According to Lippman’s The Basic Problem of Democracy, published in the Atlantic in 1922, we are a tired and busy population trying to understand the news and what’s happening our world through the prism of our own understanding and bespoken realities. As we evaluate what’s happening in America, the data shows us that the hosts of CNN and MSNBC that report on the news are disconnected from the average person. As psychological research shows, the more educated liberals are, the more disconnected they are, the more they travel in packs with people like them who believe exactly like them.

That’s why when you watched the news during the 2024 election, the MSNBC and CNN hosts were not aware of what was brewing in America and the hatred and divisiveness and owning the libs and destroying our norms that had become pervasive. We are at an impasse because the amount of information we need to process to understand what’s happening is insurmountable. The amount of context we need to fight back against a growing authoritarian pulse in the United States, the average citizen just does not have the time to complete.

We are seeing in real time how social media has altered our politics forever. It’s not just polarization and disinformation. It’s ratcheting up groupthink by in-group and out-group and detesting the out group which ferments hatred and more polarization. It’s about the common denominator that the more we repeat a lie, the more we believe it. And as these lies and misinformation are known as the truth, we are in for a very destructive four years.

There is so much we don’t know as human beings, and politics is only as good as we are as humans. The social psychologists who have been studying how social media has changed our politics are out of answers beyond disconnecting and not posting. This seems simplistic. We are as humans our own worst enemies because we are living within our own realities skewed by the media we consume and the people we talk to. It used to be so much more siloed. We only saw people at group events or community events. We never in our history have had this much access to people’s private thoughts, experiences, and opinions on politics. And as we experienced the group and community events, we saw these people, read their facial cues, understood their intent, and grew empathy for those views that just don’t exist in the written word. It’s hard to know intent when evaluating written words. It’s hard to know what people mean and context when just reading their thoughts.

I truthfully don’t have an answer for synthesizing the information we are getting through the news and responding to the authoritarian strain in America as well as I don’t know how to contend with social media polarization and misinformation. We are certainly seeing the ravages of human’s worst nature come to life in a charismatic leader and cult like following. Until we understand completely what’s happening, which as humans, we’re not sure we can, then I’m not sure how to stop these human impulses from the inevitable, whatever that is.