Credit: (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
File photo: Rep. Tom Malinowski
Editor’s Note: Funding provided by The Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poyta Programming Endowment to Fight Anti-Semitism
Of all the urgent tasks bearing down on the nation’s new president — and there are many — the quest to heal and unite a fractured American populace may be the most difficult. President Donald Trump may be gone, but the core of his unflinching base remains loyal; the country is arguably more polarized than it’s been since the Civil War — and thus at its weakest.
President Joe Biden must now lead a nation in which public discourse has become as toxic and dangerous as the pandemic that surrounds it. It lays out an ideological clash that has been largely scripted and promoted by for-profit business models to fuel the ubiquitous and combustible chat of social media. That world of alternate realities is in turn amplified in the silos of cable TV news, which has turned political reporting into entertainment.