What an excellent piece this is:
Toxic tribalism and the sad, broken state of Australian conversation
By Matthew Knott
March 22, 2019 — 11.30 am
Last August, at a Donald Trump rally, I got talking to a man named Fred. It was still a few hours until the President was due to appear on stage and we were queuing for hot dogs.
Fred was the archetypal Trump voter: a white, middle-aged, blue collar worker who had voted Democratic his whole life. But he felt the party had taken voters like him for granted. As we spoke in rural Pennsylvania, other people joined the conversation.
The Australian conversation is breaking down and could have dangerous consequences. CREDIT:MATT DAVIDSON
As we continued talking, the temperature of the discussion grew increasingly heated. What struck me most wasn't how much Fred and the others admired Trump but how much they hated Democrats. The conversation ended with one man saying he wished California, a Democratic-voting state of 40 million residents, would break away and fall into the sea. Fred countered that he looked forward to the day a massive earthquake hit the state.
I've often reflected on the conversation in the months since, stunned by how someone could so blithely wish death upon millions of his fellow citizens. And I've marvelled at how the discussion veered so quickly from the unremarkable to the extreme.
There's no reason to believe things are as bad in Australia. We are not as fundamentally divided on issues such as abortion or gun ownership. Our big cities are more politically diverse. Compulsory voting nudges our politics to the centre, and we have well-funded public broadcasters that are required to strive for impartiality.
But it would be naive to believe that we are inoculated from the polarisation that defines modern day America.
Last Friday, when the news broke that a gunman had killed dozens of people praying in mosques in New Zealand, ABC presenter Patricia Karvelas logged on to Twitter. In one of her tweets, she praised Scott Morrison for making an "incredibly strong" statement at a press conference after the massacre.
"He rightly described it as a right-wing terror attack," she wrote. "That is what this is."
Karvelas was impressed Morrison had highlighted the ideological nature of the attack. His response was altogether different from Trump's insistance, following the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, that there "were very fine people on both sides" of the protest.
She was instantly hit by a deluge of criticism.
"It was just one tweet about a press conference, not a dissertation about everything the Prime Minister has said about Muslims in his career. Yet it became this pile on," Karvelas says.
"People were accusing me of excusing his alleged past Islamophobia. A former ABC employee told me I should get out of journalism."
Ian Mannix, the former manager of ABC local radio Victoria, tweeted: "She fails to put it in context the years of hatred and racism against other people. If you can’t get this right, get out of the media."
Karvelas' conclusion: "We have lost the ability to be civil."
Craig Emerson, a senior cabinet minister in the Rudd-Gillard years, also praised Morrison's response - as well as the statements by Jacinda Ardern and Bill Shorten.
At an intensely upsetting and anxious moment for the Muslim community, Emerson believed all three leaders provided the strength and reassurance the moment demanded.
"I was just giving credit where it was due," he says. "I copped an avalanche of criticism."
The fact Emerson himself had taken a strong stand against white supremacy didn't matter. (Emerson quit as a Sky News commentator last year when the network hosted a soft interview with far-right leader Blair Cottrell.)
Like Karvelas, Emerson isn't precious and doesn't want pity. He doesn't even believe tribalism is inherently wrong or dangerous - political parties, after all, are tribes and so are our favourite sporting teams.
What concerns him is "mindless tribalism", the notion that you should never break with orthodoxy or give credit to a political opponent.
"This was just one isolated incident, but I do think it shows how hyper-partisan and tribal we have become," Karvelas says.
"I think most people, who are busy getting on with their lives, still value civility. But there is a noisy minority that floods the internet and skews the debate."
A similar point was made by Morrison in a speech this week when he said he was worried Australians are demonstrating "less understanding and grace towards others that we do not even know, making the worst possible assumptions about them and their motives, simply because we disagree with them".
"If we allow a culture of 'us and them', of tribalism, to take hold ... we will lose what makes diversity work in Australia," he said.
The extreme responses following Christchurch were not limited to anonymous trolls with a handful of followers.
"Twitter, all too often, rewards the snarky putdown, the dogmatic over-reach, the bad-faith misinterpretation of someone's argument. Empathy won't get you much traction, and neither will nuance."
Only hours after the attack, former independent MP Tony Windsor said Morrison's "dog-whistling" had "borne fruit ... not here but on a softer target".
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