I'm confused. Is Hillary Clinton the architect of a New Jerusalem, or is she the fifth horsewoman of the apocalypse? It really depends on who you listen to. There was Morgan Freeman narrating her life story in his God voice at the Democratic National Convention: "How many times will she leave her mark?" he intoned (there's only so often you can legitimately use intoned, and this was one of them). "How many ways will she light up the world?"
A commentator on Fox News, not having received the celestial memo, declared the speech "a disaster." The creator of the Dilbert cartoon, Scott Adams, wrote on his blog that the gyno-fabulous convention had caused the man-parts of an entire country to wither as if they were autumn leaves. "The Democratic National Convention is probably lowering testosterone levels all over the country. Literally, not figuratively. And since testosterone is a feel-good chemical for men, I think the Democratic convention is making men feel less happy." As of this writing, America's men had not yet driven their emasculated, fuel-efficient cars off a cliff all at once.
Ms. Clinton received a thumbs-up from The New York Times: "Few politicians, and certainly not her opponent, have the intellectual heft that she brings to the race to the White House." The National Review, however, had a somewhat less generous view of the Democratic candidate, calling her "a petty, grasping, meretricious time-server whose incompetence and dishonesty have been proved everywhere from Little Rock to Benghazi."
I'm firmly in Ms. Clinton's camp, for her progressive policies, for her feminism, her grit, her expertise and her studied indifference to modulating her voice. Not everyone feels this way. It rankles her supporters, to put it mildly. They are a defensive group and they retweet and like each other's Facebook posts and live in a dangerous, fragile bubble where they fail to recognize the strength and conviction of the opposition, whose beliefs seem so ridiculous. How can she possibly be running neck and neck in the polls when her competition is a radioactive isotope?
But she is running neck and neck, and as many commenters in the United States have pointed out, it's time to start looking into the enemy's heart and trying to understand what's there. As filmmaker Michael Moore wrote to his fellow progressives in a blog post called 5 Reasons Trump Will Win, "You are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president.… You need to exit that bubble right now."
Much has been written about the polarization of the U.S. electorate and its fragmentation into self-reinforcing information hubs (the same thing may be happening in Canada, but not yet to the same degree). The ideologically committed get their comforting pats on the back from fewer and fewer news sources, and mistrust the ones that present opposing views. In a sweeping survey of U.S. media habits in 2014, the Pew Trust found that "when it comes to getting news about politics and government, liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds." Almost half of conservatives use Fox News as their primary information source. Almost half of self-described liberals said they'd blocked people online or ended friendships over differing political views.
There's a symphony of blocking and muting and unfollowing going on out there, and people wonder why they don't understand each other, and why grievance and anger seem to filter into the political consciousness unannounced. Comedian Seth Meyers sharpened his knife on the reckless "Bernie or Bust" supporters who say "they don't know anybody" who's voting for Donald Trump. "Oh really?" he responded. "Did you ask everybody in your yoga class? Did you check with the entire drum circle? Because guess what? You know that crazy drunk uncle you only see at Thanksgiving? Well, this country is about 48-per-cent crazy uncles, and it's about to be Thanksgiving all day, every day."
It seems hopelessly old-fashioned, these days, to advocate listening to opposing views, especially when those views are so shrill/privileged/elitist/unpatriotic (feel free to pick and choose any and all that fit). The consequence is that you don't just misunderstand your foes, you woefully underestimate them. The influential technology writer Clay Shirky, watching the Republican National Convention, wrote a series of tweets outlining the dangers of willful blindness at a time when the stakes are terrifyingly high. People needed to understand that their group-think only pertained to one particular group, which was smaller than it seemed from the inside. "We've brought fact-checkers to a culture war," he wrote.
I watched both conventions flipping from blue-state commentary to red, and yes, it made my purple head nearly explode. Mr. Trump's news conference, in which he invited the Russians over for a hacking play date, was "off-the-charts crazy," according to Rob Reiner on Daily Kos, but "brilliant" if you listened to Rush Limbaugh's syndicated radio show. Michelle Obama's speech about waking up "in a house built by slaves" was beautiful and stirring by most accounts, though Fox's Bill O'Reilly tried to insist that those slaves were "well-fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government."
It was an enlightening exercise, a bit like eavesdropping on Sauron's war council. In this crazy summer, know thy enemy continues to be excellent advice.