We started this blog because we feel like lonely, lonely little boys. Where we come from, libertarians and communists toss bombs at each other, people discuss whether the US attacked itself on 9/11 to justify stealing oil, and don't even get me started on abortion.
The three of us? We feel stuck in the middle. Where's the space for the guys that think the rich might need to pay a little more, but think the far left loonies can't be trusted with a butter knife let alone the healthcare system?
That's a microcosm of society as a whole. Congress itself divides in a pretty extreme fashion, and increasing. And it isn't just Congress. People as a whole are sorting out, such that the number of "extreme" counties, IE, ones that vote for one candidate or the other by a margin of more than 10%, have pretty much doubled since the Carter era.
Yikes.
The question is why. Partly, the problem MAY be so-called "echo chambers." Sit in a cave and yell "universal healthcare is great!" You'll hear it back, 10,000 times, before that message goes away.
Okay, rename that cave MSNBC, and have a bunch of people yelling the same message, and see what happens.
The idea is that, if you immerse yourself in that kind of environment, you will end up confirming your own beliefs. Thus, us politically-motivated types become more and more extreme over time, especially since we don't even read the same books. And if Twitter mirrors society, then Republicans and Democrats do not even talk to each other.
Here's the thing. It's all bullshit.
At least for most people.
So says "Media and Political Polarization" by M Prior.
He points out an interesting statistic: only 5% of Americans even watch more than an hour of Fox News a week. Think about your last cocktail party or your kid's baseball game. How many people actually cared when you started your summary of minimum wage politics? And how many rolled their eyes?
The eye-rollers outnumber the interested by a lot. These kinds of channels just cannot radicalize most people, because most people simply do not care enough to radicalize. It's like reading the Communist Manifesto to your cat, or teaching advanced physics to your dog.
Instead what's happened is that you have a big mass of people who just don't care, and only watched the news because it was the only thing on television. Once cable kicks off, all the girls can watch HGTV, all the boys can watch ESPN, and the weirdos can watch 24 hour news channels.
And us weirdos? There's a ton of cross-over. Prior points out that almost a third of traffic at the NY Times comes from conservatives. I am not surprised: I kept Krugman on my blog-roll and read him religiously until NYT held me to 30 hits a month or whatever. Most of us are issued-based, which means we like to read things from different sources about issues we like.
Thus, if I like economics, I am going to learn about the minimum wage from the conservatives, but I am going to reach out to liberal websites to learn from them, too. You never know, they might know something!
That's not to say there is not a problem with polarization. We definitely have an issue with a radicalized Congress. Instead of looking to our media sources, though, what we should be looking towards are the incentives driving individual Congress-men to become more extreme. Reliance on donor financing and partisan supporters, for instance. Narrow, deep bases are like suction cups, that tie you down to a single space, while you reach out and try to grab as many flying independent "voters" as possible.
If anything, the problem is not one of people caring too much and becoming extreme, but most people caring too little, and therefore exerting little to no influence in the process...and therefore having no power.
-Robert
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