Historically, lack of a shared reality has been the rule. The idea that we all inhabit one reality is a construct of modernity, with the rise of mass production, mass media, and mass culture. Before the printing press there was no way for ideas to spread far enough to create a shared reality across a whole nation; indeed, the concept of a nation dates from this time. The closest you got was religion, but religions had a knack for splitting into sects and then bitterly fighting each other - witness the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion that followed. Those wars were specifically fought over whose version of reality (both of which seem very quaint today) was true: each believed that the other was an existential threat to eternity.

The Internet just ushered in post-modernism on a global scale, which undoes a lot of the thought-unification (some would say thought-control) that came with modernity.

Building on the history theme here; plenty of modern revolutions have been preceeded by a rise in polarising media. The french revolution had the pulp paper of Jean-Paul Marat [0], the soviets had Lenin's writings [1], and the Nazis had Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer [2]. It's not difficult to draw comparisons to Bannon's Breitbart here.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Marat 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer

Nit: the first issue of Marat's "L'Ami du peuple" wasn't published until several months after the fall of the Bastille and thus played no role in radicalizing the populace prior to the Revolution.

But the broader point that the French Revolution was proceeded by a radicalized literature [0] is accurate (Sieyes' "What is the Third Estate?" is the most famous work [1]). Though it's contribution to the origins of the Revolution is the matter of some debate [2].

[0] For a good overview, see the work of Robert Darnton, esp. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674536579 [1] https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Qu’est-ce_que_le_tiers_état... (I don't recall if there's a full English translation of this... there are excerpts in Keith Baker's French Revolution reader (U Chicago Press) [2] One of the better treatments of this is https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Cultural-Origins-of-the-Frenc...

Ok but the fall of the bastile was an early milestone, it was over 3 years before the insurrection of august the 10th toppled the king

Thanks this is a great nit pick :) My knowledge on this topic is hazy at best so I jumped to the most famous populist screed writer of the french revolution.

Correlation does not imply causation. Moreover, when hasn't there been polarizing media? There are countless radical publications that did not imminently result in a political revolution. Also, today's afternoon riot doesn't really compare with the aforementioned historical events.

There were gatekeepers before, who generally acted responsibly.

Now that anyone can publish anything, and make it appear reasonably professional, there's much more competition for everyone's attention.

And the media outlets who cater to specific biases, and are outspoken and over-the-top, seem to win the attention.

You could do a pretty good job of bubbling yourself up starting in the 90s with talk radio + Fox News... tons of fun vitriol towards Clinton... my parents have been on that train for a while now.

I think people listening to talk radio on long commutes was a major early driving factor.

A pretty good doc about it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brainwashing_of_My_Dad

Exactly what I've experienced with my dad. He went from someone I idolized who could fix anything and solve any problem to the guy who rants about Muslims coming to kill us while building up a stock pile of guns.

How do you know your dad wasn't always that person? Children tend to be pretty naive about their own parents. Children very rarely have a sophisticated understanding of issues such as politics and race, so they wouldn't even notice problematic aspects of their parents until they become adults themselves.

I remember learning about Dyson spheres from him when I was much younger, but most recently he could only talk about god, guns and fighting against the liberal agenda. He legitimately devolved over the years to a shadow of what he used to be. I know memory is fickle and kids idolize their parents, but I got over that delusion before he went completely off the deep end. He has been a truck driver all my life. My experiences basically mirror those talked about in the documentary.

I feel you; very much the same situation for me, and I can pinpoint it to exactly when my dad started listening to Rush Limbaugh as he drove around in the course of his work. This would have been when he was about the age I am now, so it doesn’t seem right to me that it was his age. He was curious, smart, kind, and optimistic, then came Rush Limbaugh. After that, he had no interest in anything other than talking about how big government was ruining his life and the world.

My theory is pretty simple: anger (and especially anger with an object of blame) is like a drug, and he got addicted. I think it’s as simple as that.

> He was curious, smart, kind, and optimistic, then came Rush Limbaugh.

This is the story I never believe. My reaction to hearing Rush Limbaugh is the desire to shut it off ASAP. Don't you have to willingly invite him into your life? To listen and enjoy and want to listen more, to even "experiment" with the drug of anger with an object of blame, is not very indicative of kind and optimistic IMO.

The thing is, people are complex. They can be very kind... to their own kind, if you know what I mean. Alternatively, some parents can be kind to everyone else's kids and be abusive toward their own. It's almost always nuanced. You may only see side one side of a person, even if you think you know them better than anyone else.

Rush Limbaugh wasn't the beginning though. For example, listening to Coast to Coast AM where they talk about alien stories and conspiracy theories which start off as a way to pass the time when you've got a 12 hour haul across the middle of nowhere and very few other options. Keep in mind, most of this started well before podcasts and Bluetooth so your options were extremely limited across vast sections of the country. I can see how a show like that could appeal to someone intellectually curious about things who initially just dismisses some of the wackier stuff. But that's just the beginning of the radicalization pipeline. No reasonable person just starts on Rush. They work their way up through softer, easier to swallow drugs first.

This is similar to how I view 4chan. I almost went down that path because I started viewing it as an edgy teen and thought it's just fun and memes, no one takes this stuff seriously. But over time it becomes normalized and they do start taking it seriously. Looking at it now and I assume as a "normal" person seeing it for the first time, it's crazy.

> But that's just the beginning of the radicalization pipeline. No reasonable person just starts on Rush.

This sounds more plausible. However, it's in direct conflict with the claim "I can pinpoint it to exactly when my dad started listening to Rush Limbaugh".

I feel that there's a whiff of "Reefer Madness" in the hysteria against partisan media, as if mere exposure will drive unsuspecting innocents mad.

I take your point but I feel like that’s not unlike saying “a good person would never abuse alcohol because they’d know it was a risk to their family’s happiness”. Dad definitely had a lot of frustrations - he was low income and a single parent, and I think the draw of AM talk radio was that it provided an explanation as to why his hardships weren’t his fault.

> that’s not unlike saying a good person would never abuse alcohol

It's more like, I wouldn't say that the vodka distillery is the cause of alcoholism.

By that argument you could say the cigarette industry isn’t the cause of tobacco addiction.

Anyhoo, I agree with you on the politics of the matter, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether my dad was a good person who fell into the sway of bad influences or was a bad person all along.

> By that argument you could say the cigarette industry isn’t the cause of tobacco addiction.

The crucial difference is that cigarettes are targeted at children, and the majority of smokers become addicted before they become adults. Whereas the audience for Limbaugh, Fox News, etc., skews much much older. Everyone is complaining about how their dad was brainwashed, not about how their child was brainwashed. How many smokers start as dads rather than as teenagers?

(To further clarify: Alcoholics are a minority of alcohol drinkers. The majority of drinkers drink simply because they enjoy drinking, and they could quit if they wanted to without withdrawal symptoms. In fact I quit drinking entirely when the pandemic started, for several reasons, and I'm fine, I feel like I could continue abstaining indefinitely with no ill effects. Thus, I don't consider the purpose of the alcohol industry to be hooking junkies, whereas that's almost unavoidable with nicotine, which is medically established to be highly addictive.)

> we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether my dad was a good person who fell into the sway of bad influences or was a bad person all along.

I don't believe in such black and white, good and bad people. As I said, people are complex. "It's almost always nuanced. You may only see side one side of a person". I think we're all flawed, just in different ways. My claim is that Rush Limbaugh is not a magical snake charmer, he's a guy who tells some people what they want to hear, otherwise how do you explain how you yourself are "magically" immune to his charms?

This is the missing piece in the explanatory puzzle about propaganda. It's easy to point out, but you can't jump to conclusions about its effectiveness without explaining why you who are pointing it out were not affected.

It depends on many factors.

If propaganda comes in small amounts, it will not be apparent and one can fall victim of it.

If it comes in a sudden, big quantity, people may react with disgust and be more wary of similar content in smaller amounts.

For an example, younger people can easily be effected watching videos with slight racism. Yet if you were to put a straight up neonazi speech in front of them, they would probably be disgusted.

> it provided an explanation as to why his hardships weren’t his fault.

I think that’s the core of the problem on both sides.

There are other factors though that can't be discounted. It's indisputable that he's older now. It's quite natural that many people get "worse" when they get older, a phenomenon that has always existed. Also, people raising children at home have different priorities and interests than "empty nesters" whose children have grown and left home. It's unsurprising that your father's behavior around you would be very different now as an adult than when you were young.

How exactly did he get into listening to that stuff? Were there no other choices? Not music? Not NPR?

For a lot of us it happened in adulthood, where we were definitely aware of our parents' beliefs and values before, as they changed, and after their radicalization.

That explanation doesn't quite fit with historical opinion polls. It wasn't until 2000 that strong dislike of the opposing party shot up, and dislike had been slowly growing before that. But it is possible that the sudden change in trajectory was delayed by the 4 year election cycle, which puts politics in the fore of people's minds for durations that are too short for contempt to really snowball.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/1-feelings-a...

I don't understand why we're all pretending we don't know what the cause of the partisan divide was. It's all very clearly documented.

https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-created

> If Fox News had a DNA test, it would trace its origins to the Nixon administration. In 1970, political consultant Roger Ailes and other Nixon aides came up with a plan to create a new TV network that would circumvent existing media and provide "pro-administration" coverage to millions. "People are lazy," the aides explained in a memo. "With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you." Nixon embraced the idea, saying he and his supporters needed "our own news" from a network that would lead "a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition." Alas, his fantasy network did not come into being at that time, and the 37th president was soon engulfed in the Watergate scandal. At first, Republicans dismissed the scandal as a Washington Post "witch hunt." But then the White House tapes proved beyond doubt that Nixon had used the levers of government to pursue vendettas against his opponents and cover up his extensive skulduggery. Disgusted GOP leaders, including Sen. Howard Baker of the Senate Watergate committee, chose principles over party. Nixon was forced to resign.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gi...

> “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”

Thanks for sharing those sources. The HN crowd overestimates the impact of social media and under estimates the impact of Fox News and Fox News clones. The typical Fox News viewer watches 4 HOURS every day: https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-august-ratings-most-w...

implying CNN and so on have any different motifs? Amusing.

Please show me the evidence that CNN was created in response to a Democratic scandal in order to consolidate their messaging and provide a friendly news outlet. Until then, you're "enlightened centrist" and "both sides bad" narrative reeks of conservative FUD.

John Stewart spend many years talking about how CNN was built for 9/11.

It's there to treat everything as 9/11 and blow every story put of proportion

He was off by at least a decade. It was the television of the first Iraq war that first captured the continuous news media.

So you're admitting that it's not the same and that CNN wasn't created explicitly by Democrats as a response to a scandal in an attempt to control their narrative for decades? Thanks for that.

Yeah but now you dont even have to leave the house to stock up on chef boyardi and prepare for the rapture.

I heard the argument that US used to more homogeneous ( which was reinforced by the media forcing the same values ). Now that the franchise increased with more groups trying to grab a slice, the values clashed. In other words, the people were always there, but were either not visible, ignored or marginalized.

I am willing to buy this argument.

All the stuff you hear about today has been around before the internet too. AM radio was the home of these lunatics before (still is).

Nah, any form of mass communication works. Newspapers (and other written publications) started plenty of wars after the printing press was invented, radio caused a few social experiments starting in the 1930s, and TV starting in the 60s.