Commentary: Imagine Facebook and Twitter, if you will, as large auditoriums full of sock puppets yelling and squabbling like Punch and Judy.
Honestly, do you trust those sock puppets to help you think clearly about candidates for office?
This year’s Democratic presidential primary may seem unusually nasty, or not, based on how closely one involves oneself with public comments on social media platforms, many of which are echoing points made by television commentators aligned with the major political parties; and yes, social media behavior is often malicious. So in most cases, you are encountering imitations of others’ statements, at best, and dehumanizing malice at worst.
Before “Bernie Bros,” there were complaints of “Obama boys” in the 2008 primary that pitted him against Hillary Clinton. The complaints were similar to the charges against Sen. Bernie Sanders: a fanatical following dominated by males resistant to Clinton, who many saw as likely to be the first woman President of the United States. What might it say about this Barack Obama person if he couldn’t control the behavior of their followers? Would Clinton’s base embrace Obama as the nominee despite the excesses of these Obama boys?
Debating the reality versus perception of a Bernie Bro, Yang Gang, and so on reflects a dynamic in which most political conversation – or the conversation that gets most attention and is treated as indicative of American opinion – takes place not in face-to-face conversation but among sock puppets.
In theory, social media represents a breakthrough, allowing people to interact with individuals across geographical and ideological boundaries in real time; yet we find ourselves in a world of social media accounts, not people and not even necessarily true portraits of the people behind them.
Such generalizations present irresistible tactical value in a culture that is largely incapable of debating political ideology, policy or ideas, and instead approaches elections largely as contests of personalities and political brands.
The danger this presents for us, as the governed, is that the tail too easily wags the dog: we are easily distracted and manipulated, ill-equipped to detect and firmly reject what, in this prim space, I will call “B.S.”
Worse, it constrains our imaginations. People are famously messy, and therefore so is democracy. The founders of our republic were explicit in designing a constitution that insulates power against the whims of an unruly majority.
As a young man coming of age before we spent so much time online, I received my political education in living rooms as well as classrooms, among diverse groups of people who understood that systems of power built over many generations require generations of disciplined, organized collective effort to alter, undaunted and even inspired by the inevitable setbacks when power defends itself.
Without face to face interaction, social media will prove difficult to humanize; and if we can’t do that, it will continue to be a toxic and disorienting influence on political discourse.
A better milieu is possible.
Every day, I imagine a universe in which members of a political party use primaries for vivid and good-spirited debates about what they stand for, how to get there and who is the most capable exemplar; in which the powerful yield to the conversation because they were raised to value the idea that the governed must be heard in a system rooted in justice and public service; in which people are at least passingly educated about public business and take it seriously; and in which there may be a class of people who are well-connected and prominent, but not a ruling class as such.
We can expect not perfection but continuous improvement, provided we talk to people instead of sock puppets.