This presidential race has been my #1 source of entertainment these days. Every person running just seems like, more than ever, a colorful character. Every debate stage seems to host a wild assortment of ideologies and issues, and it's been fascinating to see each candidate fall away one at a time, leaving the strongest to vie for the nomination.
Now that Rubio's out, it's down to Sanders, Clinton, Trump, and Cruz. Wow, just think about that.
Every single one of these people is vastly different down to a fundamental level. Trump and Sanders are outsiders, a reaction to the growing distrust of the government in an era of surveillance, industrial influence, and corporate pandering. Sanders emphasizes domestic social justice issues, while Trump emphasizes economic and geopolitical ones. Clinton is the only moderate left, the only one participating in the old and perceptively broken system that spawned support for Sanders and Trump. Although she's in bed with big money, her impressive resume seems to have made up for it. And then there's Cruz, an extreme religious conservative who recently spoke at a conference whose host (a pastor) called for the death of homosexuals.
This is the world we live in, folks.
There are at least a couple good reasons we see such an array of characters during this race: current political climate and changing consumption patterns in media. The current political climate is pretty straightforward, a response to Wall Street disgust and a dwindling middle class, a hopeless future for emerging generations (hence Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again," implying it's not great anymore).
Consumption patterns in media are what will connect this whole blog post to identity politics. When I worked in news advertising, it was very clear to me that journalism had an almost ancient, engrained sense of balance. It was really important for journalists to be fair, to look at both sides, to stick to facts. Part of this culture of journalism was necessitated by the nature of mass audience. If you take a side and there are millions of people reading, you're going to alienate and lose readers. And readers are what newspapers sell, because readers see ads.
But news is changing. We don't read papers anymore, we read social media. And perhaps, more importantly, we read online, where all of our tastes, preferences, and click patterns are meticulously tracked in order to produce personalized online experiences. If you notice a lot of anti-Trump videos popping up on your feed, you can be sure that Facebook is preferentially sending you that topic, and you can trust that somebody on the other end of the political spectrum has a feed full of anti-Sanders rhetoric, too. Because that's how we read news now, not news that's balanced, but news that's personal.
The great tragedy of this is extreme political polarization. Suddenly Trump is Hitler and Sanders is a Commie -- despite the obvious. The discourse is so extreme, there is no longer hope for fruitful debate. It is a worsening culture of identity politics.
Identity Politics is defined as the way in which various aspects of our identities influence our political persuasions, including things like race, class, religion, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, ideology, nation, sexual orientation, culture, information preference, history, musical or literary preference, medical conditions, educational background or specialization, professions or hobbies. It is relevant to our own identities and the identities of others.
Identity politics explains why Finance majors tend to think right, and Women's Studies majors tend to think left. Not always, but usually. And this is true for almost every aspect of one's identity. Over time, identity often snowballs. That Finance degree leads to a finance job; that Women's Studies degree leads to working in non-profit, where each identity is reinforced via social network and personal experience, etc. until each and every person is sure that they are right and therefore everyone else must be wrong.
It all comes back to evolution, because humans evolved a very strong sense of identity for themselves and others. We are built to quickly perceive duality (good vs evil), to form snap judgements, to label people or things. The question is how do we get out of this mode of thinking? How do we break our own biases in order to see what's true? Will we always have leaders so opposed to one another? Or worse, to have a populace that always mischaracterizes their own leaders? Perhaps somewhere in the fray is our political revolution, our political doom.
