Opinion: Like many Americans, I’ve been dreading the next six months for at least the last six months. The run-up to an election that could be US democracy’s death knell will be awash in bad news at home and abroad, disinformation from every direction, and way too much Donald Trump spewing from every media outlet onto every device imaginable.
Fortunately, my son has found me a way out that, if enough people took it, might just get us closer to that more perfect union one hears so much about.
Max is a community organiser working primarily on housing-related issues in the developer-friendly city of Colorado Springs. After years of regularly reading the New York Times and Washington Post, he’s about a year into a self-imposed boycott of national and international news.
His thinking goes like this: many people consume such news believing that an informed electorate is essential to a healthy democracy. The problem is, whether one binges to the right on Fox News or to the left on MSNBC, our current national media ecosystem and its parade of bad news: 1) harms our collective mental health; 2) fills the coffers of media and other corporate giants; and 3) distracts us from the types of political work that could create meaningful solutions to the problems we face.
As Max wrote, “The things we feel like we can do after reading scary national news – vote, give money to candidates, volunteer for campaigns, write to our congressional reps, etc – succeed only in preserving an unequal, unhealthy, and highly precarious status quo. Even when our preferred candidates for national office win, wealth inequality deepens, climate change progresses and our cultural divisions grow more pronounced.”
Wealth inequality in the US has been a skyrocketing growth industry since the 1970s. The share of wealth held by the top 1% rose from 30% in 1989 to 39% in 2016, while the share held by the bottom 90% fell from 33% to 23%.
The brand of toxic capitalism that dominates 21st century life in the US – of which the national media is a critical player – creates a zero-sum game that convinces working-class Americans that any gains made by one group necessarily come at the expense of another (see The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee). White Americans are told they are in competition with black and brown ones and that any public investment will go to undeserving immigrants and criminals, which makes possible an agenda that prioritises deepening inequality.
So Max is practising his faith in the power of organising hyper-locally, believing that, “counterintuitive as it may seem, in order to address the multiple and overlapping crises facing our nation and world, we need to, for the time being, ignore their enormity and focus on how they’re showing up in our communities. By doing so, we can build the social movement infrastructure we need to address our problems on the scale they operate at in the future. Having sufficiently convinced myself that the most important thing I can do to address all the problems in the world is build movement infrastructure in my community, I can feel okay about disengaging from the national news cycle.
“By basing my political life in conversations with my neighbours, people of all backgrounds and political persuasions, our country’s divisions feel less pronounced, less insurmountable.”
To be clear, making sure Trump stays out of the White House is still the single most important item on US democracy’s to-do list. None of the above should dissuade anyone from working to defeat him. But while I realise I’m far from objective, I think Max is onto something.
It can be liberating to focus your efforts on the issues closer to your front door, and to realise that if more of us did so, as opposed to doom scrolling, a foundation for a more just and equitable nation could be built.
