Recently a patient volunteered their anger and frustration about Dr. Anthony Fauci being dragged before a senate hearing and badgered with aggressive questions. “That man is a national hero. It’s a disgrace that they are treating him like this.” What I found so striking about this comment is that it came not long after another patient told me that “Dr. Fauci should be in prison for what he did.”
While I try to stay apolitical both in my office and on this blog, it’s not possible to completely disentangle medicine from politics. Besides, what I wish in this post is not to take one side or the other, but rather to use the case of Dr. Fauci as a prism by which to look at our current political dysfunction. The fact is that, increasingly, Democrats and Republicans live in alternative epistemic universes, which helps to explain much of our national polarization. It’s not just a question of which side is right or wrong on a particular issue, but that each side is consuming media that conveys a highly curated set of facts which cater only to their own view of the world, carefully neglecting to mention those facts which bolster the other sides’ points.
