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Political Polarization


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2020 Aug 2, 11:59am   1,610 views  27 comments

by Onvacation   ➕follow (3)   💰tip   ignore  

Patrick says
I'm really trying to understand and reduce political polarization now.


Are either of those goals even possible?

What is political polarization? DuckDuckGo gives the definition:
In politics, polarization can refer to the divergence of political attitudes to ideological extremes. Almost all discussions of polarization in political science consider polarization in the context of political parties and democratic systems of government. In most two-party systems, political polarization embodies the tension of its binary political ideologies and partisan identities.


It seems to me that in America today, one extreme wants to tear down the system for a socialist paradise and the other extreme longs for an America that never was. Neither will happen. Socialism doesn't realize that wealth is created by the hard work of individuals and the collective would rather bring everyone down to the mean rather than incentivise the exceptional. And the mean gets lower. Capitalism doesn't realize that survival of the fittest will mean that many will suffer and die.

MOST of us cluster around the middle. The Agenda of most Americans is to live peacefully and thrive.

It's the media and the powers that be that are separating us into two camps. It's the media and the powers that be that are making this separation more and more violent. They don't want to "reduce political polarization" they want to perpetuate it while furthering their, not our, agenda.

Remember what we are not talking about.

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1   Onvacation   2020 Aug 2, 12:31pm  

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostakovitch says
SURRENDER TO THE DIVINITY OF DONNIE! AND AMERICA! MAY SURVIVE THE CRIMES OF OBAMA'S WIFE


Exactly!
2   MrEd   2020 Aug 3, 7:39am  

Agreed 99%.
Withholding 1% in case i misread something
Onvacation says
It seems to me that in America today, one extreme wants to tear down the system for a socialist paradise and the other extreme longs for an America that never was. Neither will happen. Socialism doesn't realize that wealth is created by the hard work of individuals and the collective would rather bring everyone down to the mean rather than incentivise the exceptional. And the mean gets lower. Capitalism doesn't realize that survival of the fittest will mean that many will suffer and die.

MOST of us cluster around the middle. The Agenda of most Americans is to live peacefully and thrive.

It's the media and the powers that be that are separating us into two camps. It's the media and the powers that be that are making this separation more and more violent. They don't want to "reduce political polarization" they want to perpetuate it while furthering their, not our, agenda.
3   mell   2020 Aug 3, 7:46am  

MrEd says
Agreed 99%.
Withholding 1% in case i misread something
Onvacation says
It seems to me that in America today, one extreme wants to tear down the system for a socialist paradise and the other extreme longs for an America that never was. Neither will happen. Socialism doesn't realize that wealth is created by the hard work of individuals and the collective would rather bring everyone down to the mean rather than incentivise the exceptional. And the mean gets lower. Capitalism doesn't realize that survival of the fittest will mean that many will suffer and die.

MOST of us cluster around the middle. The Agenda of most Americans is to live peacefully and thrive.

It's the media and the powers that be that are separating us into two camps. It's the media and the powers that be that are making this separation more and more violent. They don't want to "reduce political polarization" they want to perpetuate it while furthering their,...


Yeah but 99% of the extremism is coming from the left these days. You have to look really hard to find a few right-wing-extremists or in this country. Most have moved to the center and occupied the place of the original liberal bourgeoisie, which effectively are todays conservatives, while the left has a renaissance in whacking off to Marx.
4   Patrick   2020 Aug 3, 7:55am  

The important questions:

1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?
5   FuckTheMainstreamMedia   2020 Aug 3, 8:02am  

Patrick says
The important questions:

1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?


1. Propaganda pushed by the mainstream media. Essentially Democrats running major news organizations starting with the Clinton News Network and George Clintonopolous running ABC’s nightly broadcast.

2. Tar and feather “journalists.”
6   mell   2020 Aug 3, 8:04am  

Patrick says
The important questions:

1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?


First thing is everybody turn off their TV (mostly).
8   WookieMan   2020 Aug 3, 8:23am  

FuckTheMainstreamMedia says
Patrick says
The important questions:

1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?


1. Propaganda pushed by the mainstream media. Essentially Democrats running major news organizations starting with the Clinton News Network and George Clintonopolous running ABC’s nightly broadcast.

2. Tar and feather “journalists.”

This really is the crux of the issue. I'm digging deeper into media sources lately. Claims are being reported or opined that don't remotely follow the data or the data is massively flawed or insufficient. Two charts recently on other posts here used data that was downright awful WRT mask wearing. Claimed sample sizes of 2,000 people out of 330M being thrown into charts as if that's the actual situation in our entire country? People believe this stuff without taking an extra step or two, just because it's in a pretty graphic or graph form. Or it confirms their bias.

There need to be a randomized news link aggregator that doesn't show the media outlet reporting until you click in. I think that's half the battle. A leftist won't read a FOX or Brietbart article if they know the outlet. Same with many conservatives and CNN and other liberal network. If you could somehow strip the graphics and branding, that would be even better. People are only going to sources they believe to be true. And then don't even question those sources anymore. Media has failed and is ultimately the biggest enemy of the day, and by a long shot.
9   Patrick   2020 Aug 3, 8:26am  

So TV has been declining for sure.

Matt Taibbi has a good article out about the situation:


"Kansas Should Go F--- Itself", review of a new book by Thomas Frank called The People, No

Author Thomas Frank predicted the modern culture war, and he was right about Donald Trump, but don’t expect political leaders to pay attention to his new book about populism...

Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas? in 2004, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency. The Iraq War was already looking like a disaster, but the Democratic Party was helpless to take advantage, a fact the opinion-shaping class on the coasts found puzzling. Blue-staters felt sure they’d conquered the electoral failure problem in the nineties, when a combination of Bill Clinton’s Arkansas twang, policy pandering (a middle-class tax cut!) and a heavy dose of unsubtle race politics (e.g. ending welfare “as we know it”) appeared to cut the heart out of the Republican “Southern strategy.” ...

Every gathering of self-described liberals back then devolved into the same sad-faced anthropological speculation about Republicans: “Why do they vote against their own interests?” ...

Frank explained the Republican voter had thrown support to the Republicans’ pro-corporate economic message in exchange for solidarity on cultural issues, as part of what he called the “Great Backlash”:

While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. ...

for the chattering classes, this thesis was enough. What they heard was that the electorally self-harming white Republican voter from poor regions like the High Plains was motivated not by reason, but by racial animus and Christian superstition.

For a certain kind of blue-state media consumer, and especially for Democratic Party politicians, this was a huge relief...

The Kansas title alone spoke to one of Frank’s central observations: while red state voters might frame objections in terms of issues like abortion or busing, in a broader sense the Republican voter is recoiling from urban liberal condescension.

That Democrats needed Thomas Frank to tell them what conservatives fifteen miles outside the cities were thinking was damning in itself. Even worse was the basically unbroken string of insults emanating from pop culture (including from magazines like Rolling Stone: I was very guilty of this) describing life between the cities as a prole horror peopled by obese, Bible-thumping dolts who couldn’t navigate a Thai menu and polished gun lockers instead of reading.

Republicans may have controlled government at the time, but when they turned on TV sets or looked up at movie screens, their voters felt accused of something just for living in little towns, raising kids, and visiting church on Sundays. What’s the matter, they were asking, with that? ...

Frank ripped the political strategy of Clinton Democrats, who removed economic issues from their platform as they commenced accepting gobs of Wall Street money in a post-Mondale effort to compete with Republicans on fundraising. Gambling that working-class voters would keep voting blue because “Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues,” New Democrats stopped targeting blue-collar voters and switched rhetorical emphasis to “affluent, white collar professionals who are liberal on social issues.”

...as Frank put it, “What politician in this success-loving country really wants to be the voice of poor people?”...

Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters—their traditional base—the big brush-off…

Working-class voices disappeared from the press and earnest movies like Norma Rae and The China Syndrome gave way to a new brand of upper-class messaging that reveled in imperious sneering and weird culture-war provocations...


Hello ApocalypseFuck

In an America where the chief sources of one’s ideas about life’s possibilities are TV and the movies, it’s not hard to be convinced that we inhabit a liberal-dominated world: feminist cartoons for ten-year-olds are followed by commercials for nonconformist deodorants; entire families of movies are organized around some transcendent dick joke…

In Frank’s home state of Kansas, voters reacted by moving right as the triumvirate of news media, pop culture, and Democratic politics spoke to them less and less. “The state,” he wrote, “watches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year.”

Perceiving correctly that there would be no natural brake on this phenomenon, since the executive set was able to pay itself more and more as the country grew more divided, Frank wondered, “Why shouldn’t our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?”

We have the answer to that now, don’t we?


So there we have it. The division makes the executive set richer, because we cannot possibly unify to vote against them.

(Trump's) stump act seemed tailored to take advantage of the gigantic market opportunity Democrats had created, and which Frank described. ...

workers’ share of GDP hit the lowest levels in American history in 2011 and stayed there, as inequities stemming from the Obama “recovery” became a “quasi-permanent development.” ...

Also: the word, “populism,” became a synonym for plague or menace. Post-Trump and post-Brexit, pundits tended to use the term in tandem with other epithets, e.g. the “populist threat.” For Frank, a liberal intellectual whose breathless admiration for the actual Populist movement of the 1890s had been a running theme across two decades, this must have stung. ...

F.D.R. himself was a genteel aristocrat, but battered as a Russian agent – one Chicago Tribune cartoon showed his hands covered with the “red jam of Moscow” – and his followers were described as a mob of “sentimentalists and demagogues” who wanted to “take away from the thrifty what the thrifty or their ancestors have accumulated.” His followers were “people of low mentality”


Gosh, that sounds familiar too.

Now anti-populism was taken up by a new elite, a liberal elite that was led by a handful of thinkers at prestigious universities … In short, the highly educated learned to deplore working-class movements for their bigotry, their refusal of modernity, and their borderline madness. ...

the message of anti-populism is the same as ever: the lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice. The difference today is that enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism. ...

The average blue-state media consumer by 2020 has ingested so much propaganda about Trump (and Sanders, for that matter) that he or she will be almost immune to the damning narratives in this book. Protesting, “But Trump is a racist,” they won’t see the real point – that these furious propaganda campaigns that have been repeated almost word for word dating back to the 1890s are aimed at voters, not politicians. ...

After 2016 it became axiomatic that the Trump voter, or the Leave voter, was – without exception now – a crazed, racist monster.


Hi again Apocalypsefuck.

New York Times instructing white liberals to cut off their relatives (by text, incidentally) until they donate to Black Lives Matter, or a CNN tweet instructing “individuals with a cervix” to start getting cancer screens at age 25, or to widespread denunciations of Mount Rushmore as a “monument of two slaveholders” when visited by Trump, after those same outlets praised its “majesty” just four years earlier.

These stories are as incomprehensible to Middle America as the pictures of MAGA fanatics going maskless and dying of Covid-19 to own the libs are to blue-state audiences. Yet both groups are bombarded with images of their opposite extremes, with predictable results: we all hate each other.
10   Patrick   2020 Aug 3, 8:33am  

WookieMan says
randomized news link aggregator that doesn't show the media outlet reporting until you click in. I think that's half the battle. A leftist won't read a FOX or Brietbart article if they know the outlet. Same with many conservatives and CNN and other liberal network. If you could somehow strip the graphics and branding, that would be even better. People are only going to sources they believe to be true. And then don't even question those sources anymore. Media has failed and is ultimately the biggest enemy of the day, and by a long shot.


That's a great idea!

Maybe there should be a site which never shows the source. But then, even "randomized" articles would overwhelmingly favor Democratic points of view, because they are the large majority of sites and reporters. Alternatives tend to come from small sites.
11   Patrick   2020 Aug 3, 8:36am  

Let me see if I can summarize the wall of text I posted:

Liberals do not want to believe that Red State voters are motivated by the loss of all their jobs to China and the insults on top of that injury. Instead, they want to believe that Red State voters are ignorant racists, so that they can feel that "it's not their fault" that they so willingly cooperated in the gutting of US industry.

That's partisan in itself, but of course I think it's true.
12   WookieMan   2020 Aug 3, 8:47am  

Patrick says
Maybe there should be a site which never shows the source. But then, even "randomized" articles would overwhelmingly favor Democratic points of view, because they are the large majority of sites and reporters. Alternatives tend to come from small sites.

You're likely correct with it being left leaning as a random aggregator. Could be a community page that people input a site they like and it becomes part of the "news crawl" or whatever you'd call it. I'm fine reading plain text as well. Flashy sites are that way for a reason, to distract from the actual content.

I just want information. Like during the impeachment, the segments I did watch were on C-SPAN. Not CNN or FOX. During breaks it's all partisan bull shit on either network. I just want to hear the information and come to my own conclusion. That's why I'm going to try and dig more into people links and data they present. An extra 5 minutes to see that some network or media company did an online survey, with loaded questions, to a tiny sample size, does not mean it's remotely factual or real.
13   FuckTheMainstreamMedia   2020 Aug 3, 9:43am  

WookieMan says
Patrick says
Maybe there should be a site which never shows the source. But then, even "randomized" articles would overwhelmingly favor Democratic points of view, because they are the large majority of sites and reporters. Alternatives tend to come from small sites.

You're likely correct with it being left leaning as a random aggregator. Could be a community page that people input a site they like and it becomes part of the "news crawl" or whatever you'd call it. I'm fine reading plain text as well. Flashy sites are that way for a reason, to distract from the actual content.

I just want information. Like during the impeachment, the segments I did watch were on C-SPAN. Not CNN or FOX. During breaks it's all partisan bull shit on either network. I just want to hear the information and come to my own conclusion. That's why I'm going to try and dig more into people links and data ...


This mirrors what I’ve tried to do with Covid...using only worldometers, cdc, and state and local health officials.

Guess which side argues with everything I say?
14   mell   2020 Aug 3, 10:20am  

The devastation in SF is pervasive, 50% of restaurants closed, most for good. Yet in the Marina people are partying every night, sitting close together often without masks while Covid cases are the same or lower than in other neighborhood, no spikes. I'm not saying opening up doesn't increase cases but the economic and social benefits of opening up which quickly translate into quality of life benefits which eventually affects life expectancy and longevity positively by far outweighs these drastic measures, not to mention that the money saved in UE can be used by the government for research into treatments for many deadly diseases. It's obvious to anybody but there's a mental block in the left. If they would run out of UE benefits quickly they may change their minds faster, although I have seen more lefties than I thought coming around and joining in into the Newsom and Breed recall efforts.
15   WookieMan   2020 Aug 3, 10:34am  

mell says
If they would run out of UE benefits quickly they may change their minds faster, although I have seen more lefties than I thought coming around and joining in into the Newsom and Breed recall efforts.

As much as they want to politicize a virus, they cannot continue unabated another 3 months. It's impossible. No one gives a flip about it except a tiny fraction of a minority saying it's deadly and put your mask on. What they've failed to realize is that deaths are down and most people are wearing masks in appropriate situations. You've got what you wanted. Now what? It can't be economy. We're not at war with anyone. Considering this HUGE GLOBAL pandemic, we're in decent shape.

A vocal minority doesn't like ONE person. That's really what this is all about. Really sad to let one person influence your life so much that people want recession and death to "try" and make one person go away. One person...
16   Onvacation   2020 Aug 3, 10:48am  

Trump was the man when he was just a billionaire playboy screwing supermodels and playboy bunnies.

Now he is a vile, lying, cheating, stupid, treasonous, immature, ugly fat orange man that has a cult like following.

Did I get that right?
17   Misc   2020 Aug 3, 11:08am  

All I know is that if someone came out with something titled "White is King" the left would have a screaming hissy-fit.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/02/entertainment/adele-instagram-beyonce-support-trnd/index.html

However, the reverse is widely acclaimed.
18   FuckTheMainstreamMedia   2020 Aug 3, 11:18am  

WookieMan says
mell says
If they would run out of UE benefits quickly they may change their minds faster, although I have seen more lefties than I thought coming around and joining in into the Newsom and Breed recall efforts.

As much as they want to politicize a virus, they cannot continue unabated another 3 months. It's impossible. No one gives a flip about it except a tiny fraction of a minority saying it's deadly and put your mask on. What they've failed to realize is that deaths are down and most people are wearing masks in appropriate situations. You've got what you wanted. Now what? It can't be economy. We're not at war with anyone. Considering this HUGE GLOBAL pandemic, we're in decent shape.

A vocal minority doesn't like ONE person. That's really what this is all about. Really sad to let one person influence your life so much that people want recession and death to "try" and make one pers...


Let’s be clear here...President Trump just makes it easier. The media would be in a tizzy regardless of who the Republican President was.
19   PeopleUnited   2020 Aug 3, 6:01pm  

Patrick says
The important questions:

1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?


1. Lack of shared values due to erosion of church and family values and promoting progressive/Bolshevik ideals by academia, media, and corporate propaganda.

2. Reestablish Christian and family values. Reject and shame any “news” source that is in conflict with Christian and family values.
20   rocketjoe79   2020 Aug 3, 11:52pm  

Watching several seasons of the Original "Superman", followed up with "The Andy Griffith Show" and Carol Burnett to top things off should restore all things Americana.

If you want Aversion Therapy, Watch "The Man in the High Castle" on Amazon for a chilling taste of how things might have been.
21   MisdemeanorRebel   2020 Aug 4, 12:29am  

TrumpingTits says
Yup. Remember Bush Derangement Syndrome?


Bush was literally Hitler - CANT YOU SEE THAT REDNECK?!
22   just_passing_through   2020 Aug 4, 5:19am  

TrumpingTits says
Yup. Remember Bush Derangement Syndrome?


I do! Also Batshit Crazy Cindy Sheehan...
23   theoakman   2020 Aug 4, 7:02am  

Patrick says
The important questions:

1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?


It all started with the GWB election. The first four years of Bush's term was met with a media hissyfit as well.
24   FuckTheMainstreamMedia   2020 Aug 4, 7:26am  

theoakman says
Patrick says
The important questions:

1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?


It all started with the GWB election. The first four years of Bush's term was met with a media hissyfit as well.


It started before that. Despite modern gaslighting articles, the media was heavily biased against Reagan:


“Elected on a promise to slash taxes and crack down on freeloading ‘welfare queens,’ Reagan depicted government as wasteful and minimized its capacity to help people, ideas that survive today. Reagan also dealt a blow to organized labor by firing the striking air traffic controllers, and appointed Antonin Scalia, still the Supreme Court’s most conservative jurist.”
...
“Reagan’s weakening of the social safety net by dismantling longtime Democratic ‘Great Society’ programs arguably vexes his critics the most. By persuading Congress to approve sweeping tax cuts for the wealthy while slashing welfare benefits and other social services like the federal housing assistance program, Reagan was blamed for a huge surge in the nation’s poor and homeless population.”
— Beth Fouhy in an AP story headlined: “Many Still Troubled by Reagan’s Legacy,” June 9, 2004.


https://www.mrc.org/media-reality-check/what-they-said-then-how-liberal-media-savaged-reagan

And then Bush Sr.:


In both 1996 and 1992, the public said Bill Clinton was the media favorite (59% for Clinton, 17% for Dole in 1996) and (52% Clinton, 17% George H.W. Bush in 1992). In an online Harris Interactive survey from October that posed the question differently, 36% said the media favored both candidates equally, but almost four times as many said the media favored Obama over McCain (34% to 9%).


https://www.forbes.com/2008/12/11/liberal-media-bias-oped-cx_kb_1215bowman.html#54a4812a658e

And finally when it came to Bush Sr., literally all economic news in the last half of 1992 was terrible despite an already recovering economy and magically things insta improved once Clinton was sworn in.

It was riveting. In his first solo press conference, President Donald Trump spent much of the hour berating the media for what Trump called anti-Republican bias and its relentlessly negative “tone.”
It’s about time. The liberal media has long been sticking it to Republicans.
In October 1992, during the presidential race between President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Investor’s Business Daily found that over 90 percent of the economic news in newspapers was negative. At the time, the economy was well into a recovery, on its 19th consecutive month of growth. Yet much of the business news was sour.
The next month, November 1992, Bill Clinton won. Investor’s Business Daily found that suddenly only 14 percent of the newspapers’ economic news was negative, a dramatic decline in negativity and upswing in positive economic news.


https://www.larryelder.com/column/trump-eviscerates-liberal-media-took-long/

What is true is that the media is terribly biased, and their coverage of political, economic, and foreign policy news is almost exclusively responsible for the political polarization that now exists in the US.
25   mell   2020 Aug 4, 7:29am  

theoakman says
Patrick says
The important questions:

1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?


It all started with the GWB election. The first four years of Bush's term was met with a media hissyfit as well.


Very true - though I think Boosh deserves all the flak he can get for being a war criminal it's interesting that the globalist leftoids and the lamestream media suddenly cozied up with Boosh and he became their new best friend against ORANGE!MAN!BAD! despite having a similarly good relationship with PUTIN!BAD! etc. etc. But back then they hated him yes. Probably around the time when it started. Bill was the last "normal" presidency without too much polarization.
26   FuckTheMainstreamMedia   2020 Aug 4, 7:31am  

Even though they are lefties, Bad Religion had the media pegged when they wrote this song 16 years ago
www.youtube.com/embed/BxoD9zWY9Rg
27   Shaman   2020 Aug 4, 11:06am  

I agree it started with Bill Clinton. The dude made an absolutely BRILLIANT move in allying the DNC with corporatists and the rich. Sure, he abandoned working people and totally sold out to China, but the tech boom coincided with his Presidential reign and gave him a strong economy to point at and say “see? Everything is fine!”
He basically destroyed the GOP for eight years. Their only response was to get super focused on cultural issues and try to witch hunt out some misdeeds of his past. Whitewater was originally a fishing expedition into a failed small time land deal the Clintons did, but it morphed into a monster and finally got the POTUS in trouble....for getting a blowjob. Yah it got stupid. But the Republicans were so gobsmacked by the Democrat ascendancy due to their new alliance with big money that they had nothing but rage to offer.

Republicans sort of barely almost got a win with Bush W. although Gore may also have won. Not that it mattered that much. Either would have done basically the same things in office.
And due to wars and incumbency he managed to keep the GOP in power for eight years. After which the Democrats regained their power handily and elected Obama for an eight year power walk.

But the neo-Democrats made economic enemies of the electoral during this time, hollowing out the middle class and devastating middle America with their pro-immigrant, pro-outsourcing, pro-insourcing, pro-big business stance. It got really disgusting under Obama, with the crony capitalism and blatant side deals. And all that led to a Trumpian victory in 2016.

Now the Dems want their power back. The big business world wants their sweetheart deals back. And the oligarchs want their easily-bribed Democrat politicians back.

And the people are being led astray once again by a mass media which is entirely the tool of all mentioned in the above paragraph. People are stupid .
But are they stupid enough to vote against their interests yet again just because the media told them ORANGEMANBAD? Many are exactly that stupid. Most of those have what is referred to as “an education” but are entirely lacking in wisdom, otherwise referred to as “common sense.”

Which will be the majority?

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