The Extremity of Polarization and Our Mirror Universe Era

 

 

 

This is the view from Wisconsin.

Those are the presidential approval ratings that came out of the latest Marquette poll of Wisconsin voters. It's the most polarized result ever seen.

As one of the 98% of Wisconsinites on the left who disapprove of what has happened since the second inauguration of Trump, all I see resulting is evil. A constant stream of lies and misinformation; the appointment of a loud swarm of self-promoting, hate-stirring incompetents; the spitting on our allies; the useless, destructive tariffs; the firing of thousands of American heroes, leaving agencies we all rely on for our safety scarred and staggering; the attacks on teachers and researchers and clinics and parks that are vital to a functioning society; the censorship of terms and destruction of data; the fostering of bigotry and promotion of discrimination. And all of this destruction done in order to enrich billionaires and feed shocking narcissism.

How could anyone approve of that? you might wonder. One theory is that anyone who voted for Trump is a moral monster.

Some surely are. But it's important to understand what things look like in the parallel universe coexisting with our own. First of all, the media and social media in that universe aren't reporting or discussing wide swaths of information we see all the time. What destruction of health data or mass censoring and erasure of a wide range of words from websites? What freezing of vital research? What firing of park rangers and VA nurses and aid workers saving children from starvation and vital cybersecurity specialists and cancer researchers?

You can't worry about things that, as far as your media exposure tells you, do not exist.

Instead, you hear wild stories about vast waste and laziness and fraud. Social security being collected by thousands of supposed 150-year-olds! Workers too lazy to spend five minutes writing down five things they did last week. Useless research wasting millions on pointless projects. Elitist universities with huge fortunes raking in the hard-earned tax dollars of everyday Americans and laughingly using that to indoctrinate students into self-sabotaging, deluded, antiwhite, anti-meritocratic libs. Finally, someone is doing something about all the greed and waste!

At last, someone will do something to return to the people the sweat of their labor. So many everyday people in the mirror universe believe that a big rebate check is coming their way. Like the Covid relief checks, only this time much bigger. Some say it's $8,000. Some say $18,000. And there will be tax cuts, too! And tariffs to bring jobs back to the U.S.. Everyday Americans have been suffering for so long as elites and foreign powers ripped them off, and "illegals" lived off handouts of tax dollars, and "DEI hires" lazed in federal offices fiddling with red tape and pandering to trans radicals. It has been so enraging--but finally, these freeloaders are getting their comeuppance! At long last, everyday Americans will get some of what was stolen from them back.

Every belief from the parallel universe I've just listed is untrue. But they hear it constantly from the social networks and media and influencers they trust. And if you point to mainstream media reports that belie it, they just roll their eyes, because wide swaths of them now literally believe everything the mainstream media say is untrue. Or if you point to studies, well, they know better in their gut than those deceptive eggheads who try to pass off their biases and fallacies as science.

The thing is, these people are getting played. There are no $18K "government fraud rebate checks" coming. The elites abusing them have been CEOs, not college professors. The tax cuts will go mostly to the ultrarich, and poor Americans will actually see their taxes go up. Instead of "fat" being trimmed from the government, 10% of dedicated public servants have be basically randomly selected for firing, and they performed vital jobs. The tariffs will actually cause prices to rise. And working a sweatshop job is not the American dream.

Understanding that people are being manipulated and lied to has two upsides. First, it helps me at least to view fewer people as moral monsters, and have sympathy for the way they have been played (if not for the biases that often make that possible). And second, when a person realizes that they have been lied to and have acted against their own self-interest, that is an opportunity to finally get through to them.

Right now it is extremely hard to get through to people living in the mirror universe. Like anyone, they want to believe that they are smart and informed, and it is we on the left who are dupes, sheeple, Demoncrats. There are so many news stories that they never see--and when they do, they dismiss them as lies. They feel solidarity with those in their tribe, and the unhealthy but oh-so-common thrill of seeing their opponents suffer and cry.

We are so very polarized right now that there's very little communication possible across the gap of vastly different perceptions of reality. But being aware of what people in the mirror universe are thinking is important, both to understand what is going on, and to imagine a possible way of breaking through the wall between universes.