Clickbait and Switch

If you ask Canadians, as I have been doing lately, whether they think political debate is healthy today, most will answer in the negative. Ask them when they first detected a change — whether in Canada or on the global stage — and many will say it was four or five years ago. That’s when politics seemed to take a turn toward cruder, coarser, more polarized, and generally less attractive forms of debate, especially online. This turn has left many moderate Canadians on the sidelines, wondering what happened.

The short answer boils down to three things: global inequality, Syria, and Russian propaganda. In a nutshell, globalization has produced great wealth for some, along with a new global middle class. Countless others, however, have lost out. In many places, including the United States, the Gini coefficients that measure economic inequality have increased. With social media, those disenfranchised by the new economic order have found a new...