Dissense

Nothing is wrong with the Internet.  You may now return to your RSS feed of vicious partisan screeds.

Not so fast, you say.  The Internet is dangerous.  Some people camp out in a small corner of the web where everyone agrees with them.  These same folks, presumably, have no friends or relatives with opposing views and have never seen a televised political debate.

Do such people even exist?  Probably not, outside of an apocalyptic death cult in New Mexico.

Let’s be honest. Most of us are exposed to a healthy dose (and more) of opposing views.  And most of us acknowledge – okay, whine about – this all the time.  If anything, we overstate the pervasiveness of the other side’s beliefs in order to paint ourselves as the oppressed minority.  Each of us believes himself to be the lone visionary, the truth-teller whose hauntingly beautiful cries go unheard in a cacophony of idiocy.

I live in New York City, where liberals far outnumber non-liberals – the largest city in this bounteous country that recently elected the most left-wing President in my lifetime.  Yet, to hear the average liberal talk, her West Village 2-bedroom is a solitary beacon of light in the darkness of greed, bigotry, and habitat-polluting materialism that is modern America.

Meanwhile, conservatives clamor for equal time in the media and on college campuses, casting themselves as a beleaguered minority even as George W. Bush had two terms in the White House.  And was promptly followed into office by a guy who spends just as much on health-care entitlements, protectionism and Middle East military operations.

But Obama is totally different, you say.  He has a winning smile.

What about libertarians? Now there’s a true minority in America and everywhere else on the planet. Yet Atlas Shrugged is selling like hotcakes. Ron Paul is a household name.  If libertarianism doesn’t resonate with the average person, you can’t really blame it on underexposure.  (A libertarian like me might suggest that you blame it on greed, envy, and other unsavory components of human nature. But that’s a post for another day.)

So why does this myth persist that we’re all bunkered down in our own little echo chambers, and that the Internet is somehow radicalizing us?  In part, because we want to believe it about the other side.  We reassure ourselves with smug little insinuations that our political opponents “walk around with blinders on,” blissfully ignorant of the pure, unadulterated facts that we know to be true.  “If they only knew what we know,” we sigh, “they would change their minds in an instant.  If they’d just read this book or that column in last week’s paper, or watch this clip on Youtube….”

So the next time you hear some guy whining about the polarization of discourse, dare to be curious:  Does he really wish everyone would move toward the center?  Or are his feathers ruffled because we don’t all share his worldview?

No, Virginia, people don’t change that dramatically.  At least, not very often.  There is a doggone persistent path dependency in a person’s political beliefs.  It renders us – you and me both, dear reader – all but immune to changing our minds in the face of even the most tactful opposite-side-of-the-spectrum Youtube clip email forward.

So when do political views take root?  At puberty, when sixth-grade teachers assign “controversial” novels to lure our attention away from the opposite sex?  In early childhood, when Mom and Dad indoctrinate us?  Or does the decisive moment date back even earlier, to the womb?  Will we someday isolate the gene that dictates whether you like Bob Herbert or Mark Steyn?

No matter what determines your political stripes, my experience with you political junkies is that you’ll cling to them the same way you cling to your local sports team.  Sure, a handful of you will someday switch sides – but you’ve probably harbored mixed feelings all along, and it was only a matter of time.