> Social media has flooded our consciousness with caricatures of each other. Human beings are reduced to data, and data nearly always underrepresent reality. The result is this great flattening of human life and human complexity. We think that because we know someone is pro-choice or pro-life, or that they drive a truck or a Prius, we know everything we need to know about them. Human detail gets lost in the algorithm. Thus humanity gives way to ideology.

sigh

The problem with blaming social media is that Donald Trump is a walking, talking caricature of a human being. We've become so cynical about politics that a majority of the population deem caricatures of corrupt leaders--i.e. those who make outrageous promises and categorically false statements--somehow more honest and trustworthy than politicians who bother wrestling with our (collectively, individually) conflicting desires. The notion that we'd accept the sincerity or legitimacy of such people merely because of television or computers is ridiculous. Not even 5-year-old children hold such firm beliefs that they would so credulously accept a claim of an adult as having comic book super powers, despite being presented nothing else in their daily media diet. Lived experience is much more powerful than we give it credit for; to believe in someone like Trump and his ilk says far more about how we experience, frame, and explain our day-to-day lives and personal interactions, not how we see it reflected in the media. Not to mention the fact that, once upon the time, the political elite and "the system" would never have permitted the electorate such a fatal choice. Unsurprisingly, we never make such arguments when we try to explain the emergence and endurance of corrupt but popular leaders like Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin; leaders who walk, talk, and behave exactly like Trump.

Neither social media, nor media generally, is capable of creating such bitter partisanship and shocking suspension of critical thinking. It's a consequence of an unadulterated cynicism and cultural contempt that became mainstream with the intellectual left, then adopted and perfected by the right, long before mainstream media turned the corner. If we dig deeper such partisan colors begin to disappear, but we at least can trace it back that far.

As one example, a major tenet that emerged in the intellectual left, which slowly became mainstream on the popular left, was that poverty and oppression was predominately (if not entirely) structural and institutional. This was a reaction to the long-standing framing of poverty as a moral failure (i.e. what was once called the "culture of poverty" by conservative commentators and theorists); a framing with obvious pedigree in Victorian English culture and deep religious origins in Puritanism and Calvinism. The reaction was also, I believe, a response to the failure of civil rights reforms and other political and legal successes to quickly deliver on their promises.

Whence comes our overly credulous belief that social media is so powerful, an accelerator or even principal driver of our cultural dynamics. That's a purely, even radically structuralist argument. Of course, this belief is held not just by those on the left but also those on the right. Just as those on the left are now adopting theories of cultural poverty and other socio-cultural arguments. We now live amongst political ideologies that lack even the basic elegance and internal consistency of mid-century radical political theory, but nothing has to make sense when cynicism and fatalism becomes so deep-seated.

American politics was always tribal. Tribal, partisan politics was baked into the American constitution, and in more ways than not the exact same political and even geographic divisions persist. We inherited the conflict between industrial interests pursuing the future and agrarian, rural interests clinging to the status quo and mythology. What's changed from mid-century is the rejection of individual responsibility--not morally, but in our civic life--and a loss of faith in the capacity of political compromise to have any salient qualities. The whole notion of individual responsibility is of course tainted by its association with the right and what they believe it connotes. Thus as those on the left have become our primary moral arbiters they're incapable of generalizing their morality, mired in the particulars of how to behave in an ever increasing list of social situations. Both those aspects--rejection of individual responsibility and a loss of faith in political compromise--can be most directly traced to the intellectual left, at least in the American context. That's why process no longer matters, only rigid solutions and their simplified consequences. (Structuralist theory has Continental origins, of course, but context matters and blaming Marxism or French literary criticism is a cop-out; it's thinly disguised, intellectually dishonest red-baiting that whitewashes the American left. Plus Marxism and French literary criticism have meaningful truths to share; their conclusions and particular premises and arguments can be rejected independently; failing to be so discerning and careful commits the precise same errors as did the American intellectual left in accepting so much of it wholesale.)

I don't see how we can move on without admitting that. And I've held this opinion ever since 1998, when I got into a heated argument with a sociology professor in class about the simplistic, categorical dichotomy she and the reading material presented regarding the intellectual origins behind then contemporary left and right political-economic policies. My beef wasn't with the framing of conservative policies as reflecting moralistic notions, nor even the framing of liberal policies as reflecting the empirical research regarding structural dynamics; it was with her presenting structuralism as the antithetical, superior approach, without any appreciation of its failures or its shared characteristics with culturalism as a radically reductionist and unnecessarily expansive theory. But now every time I hear about social media this or social media that, I become just a little more disheartened. We've systematically externalized our culpability as a polity by internalizing radical structuralist theory, among other simplistic and conveniently self-serving ideologies. Tragically, it's one of the few political opinions we all seem to share.

(Of course, I do believe structural dynamics are immensely important. Just not in the same ways or to the same degrees as now widely accepted and presumed.)