I hate to be a bearer of bad news, but the political bias is everywhere. It’s time to get off the bandwagon.
Sheep follow on either side of a political spectrum. The center eroded, disappeared, and like Joan Didion used to say, “it does not hold”. That is the biggest problem of today, and it will stand as the biggest problem of tomorrow as our views and expectations have become purely partisan. That’s how echo chambers get formed and become easily manipulated. Just ask Dom Cummings.
The story of the American election starts with Britain. It’s important to remember that the people who designed and led the “Take Back Control” campaign for Brexit did not come from Britain’s “neck of the woods”. They were Oxbridge and Eton educated. They figured out how to play the social networks and they’ve all read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” Trump was only a more simplistic continuation of that, with his “America first” and “Take Our Country Back”.
What about the independents?
The Independents make up the biggest portion of American society and they are the ones who are truly forgotten and only remembered when election time hits tick-tock.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
America needs a healthy center. That’s the base of informed, deliberate decision making. The only safeguard against political manipulation of any kind.
No one should be above critique and our sense of right and wrong should only know a moral, not a partisan base. That, unfortunately, is not the most popular view, as the world sees you only with or against Trump. However, the fact of the matter is, there is much more to it than a simple dichotomy.
Are you on the bandwagon?
When the Democratic leadership in Virginia got media visibility for “blackface”, it took close to twenty-four hours for the non-Republican press to form a position on racism. Really? What happened, in reality, was that a line was formed awaiting a signal from the Democratic leadership to declare their position. What ensued was a bandwagon of echo-chamber opinions and whoever pretends that this did not happen is undermining the intelligence of an independent voter. Bias is everywhere and is doing a great disservice to the public debate.
In a political system that America turned into after Trump was elected, the hardlines have been formed and in most of the cases, with good reason. Trump is bad for democracy. There’s no question about it. But we cannot condemn a lie when it suits us or fits our political preferences.
There are different degrees of the harm a lie causes, but let’s face it. Elizabeth Warren has ridden the system of success and rose to the echelons of the political power by claiming her Native American origins. She is a smart woman who took a great angle to get herself out of the controversy that followed her claims, but, regardless, a lie is a lie. The future president of America should be someone who is better than that.
There are plenty of good candidates, emerging stars of the 2020 election. They all have a chance to make their case to the American voter, but let’s measure everyone by the same standard. Honesty should not know political bias and how someone treats people is something that even teenagers evaluate on the first date. We should not hold the future President of the United States to any lower standard than that.