The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Mickey Huff & Nolan Higden about the dangerous bifurcation of the United States into antagonistic tribes that can no longer communicate
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Mickey Huff & Nolan Higden about the dangerous bifurcation of the United States into antagonistic tribes that can no longer communicate
Appears in this episode
Democratic debate and dialogue have all but vanished in the United States. There is widespread censorship imposed by social media platforms, private corporations about which we know nothing, while they know everything about us. Mainstream news outlets champion censorship and deplatforming in the name of democracy. Brian Seltzer, for example, on CNN justified banning Donald Trump form social media because, he said, “reducing a liar’s reach is not the same as censoring freedom of speech.” Sean Hannity on Fox News spent 40 minutes talking over former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, the same tactic CNBC host Rick Santelli used to shut down debate about COVID-19. The impulse is to silence opponents rather than engage in dialogue and debate. This extreme polarization, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in How Democracies Die, is one of the primary signs of a dying democracy. Nolan Higdon, a lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz and Mickey Huff, the director of Project Censored and president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation, join me to discuss this dangerous inability to communication among antagonistic groups and their new book Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy.
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Mickey Huff & Nolan Higden about the dangerous bifurcation of the United States into antagonistic tribes that can no longer communicate
The lack of job security most Americans experience has certainly contributed to the absence of political dialogue in daily life, I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned. When you spend the majority of your waking and productive hours with coworkers, work is a natural place to engage in political conversation. However, when the job is tenuous and you live a couple paychecks away from the street, how could you risk holding an unpopular opinion or showing open disagreement?
From my own workplace experiences there also frequently exists in management a sick obsession with obedience. I encountered it at the dead-end jobs I’ve worked and I’ve encountered it as a pilot – a discipline where blind obedience directly contradicts the principles of safety and ethics. When you choose integrity in these environments the consequence is siloing, harassment, and removal (if you don’t remove yourself first). When jobs are scarce and job security is nonexistent, those work environments turn the coworker who could otherwise be your ally into an informant and an enemy. The exchange of political ideas cannot take place where disagreement is actively punished, and if your choice is between disagreeing or keeping a roof over your head you don’t actually have a choice. It’s coercion.
To contrast this, the environment I now work in has a culture of open and active criticism. Everyone is always being criticized, all the time, tactfully or through a stream of obscenity. None of it is personal and most of it is entertaining. Ostensibly this activity is widely encouraged to increase safety, and certainly if you let people voice their opinions they will do so enthusiastically.
The side effect of this openness and willingness to piss each other off has been a vigorous and honest political exchange. One of the few places I’ve ever encountered it.
Most of us are not unionized, and we all lose our jobs anyway when the rains come in October, so job security isn’t really part of the calculation (union activity would benefit us in other ways). For other workplaces the security and solidarity afforded by a union could be the difference between a barren, oppressive and antisocial environment and one where a political dialogue can flourish. Seems like a strong remedy for polarization, actually. I wonder why unions are not more common...
As a former war correspondent , Chris why is there a virtual black out of coverage on the war in Yemen. Is it a Sunni Shite issue?