The Damage of the Culture Wars

Last week, media outlet Campus Reform posted a video in which a representative from the organization asked several Harvard students a seemingly simple question: “What is the bigger threat to world peace: America, or ISIS?” The students took that question seriously, offering frank critiques of American foreign policy. The Fox News opinion show Outnumbered then picked up on the story, releasing an episode in which guest commentator John Rich derided the students interviewed as a “bunch of snot-nosed brats.” Another commentator, Andrea Tantaros, expressed dismay that students were increasingly exposed to anti-American viewpoints in schools.

To anyone familiar with the polarized political environment of this country, the fact that a heavily edited series of student interviews were blown out of proportion to such an extreme degree should come as no surprise. To lament the prevalence of shoddy journalistic practices or the use of college students as political cannon fodder is to want for originality. What the actions of Campus Reform and Fox News do reveal, more broadly, is just how the kneejerk tendency to vitriol often precludes meaningful dialogue in American politics. We all have the right to disagree, but we have a concomitant responsibility to teach and indeed to learn from others.

Campus Reform and especially Fox each failed to uphold the latter half of that bargain. To dismiss these students’ viewpoints out of hand as “liberal elitism” for the sake of a political agenda was to do viewers a disservice. It’s useful to pause and recognize that the students made some good points. The question was not which entity is “worse” or “more evil”—the answer to which would undoubtedly be ISIS. Instead, the question deserved nuance, and the United States’ actions in the Middle East should be recognized as one of many factors that may have made ISIS’s rise possible. Outnumbered could have offered a cogent critique of that argument, but chose not to. While the students approached the question given them seriously, Outnumbered approached the students in a manner that was anything but serious.

Public discourse suffers in an environment where ideas are discounted off-hand due to the identity of the speaker. Outnumbered is not alone in this—for every conservative host who dismisses liberals as “elitist,” you can probably find a liberal host dismissing conservatives for similarly vapid reasons. A less combative public discourse probably won’t lead to consensus, but it can help us develop our own thoughts and understand those of others. Outnumbered had a chance to engage in this kind of discourse, to engage and critique in a thoughtful, revealing manner. Instead, in an example far too commonplace, they chose to score points in an unnecessary culture war. Their viewers, and the country, are worse off for that.