As of this morning, ten days after the Turkey–Syria earthquake, more than forty thousand people are confirmed dead. Experts expect the number to continue to rise as recovery efforts go on. This is the deadliest natural disaster since the 2010 Haiti earthquakes. Forty thousand souls, at least. Little end in sight. Horrific horror. Devastating grief.
The number forty thousand brings a few things to mind. First, it’s the population of my hometown—Crystal Lake, Illinois. This earthquake has wiped out a people equivalent to the entirety of the world in which I grew up—every teacher, every classmate, every person at the grocery store, every retiree holed up in every house with faded paint. Second, it’s the number of people who die by gun in the United States in, per the CDC, an average year. Far more people are going to have died from this earthquake than die by gun in America each year. Americans, on the whole, care about fixing one of those things.
It’s important to be as clear as we can be right now. This isn’t about guns or earthquakes. We think American gun deaths are crucial to address and reduce. We also think making the world safer from earthquakes is crucial. We aren’t trying to criticize anyone who prioritizes one over the other or another over a still different thing. We just think Americans’ focus on America illustrates something noteworthy.
For Americans looking to protect ourselves or our people, there are four spheres in which to look. We can choose to focus on local issues—issues in our towns and counties. We can choose to focus on state issues. We can choose to focus on national issues. We can choose to focus on global issues. Those are the four choices: 1) Local, 2) State, 3) Nation, 4) World. By and large, we focus on the third, followed by the first. We care about presidential elections and we care about our schools.
We are a national people and a local people. We are rarely people of our states. We are rarely an international people. When state and international issues grab our gaze, our instinct is to turn them into national and local issues. California responds to Texas’s abortion legislation, Texas responds to California’s gun legislation, and we watch with weary curiosity to see how we will manage to be divided over something as clearly one-sided as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with the answer reliably being that it will happen in the third sphere, the national conversation (for lack of a better word).
Again, again, again: We are not saying it is wrong that we do this. There are goods and bads to this tendency we’ve acquired, but we aren’t here to hash out whether we should be focusing more narrowly (on our states) or more widely (on our globe). What we’re trying to do is understand why we do this, and what it says about us that this is what we do. Why do we care about our country more than we care about our state? Why do we care about our country more than we care about our species? Why do so many Americans shed more emotion over the horrific deaths of three Michigan State students this week than we do over the horrific deaths of tens of thousands in Turkey and Syria this month? It’s not just self-preservation, caring about things that “could happen to us.” If it was self-preservation, California and Texas’s legislatures would let one another be.
The answer, most likely, is the nationalization of American media and the nationalization of American politics, two things that go hand in hand.
Over the last century, American media has dramatically transformed from a broad coalition of local institutions to a narrow coalition of national institutions. Local news is dying not just on the doorstep, but on the television as well. National news rages on. This is a little bit odd. The advent of network television and then of cable is explicable. One explanation goes: Corporations pay taxes in their home country, so corporations are regulated by their home country, so large television outlets focused on their own countries rather than trying to reach the most people, period. As media becomes more and more online, though, with fewer physical and geographic funnels of wires and airwaves keeping it from crossing borders, media remains, most often, national in scope. Even originally local outlets—the “New York” Times being the leading example—are now national entities. Not international, really. National. That’s the odd part. That they aren’t international. Perhaps this will change. But if conversation happens through the media, and media is national, our conversation is going to be national.
This nationalization of American media is often assigned some responsibility for the nationalization of American politics, and fairly so. But we’d argue that the nationalization of American politics has led to the nationalization of American media as well. Specifically, we’d argue the nationalization of the Republican and Democratic Parties has led to the nationalization of American media. Within the last century, there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Few remain. Parties operated more locally back then, and when they reached the national parts of their functions, they operated in a small-r republican way, with local representatives representing their localities. The dawn of the national primary necessitated national party identities that were more cohesive. This led to litmus tests. This led to specification of stances (no more ‘big tent’). This eventually led to one party being, at least for a few years, more about a single person than even a single platform. It also led to national partisan media. Because if you’re going to have a national conversation *within a party,* the kind you have specifically in a presidential primary, you need a national partisan forum. Enter: Fox News and the New York Times, and things of their ilk.
There are other reasons our interests are so national, rather than so international. Most of the country lives in a red or a blue state rather than a purple state, giving most of the American population little power to effect change in state elections. Given we don’t participate in any international elections, that leaves national politics as the place we think we can change things, or at least the place where we can argue about things and not know who will, at the ballot box, win. With religion on the decline, political parties have taken on some of the function of providing a sense of community and identity, as well as a place in which to feel capable of effecting that change we desire. For those untethered to a party, a sense of agency comes from the ability to choose between the two. There are more and more and more, but the bottom line is that when we try to change something outside of our specific community, we most often try to change it through our national government. So of course we focus on national issues.
As we said earlier, there are goods and bads to this. A bad? Humanity might be better served if we treated the issue of providing cheap, accessible, clean drinking water to the entire human population with the urgency we assign to drag shows. A good? For as divided as Americans are, we clearly still identify as Americans ahead of pretty much anything else, even if that’s not what we say when asked. We care a lot, collectively, about our country.
