in all the lefty nutters, both getting a 5-10% of votes and leaving the two main parties to focus on the centre. From time to time extremists in the main parties defect to the smaller ones to great fanfare but are soon forgotten.
This comment and the one on the level of presidential power (as opposed to a Prime Minister) strike me as significant on "why worse in the US"? Sorting occurred in other places, polarization exists, fear of the "other" (migrants), etc. But what accelerates this in the US - perhaps as noted here, there is simply no escape valve.
Imagine a sports league with only 2 teams - the viciousness gets bad even with existing sports leagues all over the world, but at least there are multiple teams to root for.
Do you Aussies look at the turmoil of the discourse online and think of it as centrally America's problem? Americans are so self-centered (as a country) that we see every problem in the world in an America-centric way, and I imagine other countries aren't like that.
There is a lazy/simplistic tendency in the US to assert that ‘this is the greatest nation on Earth’ and to use this an excuse to ignore obvious domestic failings.
Healthcare is an obvious example. Every other developed country gets better results for a smaller share of national resources. But the US population is remarkably disinterested. Anything that looks like coordination from the state is denounced as ‘socialism’ and political candidates run in fear. The international evidence does not register in the American consciousness.
Australia is almost the opposite. Objectively, most things in Australia are wonderful, but the population is generally convinced that we’re failing in all sorts of ways.
But don't AU and CA have far less actual true religious conservatives like exist in the US? Because honestly, the Evangelicals and other conservative Christians versus the nons was kind of the start to all of this and it goes back decades. Also, we DID have a civil war here once that was kind of a big deal. ;) One which the losing side barely seemed to have fully gotten over as recently as the 2000s.
Nowadays the things to fight over and increasingly individualistic little subcultures and discrepancies in values have of course proliferated, but at base it started with, and still is to a certain extent, the religious conservatives versus the heathen and hippy northerners. I get the impression that there has never been a strongly and deeply religious contingent in either Canada or AU, am I wrong?
This is another excellent point. Australia is far less religious than the US and there is very little evangelical influence. We have had multiple agnostic/atheist prime ministers. There are of course a few deeply religious politicians but it tends not be front and centre.
I was in the US last year in Oct/Nov and confidently predicted Kamala would win. Everywhere I went was incredibly prosperous, safe and seemingly full of confidence. I saw no sign of the crime or immigrant epidemic Trump was always going on about. I thought Americans would recall the chaos of Trump 1 and say no thanks.
Trump 1 had relatively little chaos if you wanted to avoid it, because the formerly mainstream Republicans in the administration were working hard to keep our would-be Mad King from doing anything too stupid. This time around, he has his own group of loyalists, lackeys, and yes-men to fill the positions that he used to need the pre-2016 Republican Party for, so he's free to fuck things up as much as he wants...
Noah dates this to the 2010s but I remember thinking society was fracturing earlier than that. During the 1990s, Republicans turned scorched-earth under Gingrich. By the 2000s, key political taboos began hardening. For example, it was then that it became impossible for a national Republican politician to admit man-made climate change was real (“I’m not a scientist.”)
I think that one significant driver of education polarization may have been Republicans becoming the anti-science party; they'd always had to suck up to the anti-evolution religious people, but then they also became the party of climate change denial...
I think the point about Australia is that the population overwhelmingly wants to live in the major cities around the edge - there is little incentive to move elsewhere. So though it is large in total it is not a continent that has been conducive to dispersed settlement. In this sense it is the opposite of the USA. So I think Noah's argument does stack up.
Yes, preferential voting especially, but also compulsory voting, means that political candidates need to appeal to a wide audience. So you don’t get as many kooky/dangerous elected politicians.
It seems that in the USA, the worst kind of political candidates can exploit culture wars and misinformation and get elected fairly easily. And they stoke further division to keep themselves relevant and interesting to a minority base, rather than trying to fulfil their oaths of office.
Of course, this is a separate issue to why the USA is so susceptible to culture wars in the first place. Australia (thank goodness) has traces of the same thing, but most people seem to find US-style culture wars too silly to take seriously.
Primary elections are also kind of a big deal - they're how Trump pulled off his hostile takeover of the Republican party.
As to why the US has culture wars that other countries don't, I mostly blame religion. For example, the arguments against homosexuality came down to "I don't like it because eww gross", "it has bad consequences", and "God says no." The bad consequences arguments have basically been shown to been false in practice (children raised by same-sex couples do fine, etc.). Now, to be fair, "I don't like it because eww gross" isn't always a bad argument - consider bestiality - but it's not convincing to someone who doesn't already feel that way. That leaves the religious argument, and it's really, really hard to change someone's mind about their religion (unless you're the Pope or something and the religion itself gives you the authority to do it). And the US is also unusually religious for a rich country - European Christians that take their religion very seriously are much rarer than American Christians that do.
There are other factors, but they've cooled down a lot. There are still racial divisions in the US, but the segregationists lost badly in the 1960s and it's taboo to admit that you're motivated by white supremacy. Gender and feminism still make something of a fault line, but in this case, I don't think there's anything uniquely American about it other than religion's influence.
I think severe political polarization was explicitly the project of Newt Gingrich and it was the 1994 midterms (and Gingrich's approach to them) that mark the beginning of the politics we are enjoying today
No doubt his decision to demonize his political opposition was the seed that laid a lot of our current division. I do think social media and the changing ways Americans consume media was the water that allowed it to bloom. Would we be this divided if there were still just three news networks required to air “unbiased” news?
Reagan abolished the "Fairness Doctrine" that required broadcast radio and TV to dedicate time to fairly presenting both sides of "matters of public controversy". This made it legal to air right-wing talk radio in the style of Rush Limbaugh without having to give the political opposition airtime for rebuttals, so I think the seeds of polarization came even before Gingrich.
I would note there is one chart in this post that doesn’t line up with Noah’s thesis - the Gallup poll on Satisfaction which falls off in the early 2000s. That is long after peak Gingrich. I think it reflects 9/11 and the spasm of jingoism that it spurred on which the Bush administration built a reality distortion field that served as a template for polarized discourse.
I can't help but feel American's national mythmaking has left them uniquely vulnerable to setbacks. It's like Patriots fans, back when they had Brady and Belichick, where anything other than winning the Superbowl every single year was considered a catastrophic failure requiring months of off-season soul searching.
Random other country hits roadblocks: eh, shit happens in life, eh?
Things don't turn up roses for America literally every single time: OMG the system is fucked burn it down!
Totally agree with this. I think the U.S. has this deeply embedded idea that it's supposed to be exceptional at all times, and that makes any failure feel existential. There’s no cultural muscle for shrugging and saying yeah that sucked but we move on. Every stumble turns into a crisis of identity. It’s like we’ve forgotten that ups and downs are normal, not proof that the whole thing is broken.
I earnestly believe we will look back on social media as immoral, akin to gambling, smoking or drinking. It's a new kind of information hazard, and our stories and ethic (our social immune systems) have not updated yet. The faster the better...
We're gonna look at it as something fun, that people enjoy, but that should be done moderately if you don't want to suffer bad health/life effects.
I think you're on the right track here, but two objections.
First, your claim that America is unique is not convincing. It's true that the hard authoritarian turn that has occurred here has not quite turned anywhere in the European Union, except maybe Hungary. But that's an accident of personalities and procedures. The movements and the pressures are very similar, and populist demagogues have come very close. Of course, that social media is the cause.
Second, The idea that there's no exit is a little odd, since social media actually makes it particularly easy to exit. Any conversation you don't like. Just unfollow the guy who makes you mad. Unfriend the guy on Facebook who posts political anger all the time. And you could just stop using Facebook and Twitter. Some people do.
Years ago, I published a paper called "From Printing Press to Nation-State, from Internet to Neo-Medieval Globalism." It used a theory of the economics of text to undergird Benedict Anderson's explanation of the rise of nationalism as a result of the printing press. Then it applied the same analysis of the economics of text to make a few predictions about how the rise of the internet, as a new text technology as revolutionary as the printing press, would transform the conversation of mankind and people's feelings of community and identity in as dramatic a way.
I think we're seeing that now. At bottom, the nation-states as a political institution is just not at home in the age of the internet. The way print media was produced and circulated fostered national communities that in due course came first to aspire to, and then to achieve, political unity and Independence. Now communities are being reshaped. They are turning many of our fellow nationals into a kind of foreigners, but that's the flip side of people finding, largely through social media, richer, more intensive, more authentic and sincere forms of community. People are able to be themselves with others more than they could before, and that makes the legacy institutions of national solidarity more frustrating and oppressive.
The solutions to this are very old: faith, family, and virtue. But also, a big part of the solution is simply not to look backwards to the nationalistic past. The desire for national unity is widespread but divisive, because everyone wants national unity on their own terms, and that involves forcing other people into their own mold. We need to learn to live and let live, and let the new forms of community and identity work themselves out. We should expect national identity to keep weakening as a component of people's overall identity.
A smaller government would probably help with that.
Some people also just quit smoking, but for many nicotine was basically impossible to kick until society taxed it into oblivion, made it illegal everywhere to smoke, and shamed the shit out of anyone who still did as horrible smelly losers. Seemingly social media is even more addictive than nicotine. Everyone has been talking about how bad it is for a dozen years now, and it's just worse every year. I don't see it stopping unless/until similar countermeasures are implemented, like a tax on rate bait. In fact now it's it's even worse bc so much of the rage bait isn't even real, it's AI generated.
Excellent piece! Very much agreed on most points.
I'd add that it's not nearly harsh enough on tech companies or their impact on journalism. Companies that were founded to connect people started optimizing for engagement, and found that nothing engaged people like outrage. This gave the smallest most outrageous voices a big audience and allowed the fringes to grow - all the incentives were to be outrageous. It also organized journalism around what outrageous headlines will draw clicks (remember BuzzFeed?). It seems like the entire 2010s was designed to make us angry, stressed and upset.
I don't think these were knowingly evil decisions but they were careless ones made by people who thought in the very short term and only cared about lining their pockets. Everyone has sort of realized this, I wonder if in the next 5-10 years we might reach to "I work at facebook" in the same way we do to finding out someone works at a cigarette company.
There were some interesting experiments against this that failed - remember Upworthy? Their goal was to create viral heartwarming news stories. But all that we have left is the “you’ll never believe what happened next” style of headline.
I feel this is like complaining that TV news runs constant crime stories. Most in the business aren't particularly happy about it, but people pay more attention to negative things than positive, and going too strongly against that tendency will get you outcompeted.
I think the difference is network effects. It's very easy to flip from one network to another, harder to go from one social network to another where you don't have a network.
Facebook got people in promising to connect them then turned them against each other.
We can also look at tiktok that was able to break in by being a fun place to share dances rather than an outrage machine.
I guess I blame the nature of people, not the companies. I doubt social media will change much in the future unless there's some big regulatory shift.
Any improvement will come as we develop the norms/stereotypes that lead to people thinking less of you if you are 'too online'. Similar to how we sort of denigrate/make fun of old people conspiracy theory email chains or tv-fried alien-pyramid brains or punk rock anarchists. Already kind of happening.
I find substack to be a dramatic improvement. Good paywalls make good neighbors.
Good analysis and writing, too. You don't come to substack for the outrage but for the provocation to think.
I wouldn't say it's the paywalls. The same kind of things existed on individual blogs hosted on other platforms before Substack. (The paywalls just make it easier to make a living by being an interesting writer.)
While the algorithm forces appear to have helped to radicalize my previously balanced relatives, it was their constant exposure (to the tune of 10 hours a day) to FOX News that really sealed the deal. I can tell that additional relatives are now dipping into FOX when they mention an obscure story which suddenly is filling their world. FOX is especially appealing to the elderly folks who may be declining intellectually due to aging. These last folks are drawn to the repeated stories and messages devoid of nuance, and FOX is their background noise.
I will never for the life of me understand the people who have to have yammering news voices on as constant background noise. Music, yes. A crackling fireplace or cozy cafe scene, yes. Nature programs, yes. But news? Why would anyone want to subject themselves to that 24/7? I know my grandma in the pre-Fox era would watch soap operas and the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and stuff like that (she would have LOVED David Attenborough). What ever happened to old people watching soap operas, I wonder? What IS it about news that is so alluring?
My mental health takes an upswing when I think of no news as good news. And I’m edging into the “old” category pretty soon!
And then when they “do their own research” they get drawn into the web of right wing YouTube. Sometimes even pulling them away from Fox as too mainstream (I’ve even heard “too liberal”!)
What is unique to the United States is the structure of our government. Almost nowhere else do countries have a Presidential system. No one else has an electoral college and I can’t think of anywhere else with State legislatures having such outsized ability to gerrymander districts. The senate is a ridiculous structure that gives outsized power to rural states. Some of these issues may not have been as problematic when there was less geographic sorting, but now we are pushing the envelope on the limits of what the out of power will accept. The red blue divide is almost even, but the last election has given Republicans the power to govern without regard for the wishes almost 50% of the population. Anywhere else we would have more parties and would probably be governed by a more centrist coalition.
Lots of countries have elections where the majority is determined by seats (winning districts) rather than by overall majority vote. Labour in the UK won nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament despite winning only 33 percent of the vote.
The EU has 27 countries- each one has a veto.
Federal republics aren’t easy to form and regional compromises are a necessary part of the process.
Even nations like Canada, Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK have devolved powers to regions.
Is the us that much worse on these points? When I look at uk politics over the same timeframe it doesn’t really seem placid. Yes only we got Trump but that seems as much of an effect of the weak parties strong partisans effect.
Also It seems geographically sorted populations and social media are even worse than living with a lot of people you don’t like. Like teaching has exposed me to a lot of kind Christians who’ve made me much less of a strident new atheist type.
I know so few Trump voters that I’m never really asked to develop a modus vivendi with them.
And since it is relevant here, I am going to exactly quote a comment I made today on Slow Boring:
"It seem that it is almost conventional wisdom that social medium and online gambling algorithms are bad in promoting excess engagement. Yet I've heard almost no suggestion that we just tax it. I don't mean it's obvious exactly how to do this, but THAT is not the problem. Look at how hard it is to get phones out of schools. Teachers have known from day one that they add nothing but distraction."
How about outlawing ad revenues and selling of personal info? Subscription fees only. And sure, apply sales taxes to it (in addition to the existing corporate taxes on the revenues).
I certainly have no particular insight into exactly what policy is best, but some kind of a tax ought to make sense.
It is a bit worse. Social media also create the impression that we disagree more than we actually do.
Also (but which is chicken and which is egg?) the nationalization of politics. A Texas Democratic politician tends to be perceived to be more like a NY Democrat and a NY Republican is perceived to be like a Texas Republican.
Yep. Explains why I get random texts asking me to donate to some political candidate I’ve never heard of involved in a race 1,000 miles from where I live.
Haha, yes, you donate to ONE candidate and then you get those “urgent” emails from across the country! For Pete’s sake. I think campaign outreach needs an overhaul, even if it is easier to donate to a candidate not in your area now (which someone might want to do). And those “this is an emergency” “last chance” etc. apocalyptic phrases have to goooooooo.
The problem is not the phrases, it's the inflation in using them. Otherwise you can't tell the difference between Bush and Trump, or FDR and Huey Long...
To sharpen Casey's point - The late great Kevin Drum would point out it was all down to Fox News and its relentless lying and negativity.
You could add Obama? Electing a black person to the Presidency was a bridge too far for many...
Woke liberal media and elites have absolutely helped destroy trust in institutions just as much as Fox News.
While I agree wholeheartedly, the commentariat here is turning a blind eye to the overreach from left of center institutions, and yes, dare I say the “woke” social hysteria.
Whether it was a counterattack or not, this added fuel to the fire and academia, journalism, and medicine have done plenty to undermine their own credibility.
America's original sin is always lurking just beneath the surface of every crisis
O sancta simplicitas! The idea that there is one “original sin” that poisons us is itself poisonous—and so much easier than having to do the work of mucking through the complexities of history.
Alright Jan. Calm down. The flames aren't licking around your ankles, just yet. In fact you may actually not be a victim at all.
"Every conservative in a small town got to see Twitter activists denouncing White people. And so on."
FWIW I'm a liberal in Maryland, and I hated this too. Thank God the worst of it is over though.
At some point, hopefully one starts realizing that, just like how haters gonna hate, extremists gonna extreme and cranks gonna crank. Usually you can ignore these people and just let them embarrass themselves, but when, like Alex Jones or Curtis Yarvin, they start attracting a following that takes them seriously, you might have a problem.
See also https://xkcd.com/154/
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I have much to say on this subject due to living through the 60s and 70s. I do not disagree that the smartphone has affected society. I believe social media has been a cancer.
Our political divisions that started in the 60s have become worse. These days, each side sees the other side as the enemy. Each side denigrates our institutions when it becomes politically expedient. Each side foments anger to drive up small-dollar donations and voting.
Democrats excoriate the Supreme Court for a decision they do not like, and the GOP does the same. Trump has spent almost ten years telling Americans the government acts criminally, that there is a deep state of woke Federal workers who implement woke policies. Foreigners and Foreign Aid are bad. Democrats have been telling Americans that we are a racist nation, that you cannot get a fair shake in this economy, and both sides use hyperbolic language to campaign on.
Our culture has become toxic through our own making. We are coarse and crass. We no longer exhibit shame for anything we do. Cheat on your wife, have an affair, it's ok. Commit a white collar crime, no big deal. Display a lack of ethics or morals, no problem. Our President is actively asking for bribes through his Bitcoin scam. Need a pardon, drop a mil in my donation box.
Flaunt the law? Joe Biden and Obama did it. Compromise is now a dirty word, so Congress no longer attempts to do big things; compromise means selling out. We can’t build anything, and when we do, it takes forever. Cities with homelessness and public drug use are ungovernable. No one likes it, yet Democrats cannot seem to figure it out even when they have total power.
We no longer share a vision for the country. Noah, let me ask you this. Do you think you could write a mission statement for our country that the current Democratic and Republican members of the House could agree on?
I know I couldn’t unless it was some bland, obscure thing like: To make for a prosperous, secure nation. Even then, I’m not sure they would agree.
So yeah, the smartphone and now everyone is a video journalist along with TikTok has scrwed up the nation....But our problems have other causes that have nothing to do with a smartphone.
I see political polarization taking off over a much longer timeframe. The rise of talk radio and the 24 hour cable news cycle really started the process in the 90s. My father still has a “Proud Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” mug in his cabinet (hard to believe how long ago Hillary was making enemies on the right…).
I also think that the loss of shared in person spaces has been a real loss. It is much harder to hate someone over a political difference if you’ve gotten to know them and like them before the difference is known. Shifting so many things online has been great in many ways, but it also allows a dehumanization of the political other.
I have friends I refuse to listen to online because they are jerks about politics there (even when I agree with them…), but will still hang out with them in person because they behave very differently.