Researchers may have found out the problem with politics in America, and it's simple: We're all just repeating exactly what we hear on television.

We're not even changing the words around. We're restating the loudest version of any argument, verbatim.

Cornell studied the conversation around big political events, like the 2012 debates, and dug into over 290 million Tweets. Their data found unequivocally that almost everyone is simply retweeting or actively repeating the shortest sentences of the loudest voices on the far ends of the right and left, like Sean Hannity, Bill Maher and Karl Rove.

Hannity's "Middle class crushed last 4 years" is one of the most repeated. That's the entire Tweet.

The data also shows a love for very basic, very theatrical conspiracy theories. They are not theories about the real, prosecutable financial corruption that we know exists and have simply chosen not to explore. They have to do with plot devices you'd only see in a Channing Tatum movie.

One of the most retweeted stories during the 2012 debates? When Karl Rove wrote this:

"Are those packs on [debate moderator Martha] Raddatz's back a way for ABC higher ups to feed her questions?"

There is no incentive for critical thinking. There is only incentive for seeing and reacting immediately, usually with words that are not our own. Everything must be a line from an Expendables movie, or else.

"Frankly, we're rather disappointed," Cornell's Drew Margolin told Phys.org. "Social media has so much potential to improve the diversity of voices and quality of exchanges in political discussion by giving individuals the technological capability to compete with the mass media in disseminating information, setting agendas and framing conversation."

This is how news cycles like the current one about Bowe Bergdahl operate.

If you haven't turned on cable this week, Bergdahl was an American prisoner of war who may have gone AWOL. Bergdahl had written to his parents about the pointlessness of the war he was fighting in Afghanistan, about the us-versus-them nature of an occupation instead of the nuance necessary to actually fix a broken country.

Then he wrote a condemnation of American policy. Then he was gone.

No one is sure of the next few steps, but he was held by the Taliban for over five years. Five Guantanamo detainees were traded to free him, and now the TV is sick with defenses of or contempt for the president for doing it.

And now we know that there are only two kinds of rhetoric that are conducive to getting heard in this discussion: The president is a traitor or the president is a hero, but there is nothing in between, even though war is horrible, even if war should be met with persistent and crippling doubt at every step, especially at the start, and even if there is almost always no right answer.

With the technology we have, can we outgrow war? should be the question. Can we see the horror of war, and make the images that we see from it inescapable in our collective consciousness, and internalize it, and doubt it with a force stronger than itself? could be another. We have the tools to realize that we are all the same, that death for any dogmatic cause is gruesome and terrible, and that the cure is communication.

There is a fix. It's a two-step process.

All we have to do is recognize our initial impulse to react before understanding, and realize no harm can come from thinking about the other side. "Elite" commentators, as the study puts it, speak up even more than usual in debate situations, reacting immediately and emotionally, without a tempered response.

And then, for a minute, just wait. There is virtue—and now data—in taking a few minutes or hours or days to hear the whole story, acting instead of reacting, or sometimes not acting at all.

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