Scott Rhee's Reviews > How America Lost Its Mind: The Assault on Reason That’s Crippling Our Democracy (Volume 15)

8/30/2024 addendum: the title kinda says it all...

Deep down, we know the answer to the question. And the answer isn't "Trump" or "Biden", as much as our gut response wants it to be. Because our gut response is a product of a whole slew of factors that have hardened each of us, politically, into the people we have become.

The answer to "How America Lost Its Mind", according to Thomas E. Patterson, is a complicated one. It's a finely-constructed combination of a political atmosphere predicated on stonewalling rather than compromise, a media that has become so hyper-politicized that true objectivity is non-existent, a populace that has become so enflamed with nationalism and anti-intellectualism, and a rampant demagoguery on both ends of the political spectrum. In a nutshell.

It's a big nutshell, though, as Patterson points out in his 2019 book. And it's full of nuts.

It's a tough one to crack, too, but Patterson does offer some solutions.

Elect more moderates in both parties, as the Far Right and the Far Left have essentially taken over the majority of the GOP and the Dems. As Patterson points out several times in in his book, the least liberal of any Democrat currently in Congress is still far more liberal than the most liberal Republicans. Compromise simply can't exist under these conditions.

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine. In case you've never heard of this, it was created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1949 as a way of making sure that two sides of any issue were given fair and equal time in the media. It was abolished in 1987, which ushered in a new era of politically-biased and propagandistic media such as FOX News.

Read a book. People are stupider. (Okay, so that's my own conclusion, not Patterson's.) Too many are too easily led to believe the bullshit and lies that are spoon-fed to them by their respective political leaders and media sources, and they don't do their own research. Fact-checking used to be something everyone did if they questioned something someone said on the news. Nowadays, most people aren't even asking the questions.