In one America, people are online and informed. Whether they’re well and accurately informed is another matter entirely: journalistic standards appear to be all but nonexistent, and social media and the internet in general are a swirling maelstrom of confirmation bias and venomous hostility. Left-wing opinion writers masquerade as dispassionate reporters; radicals dominate our universities; and activists of every stripe parade across the country’s stage with their claims of increasingly implausible grievances.
In this America, the anger and the outrage and the offense are ubiquitous, inescapable: no claim is too outlandish, no evidence too inadequate, to render it unworthy of reporting — if the right (i.e., right) ox is gored. This is an angry, divided America.
The other America is substantially larger, and substantially less informed about the offense du jour. Sure, that America knows the President is a monster: that truth is in the air and water by now, along with the certain knowledge that he is a Russian… something… bent on repealing the First Amendment. Everyone knows, thanks to media saturation and pop-cultural osmosis, that these things must be true. But, honestly, it’s such a bore, the way some people go on endlessly about it, the way it creeps into their Facebook feeds and dominates late-night television.
This America knows it’s divided. How can it not — it hears it every day. People in this America figure, sensibly enough, that somewhere out there a civil war must be raging. It isn’t here, not where they live. Where they live, everyone seems to get along pretty well: there are no masked antifa freedom-fighters breaking shop windows, no loudmouth activists shouting down dangerously conservative speakers, no riots of any sort. People just go on living, earning and spending money, changing jobs (which is a lot easier than it used to be, by the way), raising their kids, and watching blockbuster super-hero movies.
The country is in a civil war, this America is told. Hard to believe, its people think — but they made the mistake of popping onto Twitter once, so they know the mayhem and bloodshed is real.
On the other hand, they think, Friends is on Netflix, and — peaking out the front window into the empty streets — things seem peaceful enough. And the kids are upstairs sleeping…. Maybe, it sometimes occurs to people in this America, they aren’t the crazy ones.