I've had this observation recently I think of as like "trickle-down everything". It came up after a recent conversation I had with someone asking when Kevin Spacey's career was coming back, and it's sort of this idea presented in the article, which is if we have this Jesus-like compassion for our celebrities, it is somehow representative that humanity is compassionate. That a person doesn't have to do the hard work of figuring out how to interact with difficult every-day people or actually confront difficult emotions; but that the real work is just to say something like "everyone deserves due process" but only when talking about some wealthy popular figure in the news.
It's so painful to go back and reread Ender's Game, where a couple of children make social media accounts that are so persuasive that literally everybody on earth agrees with them. One speaks more like a demagogue, but it is nothing like the tribalism of modern social media.
It's especially hard to agree with the author in his praise of Chomsky. He's certainly no hate-spewing table-thumper, but he's got a cult of personality same as everybody else. And his time has long since passed; his influence today is negligible outside of a few ideological bubbles.
He cites the quote that hated cannot drive out hate, but love can. I think that's wrong two ways. And I see little evidence that love can end hate. Martin Luther King Jr receives much praise for providing the carrot in the conflict over Civil Rights, but we prefer to forget that Malcolm X was providing the stick. King himself cautioned white moderates about delaying justice in the name of peace, and they had the Watts Riots in mind when they heard that.
Hate can drive out hate. D Day was not an act of love. Wars end when one side gives up.
Republicans are not going to suddenly find liberals more tolerable if they were to agree to mouth niceties about Kissinger. Flaming Kissinger may not help, but I don't believe that it makes anything worse, either.
It takes only one side to make a war. Social media may have exacerbated that, but people were burning Kissinger in effigy before Facebook and before CNN. (And I do think that the 24 hour news media deserves more focus in escalating American partisanship, back in the 1990s, by turning news into entertainment.)
