There’s anger on the streets, and it’s not just drivers outraged about traffic blocking their path to the comfort and convenience promised in commercials. As the pandemic slogs on, prolonged stress is taking a toll. Many have dim outlooks in the US.
We’ll explore it by starting with a few embedded Civiqs poll figures.
Outside the beltway, a lot of people see us going the wrong direction.
Many are bleak about the economy, though the trends through the Obama and Trump years raise questions about how these outlooks are reached.
Few have seen economic improvement over the last year, and they are not essential workers that we have misused and abused even more during the pandemic.
More troubling is that life expectancy in the US dropped more than it has since WWII, with Latinos and Blacks affected more than twice as much as whites, which comes after Blacks missed out on three decades of white life expectancy gains.
The analysis, which looked at U.S. mortality statistics back to 1900, finds an additional 1 million white Americans would have to die this year in order for their life expectancy to fall to the best-ever levels recorded for Black Americans — back in 2014.
Digging into the Civiqs polls embedded above, long term and widening partisan differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans are evident. In administration transition times, party affiliation responses can flip while overall trends look largely unchanged. Moreover the party divide appears to be central to current anger and distrust.
In 1978, we rated people who belonged to our party 27 points higher than people who belonged to the other party. That stayed roughly the same for the next two decades, but then began to spike in the year 2000. By 2016 it had gone up to 46 points—by far the highest of any of the countries surveyed—and that’s before everything that has enraged us for the last four years.
And, what is driving this division? Fox Propaganda News, of course.
To find an answer, then, we need to look for things that (a) are politically salient and (b) have changed dramatically over the past two to three decades. The most obvious one is Fox News.
The conservative media ecosystem includes talk radio, websites, email newsletters, and so forth. But all of these outlets had only a temporary effect in the early ’90s before fading out in the face of a booming economy. Only Fox News has had an enduring impact.
A more recent study estimates that a minuscule 150 seconds per week of watching Fox News can increase the Republican vote share.
It is more complicated than that. The author, Kevin Drum, does outline, though perhaps too dismissively, impacts of conspiracy theory, social media and economic factors. However, a strong influence of right wing propaganda cannot be dismissed. What else explains how the Qanon movement with 4% approval according to Civiqs has been so influential? We are reaping outrage right wing propaganda knowingly sows, often with disregard for facts, truth or people’s lives, which got us to right wingers swallowing lies (and ivermectin) and dying inordinately of Covid. That is why Fox and their ilk are propaganda and not news. The title of the network is simply more propaganda.
Fox News is a hub, but they are not alone. Hysterical propaganda has been with us for decades. Whatever the source, right wing propaganda leads to misplaced outrage. Indoctrinated angry parents demonstrate it well with fallacies shouted at school board meetings.
That’s the state of discourse for much of the US. I experience it in conversations with seemingly rational people. They say antifa is a communist group filled with terrorists plotting to install dictatorship in America. There is no recognition of being manipulated to back one party rule, slide into fascism, and demonize most of our fellow citizens.
That’s what makes me angry. Indoctrinated conservatives appear incapable of considering economic alternatives. An angry vocal minority is being misled by rich corporate officers. We have to overcome that anger and convince a majority of voters in a majority of districts to vote for unified interests, more equality and inclusion, more government involvement in guiding national progress, and democracy guaranteed and enforced for all.
While propaganda and outrage are evident, there are no easy answers. It will take a lot of conversations, canvassing and GOTV work to get past this. Forgiveness and reconciliation with justice might help, with or without Jesus.
In individual relations, psychologists have also noted that uncertainty and fear can be buried under anger. Changing approaches to conversations might also help break the cycle of angry aggression and pursuits.
The best clinical approach I’ve seen for this is called Emotionally Focused Therapy, or EFT. In EFT, we teach the pursuer — the aggressor — to express a sense of needing or longing for the withdrawer. Why is the withdrawer moving back as opposed to moving forward? It’s because they’re scared out of their mind that they’re going to be torn to shreds and hurt by the aggression. It’s very hard to stop that withdrawal pattern in the context of anger. So, we help the pursuer to acknowledge to themselves and to their partner, “I need you. When you don’t call me, it makes me wonder whether you care about me and that makes me feel alone,” instead of saying, “Why don’t you call me, you jerk?!”
This is not instructions to compromise. We need to beat back fascism again and again, and we will stand firm for equality. I also have too much experience with conservatives to think that the above approach will sway many. Nevertheless, I don’t have to match anger and aggression to be effective. I can be firm, while also acknowledging my frailty and fear.
In the end I don’t think it will hurt me to try those methods. You decide your actions for yourself. Thanks for standing up for humanity however you do it.