Americans Deserve Better Than Clickbait Crack
This week’s Electoral College challenge is in part the result of tribal media consumption.
By Ben Sasse Jan. 5, 2021 6:11 pm ET
A ‘Stop the Steal’ demonstration in Lansing, Mich., Nov. 8, 2020.
PHOTO: JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES
Scores of Republicans in Congress will vote Wednesday to reject the Electoral College results in the 2020 presidential election. This comes despite the rulings from Trump-appointed federal judges in state after state rejecting the president’s assertions that he was cheated, and despite the Supreme Court’s rejection of his frivolous appeals. President Trump leapfrogs among dozens of conspiracy theories, but not a single court—in roughly four dozen attempts—has found sufficient evidence for his claims.
Senators know that the president’s social-media rantings are bunk. In our conversations, no one argues that the election was actually stolen. The arguments offered are instead about how Mr. Trump and his core supporters will respond to the certification vote. Republicans are facing tremendous pressure from a vocal minority, and they are wrestling with very real political consequences.
In a play, a rifle hanging above the fireplace in the first act must be fired by the third act. At some point Republicans, Democrats or some yet unformed party will fire the gun that Republican election objectors load this week. If voting against the Electoral College is an easy new way to signal disappointment, politicians will make it a quadrennial habit. Basic trust in our elections will evaporate and, down the road, a congressional majority may succeed in changing an outcome.
Despite these dangerous innovations in Congress, the deeper problem in our politics is on the demand side. Our central crisis isn’t the existence of political drug dealers. It is that we have a society-wide addiction to clickbait crack that treats politics like blood sport. Fifteen percent to 20% of Americans—our friends and neighbors on the left and right—are hooked.
Our politics has become so poisonous that members of Congress now see personal benefit in posturing or actually attempting to overturn a presidential election, thereby disenfranchising millions of Americans for the sin of voting for the other party. Our institutions aren’t meant for this, and the constant horse-race analysis and apocalyptic rhetoric will push us further and faster into idiocracy.
It’s time for civic self-reflection. How did we get here and how can we change course? There are no easy answers, but one thing is certain: We have to become better consumers of information.
Our media habits are driving this country to the edge of suicide. Despite the evidence, too many Republican voters doubt the election results. But nobody should be surprised. That’s exactly what the outrage-industrial complex has been selling around the clock for nine weeks since Election Day.
The same algorithms that know our favorite bands and when we need a shampoo refill are now curating our news feeds. The media ratchets up the rhetoric to increase clicks, eyeballs and revenue. News consumers reward outlets for “hot takes” and for reinforcing their pre-existing opinions. It’s a civics wasteland.
How has little-known One America News Network suddenly become a competitor to Fox News? Where Fox News journalists have declined to elevate nonsense about election fraud from lawyer and fabulist Sidney Powell, OANN has rushed in. The upstart network and the president have accused not only traditional media but also Fox of malpractice and betrayal. (Fox and The Wall Street Journal share common ownership.)
This problem isn’t limited to the right. Look at outlets catering to progressive “wokes.” Ask the
New York Times what its algorithms are teaching it about monetizing anger. And does anyone think it was a random accident that Michael Avenatti was on CNN daily for months peddling National Enquirer-level junk? Political zealotry is good for business.
We all like being told not merely that our opinions are reasonable but also that we’re the only group left standing between America and an imminent socialist or fascist hellscape. So, if you want to believe that Mr. Trump won the election, there’s a line out the door of cable hosts, radio personalities and keyboard warriors willing to comfort you. If you want to believe that abolishing the New York Police Department is a serious policy position, there are Voxsplainers and MSNBC panelists for you, too.
Ultrapartisans aren’t the majority, but they are the loudest. They are what James Madison, in Federalist 10, called “factions”: Beware the power of “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
For Madison, reason—or “common sense”—is the only sustainable diet for a republic. In this experiment in liberty, we discuss, debate and deliberate. We bring cool heads to the table. We seek to persuade our neighbors. But factions bring the “impulse of passion,” making us susceptible to bad arguments, demagoguery and worse. And where a healthy constitutionalism protects “the rights of other citizens,” realizing that self-government must accommodate a diversity of views, factions are willing to jettison their opponents to get what they want.
Our civic crisis doesn’t end this week. In politics, nothing is one-and-done. Wednesday's last-ditch effort won’t change a single electoral vote, but it will set a dangerous precedent for future transitions of power. This will happen again—and it will escalate—unless we cut the demand for performative outrage.
Although the ranks of the politically addicted are growing, I believe there is still a silent majority of Americans that want something better. They don’t want tribal forever wars that burn down our institutions. What most Americans want, and what keeping the republic will require, is learning new media consumption habits for an age of anger algorithms.
Mr. Sasse, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Nebraska.
