This is an excellent thread about the fractured media reality that we inhabit, and the fact that most Republican voters are now unreachable due to living in a different epistemic universe from us. Unlike Putnam I no longer have hope that we can fix this, but her analysis is great
https://twitter.com/lara_putnam/status/1388827384477110275
A lot of the projects to fix this (and I'm not referring to Putnam here) are some version of "we just need to educate people!", that evergreen favorite of the educated classes, which only makes the divide deeper and more impossible to bridge
The fact that there are no longer one but two public spheres, with very little overlap, and that one of them has become unglued from contact with reality is the great political crisis of our time, because the only way to fix it is to get the now unreachable people to vote for you
I used to think that some outside event might intervene, and reset the situation. But one lesson of covid that I don't think was sufficiently absorbed was that even direct physical danger—hundreds of thousands dead—was not enough to impose a shared public reality. Very scary.
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