On Liberal Alarmism
Rachel Dec argues that 2020’s culture of liberal outrage, fueled by click-bait media, fosters unproductive bottom-up thinking unable to address real crises.
Liberals have never been more alarmed — or more helpless. Between the pandemic and Trump’s post-election power grab, each push notification delivers freshly outrageous bad news. But what’s there to be done about these largely disconnected narrative threads, all of which imply the world is about to end, besides have an anxiety attack?
When directed appropriately, liberal alarm can be a powerful tool. From Watergate, we got campaign finance rules; from “An Inconvenient Truth,” we got public buy-in for climate policy. But when the only media narrative that consistently sells is “look at how impossibly bad things have gotten,” it becomes infeasible to construct a narrative of meaningful reform, let alone assemble these worries in a way that could remedy them.
Incredibly unsurprisingly, the click-based media industry generates its ad revenue by exploiting our worst fears. So in a time of such enduring crises, we are barraged with more and more crippling stories of devastation until we are forced to “turn off the news.” And it’s even harder because how deeply addicting the media is — Twitter users find themselves “doom-scrolling” at such a rate that Merriam-Webster added the term to the dictionary this year. And now, real heavyweights of public commentary, like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, are abandoning public interest writing to join the increasingly profitable trend of selling commentary. Nothing shows more about the relentless frenzy of depressing news than our inability to interpret it on our own.
All of this scrambles the brains of well-intentioned liberals to such an extent that top-down versus bottom-up advocacy is indiscernible.
Imagine seeing a person at the grocery store wearing a mask incorrectly. You are familiar with the severity of coronavirus transmission; you just saw the headline that 200,000 people have died this year. Your gut reaction may be that of shock, anger, or blame. How dare they! You might even tweet about how stupid this person may be. But you’d be missing the broader point — in countless counties across the country with under-funded public health programs, people don’t realize that the virus can be transmitted through their nose. Your desire to mock or correct this person produces little positive change; had you assembled the narrative that there are thousands of people who need to be told to wear their masks over their noses, maybe your concern would be more impactful, more sympathetic.
Admittedly, there is not a lot of hope for big-thinking policy in the Trump era. In mostly delegating a global pandemic to state governors, Trump has left the media to fixate on his personality and his endless dramas—directly at the expense of a media narrative focused around fixable shortcomings of his pandemic-related relief programs. The difference between these two? The latter informs the public of an issue that can be remedied; while the former merely leaves you angry. Alarmism doesn’t only pay the media’s bills; it also makes criticism of Trump so “noisy” that it loses any meaning.
And when the media isn’t being alarmist, it is usually calling out the absurdity of alarmism in the first place. This isn’t much better. For example, the strain of supercilious rationalism that often permeates just-left-of-center media very naturally sought to avoid the early coronavirus panic of March — the same panic that drove people to buy paper goods in bulk, lest there be a shortage somewhere in your Costco’s toilet paper supply chain. On January 31 of this year, Vox tweeted: “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” Eventually, Vox and other outlets came around to recognizing the severity of the pandemic and changed their tune — by very productively deleting their earlier tweet — illustrating how shallow-rooted the sentiment was in the first place. Alarmism-or-not dialogue is pointless; we need to shift the conversation entirely.
So what does that look like? All politics is local, yes, but we still need to be thinking about big ways to address what’s wrong. If you’re mad about Trump trying to steal the election, directing your outrage over Giuliani’s incoherent presser is neither meaningful nor conducive to long-term strategizing. If you’re worried about the dangers of catching COVID-19, it’s far less important to chastise fraternity parties at the University of Alabama than it does to recognize the importance of keeping people at home through expanded unemployment insurance.
Expecting any level of corporate self-restraint is impossible in an industry whose entire profit model is rooted in the exploitation of human emotion. So if the media is going to confuse our priorities until we are in an angry, nervous stupor, perhaps we need to direct our limited bandwidth towards that which we can actually improve. It’s one of the few things that we, as outraged liberals, have left to do.
-Rachel Dec
Join us next week for more commentary from the rest of the QCPG team: Sidhant Wadhera, Jimmy Miotto, Rohit Joshi, Connor O’Brien, and Rob Mitchell.