Was it Polarization or Propaganda?

Abstract

Here are two different explanations for the apocalyptic state of American politics. According to one story, we have been subject to systemic polarization. Social mobility and media filtering have divided us into like-minded enclaves, which irrationally boosts our self-confidence. This turns out to be a deeply symmetrical story. According to the other story, we have been subject to propaganda. Certain media sources have been systematically spreading misinformation. This story is usually told asymmetrically. I argue that current evidence better supports the asymmetrical propaganda story. I then diagnose the popularity of the polarization story. Though many are eager to accept debunking accounts of the political extremes, they often fail to adequately consider analogous debunking accounts of the political center. But the mechanisms of polarization should also effect the center. And the tendency to leap to accept a systemic polarization story, without sufficient empirical evidence, itself bears the mark of motivated reasoning.

Democracy and the Epistemic Problems of Political Polarization

“…In these cases, the enclaves and psychological dynamics associated with GPT do not necessarily lead to beliefs that are false or less reliable, but instead work to protect against the wider biases and inequalities that can influence democratic debate. They provide "safe spaces," which allow for the production of political positions and concepts that may have otherwise struggled to emerge in an imperfect democratic system (Nguyen 2021). Although often absent in more recent accounts (e.g., Talisse 2019), Sunstein (2000, 111) often emphasized the potential of group polarization to produce positive contributions.…”

Fake News, Conspiracy Theorizing, and Intellectual Vice

“…For a more recent discussion, see Network Propaganda ). I offer a discussion of their view in (Nguyen 2021c).…”

Friends, enemies, and agonists: Politics, morality and media in the COVID-19 conjuncture

“…It enables common sense thematic connections to be made between different experiences and anecdotes. It operates as a "meta-discursive" frame (Jaworski, Coupland and Galasinski, 2004), echoing familiar laments about the corrosive effects of ideological polarization (Nguyen, 2021b;Kreiss and McGregor, 2021). The theme is explicated in Cohen's framing of the first on-screen comment.…”

“…The reluctance to attribute responsibility to specific political forces becomes a formulaic journalistic script for amplifying a mediatized culture war narrative where the extremes of left and right (i.e. "both sides") are depicted as equally culpable for the problem of political polarization (Nguyen, 2021b). Read through these sedimented discourses, the culture of "toxic debate" described by the programme conceivably satisfies different ready-to-hand contextual explanations.…”

“…Within a discourse theoretical framework, the moralized antagonisms described in the BBC report and BMJ article can be conceptualized as sedimented antagonisms: features of today’s mediatized polity that have become normalized, because of the familiarity of moral panics about the polarized nature of a social-media driven public culture (Nguyen, 2021b). The notion of a ‘sedimented antagonism’ (Marchart, 2018) is a somewhat paradoxical notion for discourse theorists, because antagonistic representations are usually framed as disruptive of the sedimented order.…”