The dangerous divides that have come to shape American culture are increasingly inescapable.
Casually held truisms can sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly erupt into daily life with the power of a thunderbolt. In the abstract, I know perfectly well that many Americans live in political-cultural bubbles that rarely communicate with each other. Yet I wasn’t prepared for a recent encounter with how that can turn a simple human interaction into an irrational furore.
I’ve been recovering from an injury in rural Virginia and ended up sharing a room with a man in his mid-80s, born and raised in this area. The results were eye-opening and deeply disturbing.
At first, he couldn’t have been more pleasant, warm and welcoming. On our first day together, he asked if I didn’t mind a little TV later on. I said fine, and then came the evening doses of Fox News.
He regularly watches three programmes, culminating in the notorious Tucker Carlson broadcast. In their entirety and natural environment, these shows were quite new to me. They all have a simple formula: find something, for the next segment or two, about which to thunder in faux indignation, before moving on to the next abomination.
I was astounded that at least three quarters of the horrors they fulminated against were exaggerations to the point of being effectively fictional or simply outright fabrications. I generally kept quiet during these evening reveries, but once observed that the subject of the last segment was entirely made up. I got no reply, so I asked him if he knew that no such thing existed. I was duly ignored.
The only other time I said anything was when Mr Carlson concluded a profoundly racist rant, and I noted it was one of the most offensive things I had viewed in a long while. He snorted and we moved on.
It was obvious that this virulent propaganda was carefully designed to produce mounting and sustained outrage in regular, enthusiastic viewers. My roommate consumed three to four hours of it daily and nothing else whatsoever, yet something wasn’t adding up. He seemed to remain perfectly calm and amiable. So, I began to wonder if I had badly misjudged both the intended and the real effect of Fox programming on its core audience. Where was the rage?
I didn’t have to wait for long. Shortly thereafter, he came into our room as I was having a conversation about US politics with a third individual. He interrupted, disputing what I was saying with increasing anger. He then stood up, declared that I was “against the country, against America,” denounced US President Joe Biden as “a communist,” and marched out.
It was the last I saw him because he immediately arranged to lodge elsewhere and had others retrieve his possessions. It was clear that I was being effectively declared anathema and that remaining in my presence for a moment longer was intolerable entirely because we didn’t agree about former US President Donald Trump’s term in office and bid for reelection (questions such as the attempted coup and the January 6 insurrection, hush money to adult film stars and his hero’s demands to “terminate” the US Constitution to allow himself to remain in office never came up – though he would undoubtedly have dismissed it all as “fake news.”)
His extraordinary reaction to my quite mild though clear disagreement with him suggests several important things.
While I didn’t react with the fury and revulsion he expressed, I live in my own, essentially liberal, bubble where I don’t encounter people like him. Most of the Republicans I know don’t like Mr Trump, and even those who do remain at least partly tethered to the fact-based reality.
Some Americans now simply cannot abide those who categorically disagree with them about domestic politics. Separation is the watchword, as representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia suggested a “national divorce” between red and blue America.
Some left-wing Americans must be just as intolerant, but he fits the Trump-supporting demographic perfectly: male, elderly, strongly Christian, lacking higher education and firmly rooted in a rural community. He’s a perfect target for Fox’s calculated, disingenuous propaganda. They are trying to make him and people like him angry and are succeeding brilliantly – to the point that he cannot stand to even share a room briefly with someone who politely and occasionally challenges his political dogma.
It is unclear how many Americans share these views but it’s probably at least 20 per cent of core Republican voters. It is clear, however, there is no mass market liberal propaganda on American television seeking to promote hatred and rage like I saw Fox successfully doing in a small corner of rural Virginia. MSNBC, and arguably even CNN, have liberal biases. But they aren’t deliberately seeking to demonise, and provoke anger and hatred against, other Americans the way Fox does.
The worst part is how cynical we now know this is – although my former roommate will likely never hear of it and wouldn’t believe it if he did. The internal messages uncovered by the Dominion lawsuit against Fox clearly demonstrate that Mr Carlson and the other hosts, along with owner Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives, privately do not believe, and even mock, Mr Trump’s election lies and those being spread by his representatives, while continuing to broadcast heavy support for those very fabrications.
Mr Carlson added “I hate him passionately,” but you’d never guess that by the fawning “interview” in which he recently allowed Mr Trump to spout all manner of falsehoods and gibberish, including suggesting he alone appreciates the destructive power of nuclear bombs, unchallenged.
It’s a mixed bag for US journalism that Dominion has settled the lawsuit for $787.5 million. It may save investors in the voting machine company, but probably isn’t massive enough to rattle a purse as heavy as Mr Murdoch’s. Fox has admitted that “certain claims” it made about Dominion were “false,” but will not have to broadcast apologies to its audience, or any admission of culpability, on its programming, particularly its powerful evening shows.
Lies indeed have consequences, but not commensurate ones. Therefore, Fox will be able to buy its way out of a potential crisis of credibility with its core audience, whether they think that they lied about Mr Trump winning the election in 2000 or that they are lying now about the fact that he really lost. But most of its audience will probably never learn of the blatant manner in which they were deliberately deceived.
Dominion’s victory will therefore do little to counteract the painstakingly concocted poison that Fox pours into the eyes and ears of its credulous proselytes. The channel is deliberately tearing American society apart in an unseemly scramble for the almighty dollar. Unfortunately Dominion couldn’t provide it, but while protecting the First Amendment and free speech, the means must be found to attenuate their venom and counteract the impact of this carefully curated outrage and fury against other Americans.