Editor’s note: This is what irks me about spending too much time listening to extremist views, in our county and country: “Most of us are in the middle” politically. Thanks to a regular reader for sending it along.
“In an election year, it’s hard to turn on the television or read a newspaper without getting the sense that Americans are becoming ever more divided into red versus blue. But a new study finds that perception may be downright wrong.
“In fact, political polarization among the public has barely budged at all over the past 40 years, according to research presented here on Jan. 27 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
“But, crucially, people vastly overestimate how polarized the American public is — a tendency toward exaggeration that is especially strong in the most extreme Democrats and Republicans. (The results do not apply to Congress, politicians or media pundits, but rather to the general public.)
“‘Strongly identified Republicans or Democrats perceive and exaggerate polarization more than weakly identified Republicans or Democrats or political independents,’ said study researcher John Chambers, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida.
“The people who see the world split into two opposing factions are also most likely to vote and become politically active, Chambers said in a talk at the meeting. This means that while real growing polarization is illusory, the perception of polarization could drive the political process.”
The rest of the article is here.
Filed under: Uncategorized
The polarization is on purpose to keep the people divided instead of coming together and holding those with power accountable. This is why the black out on OWS and then the harsh crack down of people exercising their first amendment rights of speech, assembly, and addressing their grievances. Steve F this plays right into what we were talking about this weekend. Those with power will squash anyone who tries to challenge it, whether it is political parties or private entities.
As people being in the middle. What do you consider middle?
I along with 70% of Americans wanted a public option or single payer, it is called extreme left by media and republican shills. About the same number of Americans say want SS and Medicare strengthened but the media and right wing shills say privatize the programs to save them, they cease to be the same program if privatized. Raising taxes on the wealthy goes into the 2/3 approval range of Americans. Drastically cutting defense budget to private contractors, outdated military equipment, and scale back on our foreign bases and interventions is well above 50%.
This would be considered extreme left if you decided to run for political office despite a majority of Americans would back these ideas individually but not all together.
Jeff would consider this the middle or left?
The answer is within this article.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0403-25.htm
I could not agree with Ben more that the polarization feeds into the media’s narrative, and creates a dynamic that is good for business for those that benefit from selling the story. Whether it is an intentional conspiracy or not is another matter. But ultimately this is why building a new media that is less dependent on corporate control is critical to building the ‘radical center’. Blogs, news aggregators, social media, alternative web sites like Common Dreams, and a discerning public, demanding higher quality, sourced stories, and real debate about important issues is the key to disrupting the corporate media’s control over information.
What constitutes the ‘middle’ is another question.
My discussion with Ben over the weekend centered on the attraction of principle versus the adoption of pragmatism as a key strategy. The Green Party candidacy of Ralph Nader in 2000 was our foil in this debate, with Ben contending that to break the two party system Nader’s run in 2000 deserved support to the end, and me contending that he should have pulled in the last weeks of the campaign to swing the election to Gore, as many in the Democratic party were calling for. In this debate I am firmly in the pragmatist camp. Although in principle I support a multiparty system, in practice I believe elections often come down to choices between lessor preferable candidates, and incremental change needs to be seized while one waits for radical change. How else does one move the needle?
What this really comes down to is: what is your change model?
Finally, although it is true that those in power will try to ‘crush’ those out of power as a matter of course; those in power are often co-opted by the very ones there seek to crush. They tend to take on some of the characteristics and values of those they crush to retain power. Clearly this is a cynical world view, and not one I would prefer, but it is pragmatic, and in our world and current situation, realistic.
By the way Ben, I would consider all of your examples above to be part of the radical center, not the left.
Steve,
Thanks for the response in well thought fashion as usual.
To continue the discussion about Nader in 2000 (I think the political party is secondary)
This is going to make some people have a stroke but the democratic and republican parties are the power brokers that crush any opposition so they can hold onto the power in our political system. Try to run for partisan office with a third party and you will find countless obstacles and hurdles that takes up energy, time, and money for those outside of the big two. Why? Because the D’s and R’s set the rules of campaigning and elections. As the democrats in 2000 stopped fighting for the votes to be counted the campaign then became how to pin it on Nader instead of the democratic party and Gores horrible campaign. Here is Nader’s rebuttal to the criticism.
I believe that I stated clearly that I am in favor of a multiparty system; that includes reducing barriers to entry as well.
But lets play this out.
Suppose the USA had a parliamentary system where the executive power derives from the consent of the legislature, and the Green Party vote in 2000 had to decide whether to join forces with the Democratic or Republican party to choose a Prime Minister to convene a government. Do you have any doubt that the Green would have caucused with the Democrats and picked that PM? I don’t. The Democratic party is closer to the Green Party’s political philosophy than the Republican party is.
It did not escape my notice in 2000 that Bill Daley, Gore campaign manager, was calling for Nader to come on over. It was only after Nader’s final refusal to do so that the Democratic party engaged in an all out assault on the ‘Nader factor’ to try to cull some of the 2.7 million votes he eventually got. A portion of those 2.7 million votes was the balance in enough places that it cost the Democrats the election. Could those votes have been found somewhere else? Of course they could have. Do I “blame” Nader; no I don’t. Do you suppose that Nader could have wielded at least some amount of influence in the choices of leadership on say Interior, or EPA, or HHS in he had endorsed Gore? Do you think Nader could have used shifting the electoral balance to gain a national platform for a multiparty system? I think he could have.
This is what I mean by pragmatism.
While the world waits for the revolution we still need to make progress, and if incremental progress is the only progress we can make we need to be smart enough to seize it.
By the way, what happened to those 2.7 million Nader voters since then? Did they hang together to try to start a movement? Did they swing local elections? Did they organize to make their case at the ballot box?
I think one major green party candidate holds office in California, Dan Hamburg as a county supervisor in Mendocino County. I cannot find one Green Party member of the state assembly or state senate anywhere in the country. Perhaps I am wrong.
With all due respect, you don’t build acceptance for a third party based on a cult of personality. Much as I admire Nader, he bears some responsibility for the fact that the Green party, very much my ideological match, is not my political match. The Green party has not built a party apparatus to recruit candidates and run elections. That is not the ‘fault’ of the Democratic party.
Steve,
Once again the conversation goes to Nader not the failures of the democratic party in 2000. I think the fact that the democratic party/ Gore stopped fighting for all the votes to be counted is a great indicator why many democratic party voters have become disillusioned with the party among other similar issues such as fighting for labor.
Lets not forget how Clinton became president and then how he governed. Third Party candidate Ross Perot received 19% and Bill Clinton won with a plurality not a majority of 43%. Perot doesn’t run Bush wins. President Clinton then proceeded to push for NAFTA, WTO, and free trade in general which is why I left the democratic party. Ended welfare as we know it with Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. He eagerly signed into law going against many reps within his own party that set up the financial crisis, Gramm Leach Bliley Act 1999 and CFMA 2000. His administration backed and push for sanctions against Iraq, which led to 500,000 Iraqi deaths. He bombed Iraq throughout the decade. It was his financial team that continued and expanded what the Reagan administration started a decade earlier. Clinton did some good things as well (handling bombing WTC/ Oklahoma City and raising top marginal tax rate 3%) to mention some but in long term his bad outweighs the good.
It is time for the democratic party to start some self-reflection and stop pointing fingers at those who are holding the party accountable while sharing the foundation principles of the party.
Steve,
For the record I am not arguing with you but using the discussion to make some points I think need to be in the dialogue with everybody not just you and me.
Ben, I am with you. This is not an argument. I really think we need to be discussing these issues at this level, and I hope others may benefit from it. A good discussion of the issues without referencing personal attributes is what we should strive for. I really sincerely want to understand your position.
I agree: I was pissed Gore stopped fighting ‘for the good of the country’, he should have contested the vote harder, and not allowed Bush to claim the mantle of ‘presumed elected’.
I agree with you that on NAFTA, free trade and military policy Clinton was as all wet.
I readily agree that the Democratic party failed to run a campaign that could capture the imagination of the country in 2000, and they are responsible for that. I am a self reflective former Democrat.
I’m wondering if you could articulate your change model? How do we get to the rise of third parties and meaningful broad participation? Where do you stand on the principle/pragmatism issue?
Off to meeting in SF. Will respond in the evening.
Here is a link to Making Contact and a journalist talking about the extreme center.
“It’s 2012, the world is calling for change, and in the U.S, another presidential election is looming. But journalist Tariq Ali says the American public’s so-called ‘choices’ don’t present much in the way of options. On this edition, Ali speaks about the ‘extreme center’ and how Occupy and other emerging social movements are challenging the status quo.”
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/77301
I read the Amy Goodman piece and can’t find much to disagree with. It always amazes me that conservatives get away with their standard derogatory whine, that they’re being victimized by “The liberal media”. But since they still do rely on this line, I think it probably tells us something about the constituency to whom they are addressing. As was mentioned somewhere in one of these threads, the American people may not be stupid, but just as I am ignorant on various subjects, so too are a vast number of Americans ignorant on subjects such as Amy Goodman, Krugman and other such writers/commenters write about. Somewhere, today, I read where one poll revealed that 53%–I think it was–of respondents, still believed Saddam Hussein had WMD. I guess much of one’s beliefs are formed by the sources one chooses to use for information. And the grip of the corporate boa constrictor has tightened around the necks of the news sections of the media, whereby I don’t watch any of the Networks anymore. It used to be a ritual, watching real journalists. Years ago I remember Walter Chronkite responding in an interview, “That there really aren’t newscasters anymore, they’re not journalists, they’re news presenters”. So these presenters certainly aren’t going to present to the viewing audience the unpleasantries of war images, or starving kids of Biafra, etc. And to highlight Goodman’s point, Bush didn’t even allow photographs of the coffins of the dead, returning from the war zones.
But what I really wanted to comment on–before I read the Goodman piece–is the idea/belief that Gore allowed or could of somehow prevented–realistically–what happened in Florida, which led to Bush’s becoming president. Considering all the factors, including the disallowed voters from Texas, the Republican control of the important and relevant political positions in the Florida State gov., and the knowledge that there would be plenty of money to keep the issue in the courts as long as it took to ensure victory–which as it turned out wasn’t very long. I don’t know exactly what Gore could have done and admit to forgetting all of the specifics. But Alan Dershowitz’s writings reminded me of the why’s behind my statement the other day, “That the Supreme Court had no busines interfering in Florida’s business,”–or words to that effect. “For the state legislatures were given the power to select the manner in which electors are chosen–who then allocated to Congress the power to resolve contested elections. . .Instead , there was a dignified, but undemocratic, resolution behind closed doors by unelected and politically unaccountable judges who are not suppose to be involved in making partisan decisions.” And later, Dershowitz says, “In fact, the disturbing aspect of this decision–the element that makes it different from any decision previously rendered by the Supreme Court–is that the justices were willing not just to ignore their own long-held judicial philosophies but to contradict them in order to elect the presidential candidate they preferred. As the distinguished American historian Eric Foner put it, there are ‘few precedents for justices trampling on their own previous convictions’ to reach a pre-determined political result. When this result is the partisan election of a presidential candidate, the justices have violated their constitutional duties.
So, I don’t know if the Democrats ran such a bad campaign: Perhaps the lingering damage from Clinton’s indiscretions with Monica did more damage than anyone realized. I”ll bet it cost Gore at least a few million votes. And I vividly remember, from day one–actually from D minus several months) the conservative attack machine was already tearing Clinton apart, financed by Shaife (sp) and most of the old crowd. And the attacks never let up until they finally had an issue they could use.
And boy are they good at the attack. Speaking of the media, my father worked for CBS in advertising in the early days of TV. The Republicns know how to fight; win at any cost.
Cheers,