Friends,

Next week, I’m publishing a detailed response to the popular argument that focusing on polarization and its pathologies functions as a dangerous kind of both-sidesism that “normalizes” and, hence, enables fascism. I’m on holiday this week, so I’m re-publishing my analysis of American polarization from last year, drawing on the work of one of my favourite philosophers, Jeffrey Friedman:

An epistemological crisis

Both political tribes in the USA believe the country is confronting an epistemological crisis. More specifically, they think the other tribe has lost its mind.

The blue tribe observes a Republican Party and conservative media ecosystem poisoned by disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, populism, and post-truth. In their optimistic moments, they aim to address this crisis through various technocratic measures. By censoring, moderating, nudging, fact-checking, and inoculating a public infected with falsehoods and lies, they hope to drag America back to a golden age of objectivity in which people agreed on facts, even when they disagreed on values. In their more pessimistic moments, they treat the red tribe as a dangerous cult, an inexplicably psychotic force in American politics that can, at best, be kept away from power.

The red tribe observes a very different reality: a coalition of smug liberal elites, biased mainstream media outlets, and weak sheeple—so-called “NPCs” (non-player characters)—all infected by wokeism, virtue signalling, and left-wing activism masquerading as “expertise” and “science”. In their optimistic moments, they hope the crisis can be solved by exposing progressive insanity and handing out red