Let slip the tweets of war

Take two recent examples, both involving the conjunction of Christmas with big political events.

After the House of Representatives impeached President Trump, a Washington Post reporter, Rachael Bade, tweeted a photo of herself and four colleagues enjoying themselves at a restaurant. It’s a jolly scene of the sort most of us might post. But Bade added the words, “Merry Impeachmas from the WaPo team!”

The tweet couldn’t but excite outrage among the many people who’ve ground their teeth over the Washington Post‘s bias during three years of covering the Trump presidency. The tweet (later deleted) seemed to gloat over Trump’s impeachment as a cause for celebration at a newspaper that’s long yearned for it. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted aptly in response: “Fair & balanced journalism everyone. Democracy dies over chips and guac.”

I suspect the tweet was more or less innocent — merely reporters enjoying downtime together, and “Merry Impeachmas” melded two big events taking place close together without intending to suggest impeachment was wonderful. But it was nevertheless crass, oblivious to the impression it was bound to create. It also lacked professional care to preserve credibility. That points to a moat of misunderstanding separating media and the metropolitan elite from the rest of the country. The tweet wasn’t so much indifferent as clueless about how it would look.

Canadians use the phrase “two solitudes” to describe the inability of English and French speakers to understand not each other’s language but points of view. It’s a good phrase also to describe the position of many political journalists vis-a-vis the public. They are often completely unaware of how people can see things differently than they do. But it’s a journalist’s job to understand.

This moat of misunderstanding encircles not just America’s media and metropolitan elite. Inside its purblind encirclement are many of the media and members of the ruling class of the rest of the developed world. They often don’t even know it’s there. But even those who do are frequently too lazy and arrogant to try to understand what’s on the other side.

NewsThump, a satire site, ran a faux story after Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in Britain’s general election last week. Like the “Impeachmas” tweet, the story linked a recent massive political story to Christmas. The British eat turkey at Christmas, and the story’s headline was, “Turkeys vote overwhelmingly to ‘Get Christmas Done.’” This played off Johnson’s election slogan, “Get Brexit done!” The British had, like dumb critters, supposedly chosen to inflict extreme harm on themselves.

But those who took comfort from the story’s message that Brexit supporters are fools were showing themselves determined to learn nothing. The people being handed their heads were the politicians leading the anti-Brexit movement, not the turkeys. When you lose badly, it’s so much easier to avoid looking at one’s own failure and blindness than it is to confront it. And it is that very willful blindness, with its attendant sneering at those with different opinions, that led to the Remainers’ landslide defeat last week.

Whether it is the American divide between Trump supporters and sophisticates who loathe him or it’s anti-nationalists elsewhere contemning their opponents as dolts, the two sides often speak different languages from each other. The irony of today’s severe problem, though, is that those proving themselves less capable of understanding the other side are the ones who assume they’re smarter and better informed than everyone else.