That fact lies at the heart of our deepening national crisis, which goes beyond political disagreement or racial conflict into existential or epistemological realms. There was nothing exceptional about this week’s body count, sadly, although the Dallas attacks unquestionably got the entire nation’s attention. But certain aspects of our current situation are new and striking. There was a certain grim hilarity to Donald Trump’s post-Dallas Facebook lament that “Our nation has become too divided,” which is roughly like Count Dracula complaining that all the pretty girls in Transylvania have become vampires. But you can’t argue with the sentiment. We are an intensely divided country — in terms of race, culture and ideology, of course, but also in terms of basic facts and how to understand them. This profound disconnection is not without precedent, because American history is full of echoes. History also teaches us that such division holds great danger. [...]
For better or worse, we have abandoned the notion of a shared mainstream culture and embraced a radical subjectivity worthy of 1980s critical theory. Experts and authority figures can be cast aside anytime we don’t like what they say; science is understood as a matter of opinion, and the difference between science and opinion is itself a matter of opinion. Some aspects of that iconoclasm have been healthy, like the realization that we have all been shaped by cultural forces we may not perceive, and that none of us is free of bias. But the technology that has connected us and made us so self-aware has also isolated us in electronic cocoons that magnify our existing prejudices and reflect them back at us. Archie Bunker minus the running arguments with Meathead, plus Fox News, leads to Donald Trump. [...]
As we can see from the reactions to this week’s dreadful events on the competing news channels and social media, it’s not overstating the case at all to say that we have a “liberal” reality and a “conservative” reality. (I would argue that both words have been stripped of their original meanings and are virtually useless, but never mind.) In one version, the greatest nation in the world has come under sustained attack both at home and abroad, and its enemies — big-government socialists, the identity-politics thought police, Black Lives Matter, feminists and gays and Spanish-speaking immigrants and “radical Islam” and Barack Hussein Obama — share a common agenda and are quite likely working together. In another, evil corporations and embittered white racists have forged a nightmare coalition devoted to rolling back every progressive reform of the last 80 years and turning 21st-century America into a “Doctor Who”-style mashup of Victorian England, “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
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