The Demise of the Big Tent Made Us Stupid

Erecting the Ringling Brothers & Barnham and Bailey Circus tent in Florida, 1947

Peek into my bedroom on a Sunday evening sometime circa 1985, you would have seen me working on homework, probably geometry that was due the next day. But I wasn’t just doing homework; no I was also listening to the radio and I wasn’t just listening to the radio, I was listening to American Top 40 with Kasey Kasem. Teenagers of the 1970s and 80s found some time on the weekend to settle in and listen to the biggest songs in pop music. From its start in 1970 until he left the position in 1988, millions of teens and young adults did something that might seem old-fashioned back then: sitting in front of a radio and listening to the top songs for 3–4 hours.

I didn’t know it back then, but I was part of something that we took for granted in the 70s and 80s and that almost doesn’t exist today and that is mass culture, the big tent.

Mass culture, are the cultural products that are produced for the widest audience possible.

If you go back to an era where there were just three channels on television and no social media, you will find a time when many of us watched the same television shows and listened to the same music. The final episode of the TV series MASH, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, had nearly 106 million people watching it on February 28, 1983. On Saturday mornings, millions of children in America sat down and watched cartoons, a tradition that no longer exists. Everyone seemed to watch the evening news on one of the three networks.

Mass culture wasn’t limited to what we watched on television; it was also in the air in how Americans lived. Politics of the postwar era was created for mass culture. Both major parties considered themselves big tent parties, with active conservative and liberal wings. This was the era when people would vote split ticket, voting for one party in the White House and another for Congress. It was also an era when representatives of Congress would come and live in Washington and families from both parties would mingle together.

Even how we shopped, lived and worshipped was determined by mass culture. This was the era of malls. It started in 1956 with the opening of Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota and soon spread across the land, as more and more of these gathering places were built in American suburbs. Older chains like JC Penny, Sears and Montgomery Ward built new stores in these malls, while new chains like Kmart, Target and Walmart (which strangely were all started in 1962) built large locations not far from the malls.

More and more Americans lived in suburbs within houses that were mass-produced for the postwar family.

Mainline Protestantism was a church ready for mass culture. The churches represented a wide swath of American society.

If you are 40 and older, the mass culture/big tent society was your society. It was the culture we grew up in and it was the air we breathed. Personally, this was my childhood.

When I look back at those days in my youth, I realize how much the mass culture and the big tent no longer exist. We live don’t live in a world where institutions want to welcome a wide swath of the population. In fact, those institutions are breaking down. Our modern culture has created small like-minded communities where people can join certain groups and not have to deal with others that are different from us.

Sociologist Jonathan Haidt has written the article of the moment in this month’s Atlantic magazine. Entitled “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Haidt reviews the last decade in America and he notices how divided we are. Now, that’s not news, but Haidt is able to show that this division splits America into separate realities:

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

The mass culture of post-war America is gone, and what has replaced it is not simply tribalism, but atomization that is leaving us without a common story or a common past.

But what is driving this? Haidt’s answer is the answer that everyone seems to go to nowadays- social media:

Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?

I’m always a bit skeptical when people these days blame social media for everything that’s wrong. I really like Haidt and I do want to be open to what he has to say here. Social media does have a role in the splintering of our society, but I tend to think it’s more of an accelerant of what has already been going on. There have been trends that have moved us away from the big tent decades before Facebook and Twitter were even ideas. Social media may have moved us forward at a faster rate, but we were already heading in that direction.

In 2008 writer Bill Bishop wrote a book that is still being talked about nearly 15 years after its release. The Big Sort looked at how over the preceding three decades Americans were sorting themselves into communities of people who were like-minded politically. Bishop shares a story of what happened in his neighborhood in Austin, Texas when a Republican decided to talk about politics:

It was the spring of 2004, so things were already tense when Mason called the newsgroup’s attention to the election for the board of the local community college. Mason gave the names of both candidates, listed their websites, and then, after a warning that what followed was “possibly inappropriate electioneering,” recommended one of the candidates. The man Mason backed was deeply conservative, a member of the Federalist Society, a former officer of the Young Conservatives of Texas, and an opponent of gay marriage and adoption. Within the day, the newsgroup reacted in a way that wasn’t as much ideological as biological. Mason wasn’t just someone to be argued against. For the protection of the group, he needed to be isolated, sealed off, and expelled…

First response: “Okay, as a member of this list, I’d really like to see this political discussion disappear. As a lesbian, obviously I’m not going to vote for anybody who doesn’t believe I shouldn’t be allowed to adopt kids … As a resident of Travis Heights and a member of this neighborhood list, I’m not interested in having this kind of discussion here. I have to defend myself against my government pretty much daily these days, and one place I don’t want to have to do it is on this list.”

“Look, I know a lot about homogeneous political communities,” Mason said one afternoon at a South Austin coffeehouse. He’d grown up in the Republican suburbs of Houston and attended the conservative hive of Texas A&M University. He was pugnacious about his politics, ending every e-mail message with a quote from Teddy Roosevelt: “Aggressive fighting for the right is the greatest sport in the world.” Mason was also engaged to marry a feminist filmmaker, an experience that taught him that “nearly everything is political.” But nothing had prepared him for the unsettling experience of being a political minority in the community where he lived — for being a minority in the age of political segregation. “I ran off that listserve when the rhetoric became so shrill that I didn’t have the taste for saying about anyone the things you would need to say to win that argument,” Mason continued. “I’m not going to use that listserve for politics again, and there is some shame in that.” The experience had changed the way he saw himself in the neighborhood.

Knowing he was a minority, he wondered what people thought of him as he walked Hotard. “In some way after that exchange, I think I’m viewed with suspicion by my neighbors because of an act of political expression, which is a little on the bizarre side,” he said. “I’m just a guy who has a dog and works a job.”

This sorting is taking place at all levels of American society. Remember when I talked about how the families of Representatives and Senators lived in DC and they mingled regardless of party affiliation? That is not the case anymore. The collegial atmosphere in Congress changed through the 80s and 90s to what we see today. While you can’t pin it on just one person, it is important to note that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had a role in stripping away civility and turning Congress into a partisan jungle where Republican representatives are pilloried by their colleagues and receiving death threats because they voted for a Democratic infrastructure bill and the Senators who voted for the first African America woman to the Supreme Court were deemed by members of their own party of being “pro-pedophile.” Twitter might have made it easier to spew this hate, but it was not the instigator.

Americans were in thrall to conspiracy theories well before Twitter and Facebook. Do we remember the stories about Ohio after the 2004 election? Do people remember former congressman Ron Paul’s newsletters which were filled with conspiracies and racism?

It’s the sorting of America into red and blue and not social media that has made American culture a little more stupid than before. Social media was a vehicle, but it was not the main cause.

We live in an age where we no longer want to persuade. When we want to speak to our own side more than try to persuade others, our brains get dull. We no longer have to think about why we think our belief is better than your belief. We are no longer exposed to other beliefs that make us think about our own beliefs and maybe reconsider what we have always believed. We go from towering intellectual giants like Daniel Patrick Moynihan to crass hacks like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Politically pure cultures lead to inbreeding and that leads to a lower form of discourse, one that is not only dumb but mean.

It’s also important to note that social media isn’t all bad. It can bring people together. We have sought to blame social media for all that’s wrong in our world that we forgot to look at what’s good in the first place. In a recent essay, Andrew Donaldson writes about the benefits of social media and how the current assessment of Twitter, Facebook, et al. is really just a proxy for the same issues we as a society have been dealing with:

It’s easy, but not accurate. There is much good on social media: an explosion of interconnectivity, of information, of bypassing gatekeepers, of breaking down barriers. This is talked about much less, however, since the loud, the obnoxious, the odious are front and center. But worse? Are things really worse? Or are they just louder, more immediate, less avoidable?

Most of the philosophical debates and public intellectual pursuits regarding how bad social media is are just proxy wars for the same old discussions on regulating human behavior, but we get to yell at Twitter instead of each other which makes it more socially acceptable. Plus, we can blame the nebulous Big Tech company instead of doing any meaningful reflection on our part. It should be noted as well, that the perspective of the very online — a class of folks that I’m guilty of being a member off — tend to assume the world revolves around the online when for a vast majority of folks the interwebs are an occasional visitor to their real world pursuits, not the universe they naturally inhabit.

For Donaldson, joining Twitter was a way of meeting people and expressing himself during a dark period in his life:

When coupled with the improved programs the VA provides me, the results of my little side project of Twitter activity has been wonderful for me. My world stopped contracting and began to expand again. Since starting with Twitter in October, an unexpected side effect was the return of my long dormant habit of writing, another positive mental health development. Dabbling in the digital world has the real-life effect of feeling like I am accomplishing something, even if it is only “liking” something or complimenting what someone said. I try to make a habit to at least say something randomly nice or congratulatory to a few people every day as opportunity presents. I have been able to engage with many, most of whom are decent people. Plenty of vets and other people with mental and physical health issues are to be found, and many will gladly engage with you.

As it turns out, plenty of people use their Twitter as an outlet, and more than a few are a lot like me, using social media as a way of channeling their real world into a manageable space. I quickly connected with people that think similarly to me, and I try to follow and engage as many people as I can with whom I disagree or who live very different lives than I do, so I can hear their version of things as well. I’ve learned to avoid and filter out people that just want trouble, or to troll, or to argue without good faith.

America has been splintering from the mass culture for at least 30 years. It has happened gradually over the years and in the last decade, it happened all at once. Social media made it happen all at once, but it was going on for a long time.

If we want to have a more holistic society, one that is more of a big tent than the fragmented society we have now we have to do more than go after Facebook or YouTube. Our society has been fraying for nearly 40 years. We need to find ways to reknit our society and that’s going to take time. No, that doesn’t mean we are going back to three networks and all the other hallmarks of the past mass culture. But we can find ways to create new institutions that welcome a wide swath of the culture and not just a narrow sliver of society.

Social media isn’t an innocent in how are society has developed, but it’s also not the sole problem. If we want to move away from a dumb and mean culture, we need to find ways to recreate the big tent.

Originally published on Medium