When worlds don’t collide

Created
Fri, 11/08/2023 - 00:30
Updated
Fri, 11/08/2023 - 00:30
How much is “engineered division”? Click-bait coverage of Trump rallies makes it easy to believe that the country is hopelessly divided. Or at least the 70% from the fringe-right 30%. If Trumpers don’t get their way, it’s civil war, etc., etc. As if these two below will lock and load and defend march to war behind some 21st-century Robert E. Lee. Capitalism and democracy being strange bedfellows, it’s those voices that get air time because they draw eyeballs and generate clicks. But is it really as bad as quickie profiles of the blowhard right make it seem? Under cover of mullet, John Russell of The Holler discovered that there is more common ground between the left and right than footage appearing on social media and in news coverage makes it seem. “Solidarity is waiting to have a moment.” “You would never know [this]” about people at a Trump rally, Russell explains, “if you just watched Fox or CNN.” “They’re trying to divide people,” one young woman says of the dominance of hot-button social issues. Russell writes: Would you expect to hear about how anti-trust laws were used to break up the telephone monopoly, Bell Systems, in the 80s and that it might be time to dust them off again? Or about small businesses being squeezed out by corporate consolidation? Or how the world’s largest asset managers, Blackrock and Vanguard, command nearly $20 trillion dollars of wealth? I went to the Trump rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, and heard all of this…