noisy extremes and the silent middle

One of the most destructive things about the internet is that it has distorted people’s views of political realities. It has led a lot of people, both self-described members of the left and self-described members of the right, to mistake the internet for reality. The reason for this is simple. They spend too much time in online ideological echo chambers. And they isolate themselves still further by being unwilling to engage in good faith with those of differing views.

Even worse they mistake the political internet, which is only a small subset of the online world, for reality.

The political internet attracts people with extreme views. Views that they cannot express anywhere else. In the pre-internet days anyone who argued for some of the extreme positions that are commonplace on the political internet would have found himself shunned by decent society. But now people with often hair-raising beliefs can find others  online who share those beliefs. So they start believing that their extremist views are socially acceptable.

What they don’t realise is that the handful of like-minded they find online are often the only people in society who share their beliefs. Normal people just don’t think that way.

The internet is not the real world. And the political internet is definitely not the real world. But it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it is. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that online political sites represent a sampling of the real world. They don’t. Such sites are hang-outs for misfits (and I freely admit to being a misfit) and unstable people and for people consumed by irrational fears and hatreds. It’s a magnet for people with marginal political and social views – marginal political and social views on both the left and the right.

It’s a particular problem for anyone who rejects political correctness. Any sane person should reject political correctness. In real life it’s increasingly difficult to do so openly. So people go online and gravitate toward far right forums. But what they often find there are not moderate reasoned rejections of the dominant ideology of political correctness but extreme and often completely unrealistic opposing views.

The end result is the perception that the political middle ground no longer exists, that most people are either extreme Social Justice Warriors or alt-righters.

But is the political middle ground really vanishing? Political extremists make a lot of noise (especially on the internet) but how many people actually support extremist positions? The extreme Social Justice Warriors and the alt-right are actually small minorities. I suspect that in reality most people support far more moderate positions. Most people do not want extreme solutions. On balance they’re probably correct to be suspicious of extreme solutions. The problem is that moderates generally do not bother with the political internet, so while most people are moderates they’re effectively invisible on the political internet.

As a result the perception that society is bitterly divided politically gains ground. Society is divided politically and those divisions can get bitter but it’s important to avoid exaggerating the extent of the divide.