The Internet Cocoon

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert writes an interesting piece on how the internet contributes to the rise of political extremism. That might seem a little counterintuitive; after all, the internet brings everyone closer together, right? Well, right...and wrong. Yes, it does bring people together. Unfortunately, it unites the same kinds of people--it allows conservatives to surround themselves with other conservatives and liberals with other liberals.

They end up strengthening one another's biases. It's a well known fact that if you put two conservatives--or two liberals--in a room together and get them started talking politics, they'll end up in a never-ending cycle of agreement. The first guy says he doesn't like Barack Obama; the second guy, wanting to prove his worth as a conservative, disagrees: he HATES Barack Obama. And so it continues from there.

The internet, then, allows not only for the growth of extremism, but also to the spread of malicious and downright false political rumors. Kolbert cites the "birther" movement as a perfect example. There's plenty of evidence out there definitively proving that Barack Obama was born in the United States and not in Kenya or Switzerland or wherever. But because birthers tend to frequent only hard-core conservative websites, they never see this evidence. Even if they do they dismiss it as a liberal propaganda. These kinds of bizarre political movements couldn't exist without the internet.

But I think Kolbert makes a serious mistake when she argues that this paranoid extremism is a purely right-wing phenomenon. She writes:

Several decades ago, a detachment of the American right cut itself loose from reason, and it has been drifting along happily ever since. If the birthers are more evidently kooky than the global-warming “skeptics” or the death-panellers or the supply-siders or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they are, in their fundamental disregard for the facts, actually mainstream...The historian Richard Hofstadter’s description of the far right in the era of Barry Goldwater could apply equally well today: “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Sorry, Miss Kolbert, but Hofstadter's argument was outdated two decades ago. The conservative movement is just a troglodytic reaction to the modern age. We're not all tin-foiled-hatted kooks on the lookout for black helicopters. I would add that political paranoia has plenty of practitioners on the left. A liberal friend of mine once solemnly informed me that Halliburton was building "concentration camps" in the Great Plains to house dissidents. And what is the 9/11 "truther" movement, if not the left-wing equivalent of the birthers?

Stupidity knows no color, creed, or ideology. There are stupid liberals and stupid conservatives. There are stupid libertarians, stupid anarchists, stupid socialists, and stupid centrists. That's how politics works and always will work.

WILL SCHULTZ