When we were exposed to opposing ideas, there's a better chance than not that it was in a defanged and castrated form published with the ascent of corporate gatekeepers.
It's easy for a liberal to have a debate with a conservative when they values have a 98% overlap, and their disputes are largely inconsequential questions of cultural aesthetic which demand only minute changes.
I do think one difference is the chance of repeat engagements. If you and I are neighbors and debate over dinner, well, I'm going to see you frequently. We both need to be kind enough to continue that relationship.
Online, we may debate and never bump into each other again. We can block and ignore. It's to my interest to behave greedily and "dunk" on you, insult you, etc to try and score fake internet points since it's a single engagement with spectators.
Mass media and educational institutions bounded our collective capacity for political thought through their selective exposition of certain ideas, meaning people in the era were less likely to have mutually unintelligible or incompatible beliefs about the ordering of society, and that they were similarly incapable of conceiving of such a political enemy (communists notwithstanding)
As a result, we never collectively developed the rhetorical tools or emotional capacity to consume or have reasoned discussions that tackled the fundamental aspects of our culture or its organization that conflicted with our preconceived notions, because we never truly had to.
Social media has given air to ideas that would have historically been suffocated in the cradle or domesticated long before we were ever exposed to them, and as a result I don't think it'd so much degraded our capacity for political dialogue inasmuch as it has how sheltered we've collectively been, and how much less refined and rational we actually were.
The irony of downvoting this...
The narrative says:
- all unequal outcomes are necessarily because of racism - that racism is at the foundation of every aspect of American culture and economy - that America is irredeemably racist and any evidence to the contrary is only given by racists - that no culture can have problems in of themselves, even if they intersect with systemic racism and oppression, without them being wholly laid at the feet of racism. African American criminals murder asian americans in the street? Blame the racism of white people.
Framing CRT merely as a movement against racism is
A. Complete b.s. and is missing just how far it's extending the debate and moving the goalpost so far that the only thing someone part of a "privileged" skin-tone can do is self-flagellate, while asking for forgiveness as if their whiteness is akin to some religious "original sin" they must atone for, forever.
B. Ignoring the racism that CRT itself perpetuates through it's increased push for segregated ceremonies, separate national anthems, etc.. Not to mention it's continued racism of low expectations in lowering academic standards .
Critical racial theory (CRT) is a Marxist based theory that views everything as a racial conflict that can't be (fundamentally) resolved. White people will always be racist against non-Whites, anything and everything is entrenched in racial conflict, and even innocuous actions and conversations are a part of that racial conflict. CRT specifically is guilty of a literal black and white viewpoint.
I find the theory illiberal, poorly supported and a mess of badly defined unclear terms including it's basis of racial identities.
Listening to other people and engaging in debate used to be the standard. Somewhere about when Twitter became popular we quite lost that value as a culture.
One of my issues today with CRT is that questioning it as a narrative is now "aggression". I generally regard all unquestionable narratives the same.