I Started Writing This Column 35 Years Ago. Where Are We Now?

I WROTE MY first “Eyes and Ears” column in January 1987 when I was a Sojourners staff editor. Over the ensuing years, I’ve changed from Protestant to Catholic, from full-time journalist to full-time teacher, and from city mouse to country mouse. I’ve been married to Polly Duncan Collum and helped raise four children. Through all that, I’ve kept this column going, but now I’m pulling the plug to make way for whatever’s next.

In my first column, I set out a twofold purpose for this space. I intended to track the merger of politics and popular culture that began in earnest with the 1980 election of a movie star president. I noted then that our public life was largely being reduced to an “ephemeral community of shared media experience,” by which, at the time, I meant mostly Hollywood movies and various televised spectacles.

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By the time we elected a reality TV star as president, the convergence of politics and popular culture was already long complete, except that, in a world of microtargeted messaging, there is no longer even much “shared media experience” from which to forge a community.

My second rationale for starting the column, however, has held up a little better. I noted way back then that, in both politics and popular culture and in the intellectual netherworld of think tanks and commentary journalism, the very definitions of terms such as “America,” “democracy,” and “Christianity” were up for grabs. In 1987, I called this a “war of ideas” and it continues with a vengeance, though often degenerating into an emotional war of identities.

However, “stuff happens.” And in these 35 years, two big things have happened that exploded many of my expectations and drastically altered the cultural landscape.

The first, obviously enough, was the expansion of the internet into everyday life, with all the hope and havoc it has wrought among us. The second has been the persistent stagnation and decline of wages for the average American worker alongside the stupefying rise of the billionaire class and its army of minions in the professional-managerial elite.

In its first decades, the internet seemed like a great idea. Until the 1990s, to have your idea, story, or call to action reach a mass audience, you had to win the approval of one of a relatively few media organizations, almost all of which were for-profit corporations. The only alternative was to raise huge sums of money to print and distribute the message yourself. Then, suddenly, for much less money you could put up a website that could possibly reach hundreds of millions of people. The potential for democratizing politics and culture was mind-boggling.

However, by the turn of the century, those new democratic vistas were thoroughly colonized by corporate America. By the time average, non-techie Americans started logging on to the internet in large numbers, they saw a medium that seemed to offer mostly shopping, gossip, and secondhand news. As of 2019, according to the network intelligence firm Sandvine, more than 43 percent of all global traffic on the internet went to sites controlled by only six U.S.-based corporations—Alphabet (parent company of Google), Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.

Worse yet, the often unedited, unmoderated, and unaccountable nature of this new mass medium has polluted the public square with dangerous falsehoods. Meanwhile, the algorithms of social media and search engines wrap us in cocoons of people like us, who think like us—and fuel our outrage at everyone who doesn’t.

In addition, the owners and operators of the digital domain have been among the big winners in the great economic stratification of recent decades. Several of the billionaires who saw their wealth increase by 62 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic have ties to those six big tech companies. And their tech-savvy underlings are doing all right, too. From 1970 to 2018, the share of U.S. income going to the top 20 percent increased from 29 percent to 48 percent, while the share going to low-income and middle-income households both declined. This has also meant an ever-growing gap between the earnings of college graduates, who are still only a little over a third of the U.S. adult population, and everyone else.

The rapid growth of this economic divide, along lines imposed by education status, has left many Americans utterly alienated from the people who dominate our media and cultural institutions. Combine that with the cocoon effect of the internet and you get a population terminally distracted by a perpetual culture war over bathrooms, vaccinations, masks, history curricula, etc.

THOUGH THIS COLUMN has never featured much overtly religious language, I’ve always approached these matters from the starting point of Christian faith. And, as I see it, the Christian social mission is to do whatever we can in our immediate circumstances to bring the life of this world into closer alignment with the values of the Kingdom of God.

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Of course, this is always a relative matter. In our lifetimes, we probably won’t see the first become last, but we could possibly see a nation in which the 50 richest individuals don’t own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the population. We may not vanquish death and disease, but we could see a nation in which all people can go to the doctor when they are sick. We may never, in this life, each get to sit, unafraid, beneath our own vine and fig tree, but we could have a guarantee of dignified work at a wage that supports a family.

Anyone in the U.S. who is genuinely interested in accomplishing those sorts of things should know that the only path forward is a majoritarian alliance of low- and moderate-income people, across all racial and cultural divisions, based upon shared economic interest and human values. That alliance must include most of the people who marched for Black lives in the summer of 2020 and at least some of the people who voted for Trump that November.

At the moment, I see little cause for optimism about that kind of change. I once thought popular culture could bring people together. After all, popular music especially has done so; for decades it’s been a place where all the silenced people of America could find a loud and rebellious voice. However, in the digital age, even music further atomizes us. I have my Spotify recommendations, and you have yours.

Those of us who are believers must hope that our spiritual traditions can pull us together around a vision of economic and racial justice. And in many places, there are local congregation-based community organizations doing just that. However, far too many of our religious institutions (progressive and conservative alike) are captured by one or the other of the culture war camps and no longer offer a unifying alternative.

What little hope I see on the horizon these days comes from the unions. Organized labor is a shadow of what it was 50 years ago, but it does still have 14 million members, and those 14 million people look like America. More than 37 percent of them are Black, Hispanic, Asian-Pacific, or other nonwhite; 47 percent are female. They are all united around the goal of redistributing wealth and power in the U.S., and, as the recent wave of strikes and organizing drives have shown, they are on the move in the post-pandemic economy.

So, my last thought as a regular Sojourners columnist is this: In 12-step groups, there is a slogan that says, “Look for the similarities, not the differences.” That strategy works well for those groups of disparate individuals who are trying to help each other with their common problem. I suspect that it could also work in the civic arena where the bottom 80 percent of us, from a wide range of backgrounds and cultural identities, share common problems of inequality, injustice, and powerlessness.