When something as shocking and anguishing as Tuesday night’s election happens, it’s sure to be felt as a massive failure of communications. Why didn’t the ignorant know better? we wonder. How could they refuse to know better? Could it have been all those “false equivalencies” the media were peddling—the ones we saw through in a second yet were so impenetrable to anybody who wasn’t us?
Someone else said she thought the last week of the Clinton campaign was most odd, a series of quiet rallies in small settings leading up to the ultimate blowout in Philadelphia. In retrospect that seemed delusional to her, a fatal misreading of what the race should have been telling Clinton about how at-risk it was. But Clinton didn’t see it then and the reporter didn’t quite see it either.
Reading this I entertained the sweet thought that four years from now no one will be planting wacky ideas in my old friend’s head—like those techies who program android hosts to shoot up the saloon in Westworld. So she’ll succumb to reason. Yet Herrman’s prognostication doesn’t make me particularly hopeful. Failure to communicate is an ancient and inevitable regret the morning after: if only whatever divided us had been better reported. Or discussed. Or repudiated. But I don’t think our divides divide us simply because the media let us down or we don’t talk something through. I blame the implacable human attitude that I don’t want to agree with you so I won’t.
