Behind the Lines / Prejudice of political opinion & the Partisan Divide

06/04/2020

"At the same time, lingering conservative distrust of government and 'experts,' combined with a red-and-blue fissure over the severity of the crisis, have surfaced dystopian national divisions: between those taking social-distancing measures seriously and those who view them as resulting from government overreach, between those who would support a prolonged economic shutdown and those who would be willing to trade additional casualties for a faster return to normalcy. 'That,' said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, 'is one of the questions our politics will solve in November.'"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/us/politics/coronavirus-democrats-republicans-trump.html

A huge federal disaster response, new urgency around health care and a debate over social distancing have muddled the nation’s ideological debate.

01/04/2020

Opinion: Covid-19 Is Twisting 2020 Beyond All Recognition

"A marker of our political sickness is that taking the virus seriously has become itself a marker of tribal identity."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/coronavirus-politics-election.html

25/03/2020

"A steady religious realignment has reshaped the white American electorate, turning religious conviction — or its absence — into a clear signal of where voters stand in the culture wars.

"As mainstream Protestant denominations have declined over the past half century, there has been a hollowing out of the center among white Christians of all faiths. New generations of Americans have joined the ranks of evangelical churches, while others, in larger numbers, have forsaken religion altogether."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/religion-democrats-republicans.html

20/03/2020

"Public opinion is shifting as the crisis mounts, so questions asked a week ago would get different answers today. But one pattern has persisted: In every poll, Republicans have expressed far less concern about the virus than Democrats have. Last week, 55 percent of Republicans, compared with 25 percent of Democrats, said they didn’t worry much about it. Forty-eight percent of Republicans, versus 18 percent of Democrats, expressed little or no concern 'about a coronavirus epidemic here in the United States.' Sixty-three percent of Republicans, as opposed to 31 percent of Democrats, said they were similarly unconcerned 'that you or someone you know will be infected.'"

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/polls-republicans-coronavirus-spread.html

It’s not old folks or millennials. It’s Republicans.

16/03/2020

"But many Americans simply aren’t buying into the warnings to stay home. A majority of the respondents of an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said they expected their lives to change in only a “small way” or not at all. The poll found a partisan divide."

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/03/15/lockdown-vs-libertarian-tug-of-war-for-local-officials-1267144

Cities and states late last week began imposing severe restrictions on local businesses and, in some cases, the movement of their citizens.

23/02/2020

PRÉCIS
9th WANG CENTER SYMPOSIUM
Disarming Polarization: Navigating Conflict and Difference
The 9th Wang Center Symposium takes up the issue of heightened political and societal polarization within the U.S. and globally as well as its primary consequence, the increasing inability to communicate and collaborate across differences to develop solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. These problems include but are not limited to: climate change, food and water insecurity, immigration, poverty, and income inequality, as well as ongoing large and small-scale conflicts resulting from strained relations among those of different races, ethnicities, religions, genders, s*xual orientations, and social classes. Acknowledging this challenge, the two-day conference will bring together academics, activists, and practitioners whose life’s work engages polarization—within and across disciplines, traditions, communities, peoples, etc.—in ways that increase understanding about the topic or model actions that facilitate effective collaboration across difference.

https://www.plu.edu/wang-center-symposium/

The 9th Wang Center Symposium – Disarming Polarization: Navigating Conflict and Difference – takes up the issue of heightened political and societal polarization within the U.S.

12/02/2020

Another C**t Ford video -- in my view, this one contributes in its own right to healing the partisan divide. The setting -- a news conference with "the media" in force, diverse in terms of age and race.. C**t sings and raps "We the People" extolling the virtues of country people and what they hold dear. The media look critical and disinterested in the beginning, but over the course of the video loosen up, start head bobbing and moving to the rhythm on his song. Buy the end, they are all dancing joyously together. There is no mockery of the media here. And, hey folks, this is rap -- country rap. How unifying is that! Country and rap together. America isn't all going to hell. This video is evidence of the integration of society that is happening simultaneously with the disintegration.

https://youtu.be/U0CO_Rv1yIY

Download+Stream: http://averagejoesent.co/WeThePeople_SingleAY Keep up with C**t Ford: Website: http://www.coltford.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/co...

11/02/2020

This is country rap / country identity music. If you are urban, listen to it, study it -- see how rural people like C**t Ford see things. Crossin' the partisan divide.

Celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Ride Through the Country. Get the Deluxe CD available at Walmart. Download here: http://averagejoesent.co/RideThroughT...

09/02/2020

On the "relationship between strength of political ideology and conspiracy beliefs" --

"Abstract: Historical records suggest that the political extremes—at both the “left” and the “right”—substantially endorsed conspiracy beliefs about other-minded groups. The present contribution empirically tests whether extreme political ideologies, at either side of the political spectrum, are positively associated with an increased tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. Four studies conducted in the United States and the Netherlands revealed a quadratic relationship between strength of political ideology and conspiracy beliefs about various political issues. Moreover, participants’ belief in simple political solutions to societal problems mediated conspiracy beliefs among both left- and right-wing extremists. Finally, the effects described here were not attributable to general attitude extremity. Our conclusion is that political extremism and conspiracy beliefs are strongly associated due to a highly structured thinking style that is aimed at making sense of societal events."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550614567356

09/02/2020

"The internet’s best opinion page. Fiercely committed to intellectual pluralism." ARC Digital is one of those "Least Biased" rarities online.
https://arcdigital.media/

"Publications tend to fall into one of two camps. The first camp includes those who present themselves as pure observers of reality, devoid of partiality or partisanship. The second include those who are very comfortable — a little too comfortable — in their ideological skin.
Problem: the first approach is impossible and the second distorts reality".
https://arcdigital.media/welcome-to-arc-44a4a48d7214

"Overall, we rate Arc Digital Least Biased based on topic selection that covers both liberal and conservative view points. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record."
https://arcdigital.media/welcome-to-arc-44a4a48d7214

On what matters.

09/02/2020

This is so inspiring. It describes the partisan divide and its solution -- the face-to-face coming together of those on both sides of the divide to share their human experience. After himself being the focus of racist venom from the right, he found a way to see conservatives as people. He specifically makes reference to how liberals see themselves as accepting of diversity -- except for those with conservatives views That, my friends, is prejudice. Thanks, Cindy, for bringing this to my attention.

Scroll down below any viral video and you will find users waging war in the comments section, dropping racial slurs and epithets from another time. Curious a...

08/02/2020

Arthur Brooks at the National Prayer Breakfast gave this speech.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/07/arthur-brooks-national-prayer-breakfast-speech/

07/02/2020

Ezra Klein's compelling new work, “Why We’re Polarized" continues to be the big news on polarization, with lots of articles consisting of reviews of his book or interviews with him, far more than have been reposted on this page so far. Here is Fareed Zakaria's post from the Washington Times last week.

"Crucial in understanding tribal loyalty is negative polarization. Klein cites several studies that show that negative views of the opposing party are far more likely to get people to vote and contribute compared with positive views of their own party."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-story-of-impeachment-tells-the-story-of-polarization/2020/01/30/cdf1ad28-43a4-11ea-b5fc-eefa848cde99_story.html

Government is paralyzed by a lack of compromise and cooperation.

05/02/2020

Fake news, fake religion, and now fake governance, Bridge USA has the same focus that Behind the Lines: News Article Discussion of bringing people -- in their case, college students -- of diverse opinions together to share impressions

"At BridgeUSA, the leading multi-partisan organization on college campuses, we see another way forward for our generation; we see the potential to instill new norms of governance in the leaders of tomorrow.

T"o mitigate polarization and apathy, we encourage students to engage with our democracy through the “bridge mindset.” BridgeUSA creates spaces for students of varied ideologies to interact with those they disagree with. Students explore new ideas and learn to articulate their own preferences through civil discourse."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/07/college-students-come-together-bridge-political-polarization-column/2758051001/

My generation knows nothing besides dysfunctional fake governance. It’s no wonder so few of us vote. We see a system broken by polarization.

05/02/2020

"Using survey results, they construct a measure of polarization that permits comparison across the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland over the past four decades. What they found is striking: In five of those countries, polarization actually declined in recent decades. In no country did it rise as quickly as in the US."

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/24/21076232/polarization-america-international-party-political

05/02/2020

"As the U.S. enters a heated 2020 presidential election year, a new Pew Research Center report finds that Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments."

https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/u-s-media-polarization-and-the-2020-election-a-nation-divided/

As the U.S. enters a heated 2020 presidential election year, Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments.

04/02/2020

"With a broad-brush criticism of both political parties, Murkowski spoke of their 'apparent willingness...to destroy not just each other, but all of the institutions of our government. And for what? Because it may help win an election?'"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-impeachment-murkowski/republican-senator-murkowski-spares-few-in-fiery-impeachment-speech-idUSKBN1ZY06D

Republican U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, an unpredictable moderate in a polarized...

04/02/2020

I will be making a series of little changes as Behind the Lines is reformatted to a page the purpose of which is to tell the story of the Partisan Divide. Followers of this page will get notifications of each change, which may be a little obnoxious to some. Your patience is appreciated. The page will settle down soon. However, the news the page is chronicling will not be settling down, at least for the foreseeable future. So say a little prayer.

04/02/2020

Behind the Lines take no political stance. What is posted here is not to boost one candidate over another or advance one party at the expense of another. Instead, this page is telling the story of the partisan divide and its driver, the prejudice of political opinion. It is a town crier shouting, "Hold onto your hats, it's only going to get worse," because that's what happens when there is no longer a consensus about anything. Chaos and disunity rule. Everything falls apart.

In a partisan environment, bad news endured by one side is cheered by the other. Today the news is the Iowa Caucus, an impeachment trial coming to an end, a State of the Union Address -- and this article predicting party conflict right up to its political convention and beyond. It's not pretty.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/02/mike-bloomberg-democratic-contested-convention/605956/

"The answer to one Republican New York billionaire is surely not going to be a slightly richer Republican New York billionaire,” one Biden ally said. “It's laughable we even have to say that out loud."

03/02/2020

“Nothing in the constitution of the United States authorises the government to punish socialists or anyone else on the basis of their political beliefs,” he said, adding that political speech is protected under the first amendment and the state constitution of Montana, which state representatives swear to uphold, “expressly prohibits discrimination on the basis of political beliefs”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/03/montana-republican-rodney-garcia-socialists-comment

State legislator Rodney Garcia insists constitution says socialists should be jailed or shot, according to Billings Gazette

02/02/2020

Since October there have been nine opportunities for those living in the Tacoma area to discuss news articles of importance and relfect on their meaning

02/02/2020

"The bottom line: Americans are dividing ourselves into informational and cultural echo chambers — and we're just starting to learn how deeply that affects the way we see the world."

https://www.axios.com/echo-chambers-news-entertainment-272236ca-9097-471c-b1ae-7aaa5ed3d5a7.html

It's not just news that polarizes us — it's our culture, too.

02/02/2020

Going forward, this page will be a repository for content on polarization, of which partisan politics is a major force. The polarization of citizens of the U.S and elsewhere into divided camps, not only between political parties but within parties, is driven by prejudice. To prejudice of race, s*x, class, age, etc., add prejudice of political opinion. Where there is prejudice, there is disunity. Disunity is the problem. Our diversity is our strength, but unity in diversity is our goal. We can hold different opinions, but through consultation we can come to agreement on anything, move forward, consult again, and move forward again. That is how a united society is supposed to function, individual, institution and community all working in sync.

https://youtu.be/SgccHLmIHQs

01/02/2020

"...[T]he modern right depends on its own form of 'political correctness.' We’re often told that the modern left is in some ways uniquely censorious, particularly on issues relating to race, gender, and s*xual orientation. 'There’s no right-wing equivalent to this kind of ideological policing toward people sympathetic to right-wing causes,' as the journalist Cathy Young recently put it.

"...[T]his is simply not true. In conservative cultural spaces, even a very long right-wing record ... doesn’t immunize you from the consequences of violating the community’s political standards. Stalwart conservative legislators are, according to Alberta, terrified of what people in their communities think of them. ...

"The fact that this kind of censorship plays out in local communities, rather than the pages of national magazines, makes it no less powerful — and arguably more so...."

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/31/21116689/trump-impeachment-lamar-alexander-witness-bolton

Photo: Jasperdo
Philipsburg, Montana
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

27/01/2020

The electoral college is becoming the primary influencing factor for maintaining the partisan divide, according to this analysis: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/democrats-republicans-polarization.html

25/01/2020

Simply the best brief unbiased fact-based assessment of where politics in America is taking us. If you hunger for the good old days and think things are going to get easier -- read this and weep

"The alternative to democratizing America is scarier than mere polarization: It is, eventually, a legitimacy crisis that could threaten the very foundation of our political system."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/democrats-republicans-polarization.html

Here is the full text of the article for article for those who can't get past the NYT paywall:

----------

Opinion

Why Democrats Still Have to Appeal to the Center, but Republicans Don’t
Polarization has changed the two parties — just not in the same way.

By Ezra Klein
Mr. Klein is the author of “Why We’re Polarized.”

Jan. 24, 2020

American politics has been dominated by the Democratic and Republican Parties since the Civil War. That gives us the illusion of stability — that today’s political divisions cut roughly the same lines as yesteryear.

But in recent decades, the two parties have been changing, and fast. Those changes are ideological — the Democratic Party has moved left, and the Republican Party has moved right. But more fundamentally, those changes are compositional: Democrats have become more diverse, urban, young and secular, and the Republican Party has turned itself into a vehicle for whiter, older, more Christian and more rural voters.

This is the root cause of intensifying polarization: Our differences, both ideological and demographic, map onto our party divisions today in ways they didn’t in the past. But the changes have not affected the parties symmetrically.

Put simply, Democrats can’t win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans. They can move to the left — and they are — but they can’t abandon the center or, given the geography of American politics, the center-right, and still hold power. Democrats are modestly, but importantly, restrained by diversity and democracy. Republicans are not.

Let’s start with diversity. Over the past 50 years, the Democratic and Republican coalitions have sorted by ideology, race, religion, geography and psychology. Not all sorting is the same. Sorting has made Democrats more diverse and Republicans more homogeneous. This is often played as a political weakness for Democrats. They’re a collection of interest groups, a party of list makers, an endless roll call. But diversity has played a crucial role in moderating the party’s response to polarization.

Appealing to Democrats requires appealing to a lot of different kinds of people with different interests. Republicans are overwhelmingly dependent on white voters. Democrats are a coalition of liberal whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and mixed-race voters. Republicans are overwhelmingly dependent on Christian voters. Democrats are a coalition of liberal and nonwhite Christians, Jews, Muslims, New Agers, agnostics, Buddhists and so on. Three-quarters of Republicans identify as conservative, while only half of Democrats call themselves liberals — and for Democrats, that’s a historically high level.

As a result, winning the Democratic primary means winning liberal whites in New Hampshire and traditionalist blacks in South Carolina. It means talking to Irish Catholics in Boston and atheists in San Francisco. It means inspiring liberals without arousing the fears of moderates. It’s important preparation for the difficult, pluralistic work of governing, in which the needs and concerns of many different groups must be balanced against one another.

The Democratic Party is not just more diverse in who it represents; it’s also more diverse in whom it listens to. A new Pew survey tested Democratic and Republican trust in 30 different media sources, ranging from left to right. Democrats trusted 22 of the 30 sources, including center-right outlets like The Wall Street Journal. Republicans trusted only seven of the 30 sources, with PBS, the BBC and The Wall Street Journal the only mainstream outlets with significant trust. (The other trusted sources, in case you were wondering, were Fox News, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart.)

Fox News, in particular, holds a unique centrality in Republican media: Sixty-five percent of Republicans say they trust it, more than twice as many as trust any other outlet, and 60 percent of Republicans said they relied on Fox News in the previous week — again, more than twice the proportion who relied on any other news brand. Among Democrats, by contrast, the most-trusted and frequently consulted outlet was CNN.

The Democratic Party’s informational ecosystem combines mainstream sources that seek objectivity, liberal sources that push partiality and even some center-right sources with excellent reputations. On any given question, liberals trust in sources that pull them left and sources that pull them toward the center, in sources oriented toward escalation and sources oriented toward moderation, in sources that root their identity in a political movement and in sources that carefully tend a reputation for being antagonistic toward political movements.

There is no similar diversity in the Republican Party’s trusted informational ecosystem, which is heavily built around self-consciously conservative news sources. There should be a check on this sort of epistemic closure. A party that narrows the sources it listens to is also narrowing the voters it can speak to. And political parties ultimately want to win elections. Lose enough of them, enough times, and even the most stubborn ideologues will accept reform. Democracy, in other words, should discipline parties that close their informational ecosystems. But America isn’t a democracy.

Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and a majority of governorships. Only the House is under Democratic control. And yet Democrats haven’t just won more votes in the House elections. They won more votes over the last three Senate elections, too. They won more votes in both the 2016 and 2000 presidential elections. But America’s political system counts states and districts rather than people, and the G.O.P.’s more rural coalition has a geographic advantage that offsets its popular disadvantage.

To win power, Democrats don’t just need to appeal to the voter in the middle. They need to appeal to voters to the right of the middle. When Democrats compete for the Senate, they are forced to appeal to an electorate that is far more conservative than the country as a whole. Similarly, gerrymandering and geography means that Democrats need to win a substantial majority in the House popular vote to take the gavel. And a recent study by Michael Geruso, Dean Spears and Ishaana Talesara calculates that the Republican Party’s Electoral College advantage means “Republicans should be expected to win 65 percent of presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote.”

The Republican Party, by contrast, can run campaigns aimed at a voter well to the right of the median American. Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. If they’d also lost six of the last seven presidential elections, they most likely would have overhauled their message and agenda. If Trump had lost in 2016, he — and the political style he represents — would have been discredited for blowing a winnable election. The Republican moderates who’d counseled more outreach to black and Hispanic voters would have been strengthened.

Instead, Republicans are trapped in a dangerous place: They represent a shrinking constituency that holds vast political power. That has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy. Behind the party’s tactical extremism lurks an apocalyptic sense of political stakes. This was popularized in the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay arguing that conservatives needed to embrace Trump, because if he failed, “death is certain.” You could hear its echoes in Attorney General William P. Barr’s recent speech, in which he argued that “the force, fervor and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion” poses a threat unlike any America has faced in the past. “This is not decay,” he warned, “it is organized destruction.”

This is why one of the few real hopes for depolarizing American politics is democratization. If Republicans couldn’t fall back on the distortions of the Electoral College, the geography of the United States Senate and the gerrymandering of House seats — if they had, in other words, to win over a majority of Americans — they would become a more moderate and diverse party. This is not a hypothetical: The country’s most popular governors are Charlie Baker in Massachusetts and Larry Hogan in Maryland. Both are Republicans governing, with majority support, in blue states.

A democratization agenda isn’t hard to imagine. We could do away with the Electoral College and gerrymandering; pass proportional representation and campaign finance reform; make voter registration automatic and give Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico the political representation they deserve. But precisely because the Republican Party sees deepening democracy as a threat to its future, it will use the power it holds to block any moves in that direction.

The alternative to democratizing America is scarier than mere polarization: It is, eventually, a legitimacy crisis that could threaten the very foundation of our political system. By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the 15 largest states. That means 70 percent of America will be represented by only 30 senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by 70 senators.

It is not difficult to envision an America where Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they typically control both the House and the Senate despite rarely winning more votes than the Democrats, where their dominance of the Supreme Court is unquestioned and where all this power is used to buttress a system of partisan gerrymandering, pro-corporate campaign finance laws, strict voter identification requirements and anti-union legislation that further weakens Democrats’ electoral performance. Down that road lies true political crisis.

In the meantime, though, it’s important to recognize the truth about our system: Both parties have polarized, but in very different ways, and with very different consequences for American politics.

Ezra Klein is founder and editor at large of Vox, host of the “The Ezra Klein Show” podcast and author of “Why We’re Polarized,” from which this essay is adapted.

Polarization has changed the two parties — just not in the same way.

24/01/2020

This will be the lead article for review at Behind the Lines on 1/25/20. It is posted in its entirety for those for whom the NYT paywall is a problem.

Opinion: The Darkness Where the Future Should Be
What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist

Jan. 24, 2020

William Gibson, the writer who coined the term “cyberspace” and whose novel “Neuromancer” heavily influenced “The Matrix,” has spent a lifetime imagining surreal and noirish possibilities for human development. But Donald Trump’s victory threw him off balance. “I think it took me about three months to come out of the shock of his actually having been elected,” Gibson told me. And when he finally did come out of it, Gibson still wasn’t quite sure what to do with the manuscript he’d been working on, about a young woman in modern-day San Francisco, since the world he’d situated her in seemed to have suddenly disappeared.

“If I had somehow been able to finish it, by the time it was published, it would have just been this lost thing,” he said, “completely out of time and unconcerned with what I immediately saw as being the beginning of something extraordinary, and almost certainly something extraordinarily bad.”

In the end, he turned the new book into a sequel to his 2014 novel “The Peripheral.” Part of The Peripheral is set in a 22nd century where the world as we know it has been wiped out by a confluence of events known as “The Jackpot,” which is, as Gibson put it to me, “All the bad stuff that we’re worried about now coming true.” Eighty percent of the population has died, and many of the survivors live under the authority of a hereditary oligarchy descended from Russian kleptocrats. People in that future have developed the ability to use data to reach back in time, but when they do, rather than changing the course of events, they inaugurate new, parallel continuums, called stubs.

Much of the new book, “Agency,” takes place in a stub where Hillary Clinton won the election and Brexit never happened. Characters from the future — from Gibson’s extrapolated version of our own dark timeline — try to help people in the alternate past avoid a similarly cataclysmic fate. The question looming over the book is not whether the future will be horrifying, but if there’s even the possibility of a future that isn’t.

Gibson is famed for his sensitivity to the zeitgeist, and I asked him if he thought that part of what he’d picked up on here is a growing sense of the future as an abyss. “In my childhood, the 21st century was constantly referenced,” he said, “You’d see it once every day, and it often had an exclamation point.” The sense, he said, was that postwar America was headed somewhere amazing. Now that we’re actually in the 21st century, however, the 22nd century is never evoked with excitement. “We don’t seem to have, culturally, a sense of futurism that way anymore,” he said. “It sort of evaporated.”

The dearth of optimistic visions of the future, at least in the United States, is central to the psychic atmosphere of this bleak era. Pessimism is everywhere: in opinion polls, in rising su***de rates and falling birthrates, and in the downwardly mobile trajectory of millennials. It’s political and it’s cultural: at some point in the last few years, a feeling has set in that the future is being foreclosed. When the S*x Pistols sang, “There is no future” in the 1970s there was at least a confrontational relish to it. Now there’s just dread.

The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence so terrifying that it’s often easier not to think about it at all.

But it’s not just climate change. In his forthcoming book, “The Decadent Society,” my colleague Ross Douthat mourns the death of the “technological sublime,” writing that our era “for all its digital wonders has lost the experience of awe-inspiring technological progress that prior modern generations came to take for granted.” This is true, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Our problem is not just that new technologies regularly fail to thrill. It’s that, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering to mass surveillance, they are frequently sources of horror.

Consider some recent headlines. The New York Times reported on Clearview AI, a start-up whose facial-matching technology could give strangers access to the identity and biographical information of anyone seen in public. (“Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it,” one investor said.) Reuters described classes in South Korea that teach people how to arrange their features for job interviews performed by computers that use “facial recognition technology to analyze character.” Wired had a story about “smart contact lenses” that could overlay digital interfaces on everything you see, which is not so different than the visual feeds that the post-Jackpot characters have in “The Peripheral” and “Agency.”

Around the world, the social media technologies that were supposed to expand democracy and human connection have instead fueled authoritarianism and ethnic cleansing. Andrew Yang is running a remarkably successful insurgent presidential campaign premised on the threat that automation and robots pose to the social order.

Fear of the future doesn’t pose much of a political problem for conservatism. Reactionary politics feed on cultural despair; the right is usually happy to look backward. In his 1955 mission statement for National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. famously wrote that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

It’s a bigger problem for the left, which by definition needs to believe in progress. In 2013, Alyssa Battistoni wrote in the socialist magazine Jacobin about the challenge that climate change poses to left politics, asking, “What should the orientation be of a politics that’s playing the long game when the arc of the universe is starting to feel frighteningly short?”

I suspect that one reason Pete Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of a small Midwestern city, has vaulted into the top tier of presidential candidates is that he speaks so confidently about the future. He asks voters to picture the day after the last day of Trump’s presidency and discusses how the world might be when he’s nearly as old as his septuagenarian competitors. “You just have a certain mind-set based on the fact that — to put it a little bluntly — you plan to be here in 2050,” he once said. But his forward-looking technocratic pitch has mostly failed to resonate with his own generation. Instead, it appears that the people most soothed by Buttigieg’s ideas about what America might look like decades hence are those who won’t be here to experience it.

The candidate who polls show has the most support among young people is Bernie Sanders, the oldest person in the race. Clearly, Sanders fills his followers with hope and makes them feel that a transformed world is possible, but he also speaks to their terrors. Recently Sanders backers released one of the more moving campaign videos of this cycle. Set to a mournful cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” it features inspirational scenes of the senator and his supporters, but also flooded streets, wildfires and an emaciated polar bear; in one scene protesters hang a banner that says, “We deserve a future.” It’s an ad that speaks to the desperate longing for kindness and solidarity to replace the cruelties of a society devouring itself, but also a grief-stricken apprehension of what’s in store if they don’t.

Writing about the future is usually just a way of writing about the present, and were it not for climate change, one might see widespread anxiety about what’s coming as just an expression of despair about what’s here. It’s still possible, of course, that someday people will look back on the dawn of the 2020s as a menacing moment after which the world’s potential opened up once again. But that would seem to require political and scientific leaps that are hard to envision right now, much less stake one’s faith in.

Though Gibson’s older work is frequently described as dystopian, he used to consider himself an optimist. “Neuromancer,” he pointed out, was written in the early 1980s and posited a future in which the Cold War hadn’t led to apocalypse, something far from guaranteed at the time. “Since the end of the Cold War, I’ve prided myself on being the guy who says, eh, don’t worry, it’s not going to happen tomorrow,” he said. “And now I’ve lost that.” This darkness where the future should be, he said, “makes my creative life much, much more difficult,” since he doesn’t simply want to surrender to gloom. Gibson is a man renowned for his prophetic creativity, but he can’t imagine his way out of our civilizational predicament. No wonder so many others are struggling to.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace s*xual harassment issues.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/william-gibson-agency.html

What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?