That she may long live here
On the night of Tuesday, November 8, 2016, I published a brief post onto this blog called "Dead-Killing News" that contained only a 24-word quote from William Shakespeare's play Richard III. At the time, I was taking an Intro to Shakespeare class while dual-enrolled as a high-school senior at The Ohio State University. The quote contains the remarks of Elizabeth Woodville, who was the queen consort of England from 1464 to 1470, reacting to the news that the morally corrupt Duke of Gloucester would be crowned the next king of England. The post was my reaction to the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States.
On Saturday, November 7, 2020, five days after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, major news networks projected that Joseph R. Biden, Jr., will be the 46th President of the United States. Accordingly, on that day I considered submitting a post to this blog that would simply quote the last four lines of Shakespeare's Richard III as a reference to my post four years ago:
Let them not live to taste this land's increase
That would with treason wound this fair land's peace!
Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say amen!
These are the words of the Earl of Richmond (also known as Henry VII), having just been crowned the new King of England after defeating Richard III (the former Duke of Gloucester) at the Battle of Bosworth Field, as well as having just resolved by marriage a broader conflict between the House of York and the House of Lancaster called the Wars of the Roses. I thought at first it would be a clever callback to my 2016 post, but the more I considered it, the more I realized maybe it wouldn't be such a great idea to post the quote as nakedly as I did the 2016 quote. After all, in the quote, the new king essentially calls for the death of those who disturb the new peace.
Furthermore, the sentiment would be inaccurate. I can hardly claim that "Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again". Political polarization in the United States has skyrocketed in the last decade, and it seems that the only time in American history during which the country was more politically divided than now was the Civil War. Although all mainstream news networks have projected that Biden won the election, the President still has not conceded the election and is pursuing legal challenges to the election results that have almost no chance of being successful in court. On November 27, 2020, for example, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed a lower court's decision denying the Trump campaign's motion to amend their complaints against Pennsylvania election officials, and the Court also denied the Trump campaign's motion for an injunction that would reverse Pennsylvania's certification of their election results. The unanimous (3–0) opinion authored by Judge Stephanos Bibas, whom President Trump appointed to the Third Circuit in 2017, repudiated the Trump campaign's legal reasoning in no uncertain terms: "Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections."
Meanwhile, the President continues to promulgate unsubstantiated claims of election fraud elsewhere, especially on Twitter. For example, on November 28, 2020, the President tweeted, "The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, perhaps more than anyone will ever know. The Pennsylvania votes were RIGGED. All other swing states also. The world is watching!" This tweet retweets a blurry image from Republican Senator Doug Mastriano from Pennsylvania that claims that the Pennsylvania Department of State's "dashboard" reported 2,582,242 total mail-in votes in the election, despite only 1,462,302 mail-in ballots having actually been returned. (The tweet also mentions that the post has been "deleted" from the dashboard, thereby preventing it from being verified.)
At the same time the President and some of his supporters have been disseminating these claims of fraud, the Trump campaign's lawyers have made clear that their legal challenges do not present a case of fraud. As Judge Bibas wrote:
The Trump Presidential Campaign asserts that Pennsylvania’s 2020 election was unfair. But as lawyer Rudolph Giuliani stressed, the Campaign “doesn’t plead fraud. . . . [T]his is not a fraud case.” Mot. to Dismiss Hr’g Tr. 118:19–20, 137:18. Instead, it objects that Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State and some counties restricted poll watchers and let voters fix technical defects in their mail-in ballots. It offers nothing more.
In the legal system of the United States, serious accusations require serious evidence, and if the President seeks publicly to challenge the results of the election on the basis of fraud, then in order to be successful he must prove his claims in a court of law. There, the person who advances the allegation holds the burden of proving the allegation. Although the President and his supporters seem thoroughly convinced that the election was fraudulent, they have thus far not only failed to prove their claims in court, but also in some cases failed even to advance allegations of fraud in court.
This is utterly unpresidential. The United States today is completely unrecognizable from the United States not more than 12 years ago, when we had a peaceful transition of power from a Republican president to a Democratic president, when President George W. Bush stated at the White House that he had a "warm conversation with President-elect Barack Obama" and "congratulated him and Senator Biden on their impressive victory". What happened between then and now?
As it turns out, a lot. Since 2008, technological advancements have taken place at a lightning-fast pace, and society has struggled to keep up. Apple released the first generation of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, spearheading a revolution in which today almost everyone has a smartphone. According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 81% of U.S. adults own a smartphone. Among adults aged 18-29, 96% of them own a smartphone; for ages 30-49, the percentage is 92%. Socioeconomic status appears to have an effect, although even among adults whose income is less than $30,000, smartphone ownership is still 71%. It is difficult to overstate the remarkable influence that the increased connectivity provided by smartphone ownership has had on the body politic. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook were still nascent at the time of the 2008 presidential election, but over the past 12 years they have grown into corporate behemoths that have terrifying control over the spread of information.
Although the world today seems eminently more interconnected than ever
before, the divisions between people seem to have increased cavernously.
What we have started to see is a desire to avoid interaction
with those who do not share our views or interests, and social media has unequivocally contributed to this. The algorithms developed by Facebook and Twitter are designed to show you the content that produces the most engagement out of you, because the more you engage with their platforms, the more money they make from showing you ads. What kinds of content produce the most engagement from you? Oftentimes, it is people who share your views and who are able to get you riled up about them. Instead of reading the news from professional journalism, many of us now get our news from the people we follow on social media, who may not be so worried about getting things absolutely right before publication. Because social media places us in these bubbles where we rarely interact with people who don't share our views, we struggle to understand why those who don't share our views do so. Are they not seeing what we are seeing? As it turns out, they really aren't. The social media companies only show them the content they want to see, the content that supports their views, not yours.
Since the rise of social media, we have also started to see the frequency of mental health conditions skyrocket: more people are anxious, more people are depressed, more people are lonely. Alarmingly, according to an October 2019 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide rates among children aged 10–14 increased nearly threefold between 2007 and 2017 (from 0.9 per 100,000 in 2007 to 2.5 per 100,000 in 2017), and suicide rates among all persons aged 10–24 increased from 6.8 per 100,000 in 2007 to 10.6 per 100,000 in 2017. This deeply chilling statistic was highlighted in a recent Netflix film called The Social Dilemma, which interviewed various former engineers at social media companies like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, watching The Social Dilemma was somewhat of a catalyst for this post—the film also discusses what I mentioned in the previous paragraph about social media only showing you content that produces the most engagement from you.
What is the solution here? The first step is for Americans to agree that the spread of misinformation and misleading information through social media is even a problem. It is an existential threat to our democratic institutions. I fear that as I get older, I will be reduced to someone wearing rose-tinted glasses recalling "the good ol' days" of actual civility in divided government. Yes, the current President is indeed not making matters better with his persistent unsubstantiated claims of fraud, but the fundamental problem is not with the President, but rather the medium through which he speaks.
And so, I long for the day when I can post in earnest that:
Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say amen!