Commentary: The time has come to see the evil social conditioning — so put on the glasses

We’ve trained for this, and it isn’t good news.

U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) may or may not become the speaker of the House, but every Democrat in D.C. will helpfully explain along the way that he's an “insurrectionist” and (following the alleged Republican John Boehner) a “legislative terrorist.” He attacked our Constitution! Also, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is literally a blood-soaked murderer, as protesters keep screaming in her face, with the obvious moral authority that accrues to Hamas supporters. Everyone to the right of Ken Buck or a cup of tepid water is a terrorist insurrectionist murdering slaughterer who murders and kills and brutally destroys everything everywhere and hates the children and something something mass-horror-terror-killing-death-blood something.

And that’s putting it very gently, I promise.

The historian Richard Hofstadter famously described a “paranoid style” in American politics, especially on the supposed far right, and hilariously located that tendency to madness in the golf-sweater libertarianism of the monster Barry Goldwater. What we do in America, Hofstadter explained, is constantly manifest “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” in our discourse. But maybe Vladimir Putin told him to say that. In 1964.

Watching discussion about Israel and Hamas over the last 10 days, I’ve been depressed by the explosive emotional atmosphere. On social media and in news site comment threads, people assume the worst of other people, carefully overread or underread to arrive at the angriest possible response to the thing they’ve briefly hate-skimmed, and spend their time denouncing enemies and blasting disagreement in the tone of rage and disgust.

Reader email and comments this week have explained to me, in proximate messages, that I’m a bloodthirsty Zionist pig and a disgusting Jew-hater who obviously despises Israel. Writers on subscription-based platforms are talking about how hard their paid subscribers have been storming away from them since more or less the minute Hamas attacked. No time for disagreement. We’re left only with disgusting monsters whose evil is towering and unspeakable.

All of this makes sense, to a point: People are dying, terrorism is meant to provoke, and war comes with rage. As Hofstadter argued decades ago, angry political discourse is just normal American behavior. But the last two weeks haven’t felt normally angry and dismissive. They’ve felt explosive, like the moments before a deadly brawl. And I invite you to perform a thought experiment with me.

Imagine that Hamas attacked Israel, in a horrifying rampage of torture and murder that targeted unarmed people in their homes and at a music festival, and Israel responded with an aggressive attack on a broad list of targets in Gaza. Imagine the last two weeks the same. But with one difference: no pandemic first.

No pandemic means no lockdowns, no prolonged social isolation, no habituation to physical inactivity, no school closures, no devastating wave of anxiety and depression among children, no disgusted parents and the resulting school board confrontations, no parents-are-terrorists NSBA letter, no face-hiding mask mandates with vicious social shaming campaigns over filthy anti-mask scum who want to murder their neighbors, no calculated campaign of degradation against anti-vaxxer trash who should die.

Imagine how we’d be talking to each other this week if we hadn’t been conditioned for degradation and rage-inflected social banishment, you anti-vaxxer MAGA scum! We’ve been taught this. And we’d better unlearn it, by force of will, and demand that others do the same.

Paradoxically, the time has come to be enraged by the enraged, to shun and demean people who want us to shun and demean. The efforts at social conditioning aren't hard to spot. So see them. To borrow from Roddy Piper, put on the glasses.

In California, polling consistently shows that sizable majorities of all voters, not just parents, strongly favor parental notification policies in schools. Across the ideological spectrum, close to no one believes that schools should be having secret discussions about sexual identity with children. Vanishingly few people, even in a thoroughly left-wing state, actively favor a culture of anti-parent secrecy in schools.

So look at how the news frames the debate: “LGBTQ+ students in conservative crosshairs.” This is culture war social conditioning dressed up as news, and it’s shameful. It harms us all a little more every day, like a poison with cumulative toxicity. The subtext of mainstream media product is hate hate hate hate hate, all day and every day. They’re prodding you.

Read calmly, speak calmly, react slowly. None of this implies adopting the capitulationist behavior of the allegedly moderate wing of the House Republican caucus. We need to at least aspire to firm calmness, rejecting the trained response that media and the expert class have pounded into us. This approach won't work with ardent leftists on the site formerly known as Twitter, but it may gradually work IRL. Sorry, “in real life.” Put on the glasses. Get others to put on the glasses. Be aware that MAGA-prodding demagogues like Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) are evil trash who – sorry, are people who are unfortunately acting with malicious intent.

This may take some practice.