Have you noticed that everyone's a partisan these days? The whole world seems to have turned into an Op-Ed page. Some people still want to "reason together," but most simply draw from their small set of truisms and talking points and repeat them over and over.
That may be an overstatement, born of a slight case of discouragement. But certainly, partisanship as a way of being, a way of interacting, is on the rise. A partisan sees everything, every act of communication, in the light of his/her allegiance to the cause. Ordinary acts of communication take on a propagandistic coloring. Everyone seems to see themselves as a foot-soldier or talking-head for the Party or the "movement" (whatever that may be).
When you're a partisan, you give no quarter to the opposition. You concede nothing. They're all Nazis. Or they're all Communists. They're all racists. Or reverse-racists. Or nationalists. Or traitors. The point being, partisanship thrives on oversimplification, lurid fear-mongering, declarations rather than conversation, name-calling, and weighted language that attempts to marginalize opposing ideas. Not just refute them, mind you, but to silence them.
The thing is, we readily perceive these partisan tactics when they are used against our favored political positions ("There they go again!"), but we applaud those same tactics when they are arrayed in favor of "our side."
If you scan the news using Google News, you will see that even front-page stories from legacy newspapers with lots of inherited reputation for objectivity have become nothing more than partisan attempts to lead the reader to a preferred conclusion. This is the kind of thing that has been famously labeled "Fake News!" Furthermore, on that same Google Newsfeed, you will see no attempt to differentiate opinion pieces from the news. The traditional newspaper generally segregated their opinion pieces to one or two pages at the back of the first section. Not so Google News.
This is why even the opinions of pop-culture entertainers are treated as important assets to the cause.
And Facebook and Twitter are of course prime real estate for partisan rhetoric. Social media didn't create the problem, but it has provided the perfect platform for the dissemination of partisan talking-points, the goal of which is not to approach truth, but simply to sway opinion.
It all seems like a dangerous development for American democracy. In political terms, it sometimes seems that we have all become apparatchiks, political operators, almost, you might say, eager little Stalinists. I fear for my country.
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