Letters to the Editor
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manniwood
NPR is nowhere near 'as far left as you can get'. It's not even as far left as Pacifica Radio which last night ran an interview with someone who claimed to have proof (never demonstrated) that Bush, the Mafia and the drug cartels were secretly engineering the drug trade through Guatemala. It makes an entertaining story but it doesn't hold up. Cake for the masses mostly.
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small point
"""I should say, I have a soft spot for O'Reilly, though. I've been on his show, and he's been fair and likable to me. I don't watch the show very often, so whether that's generally the case, I don't know."""
yeah, you wrote a book about the fracturing of political discourse in america, and you have no idea whether o'reilly is generally fair on his show.
right.
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It can never be said too often
Democrats and progressives listened for years to the "don't be too polarizing" mantra. It got us George Bush as President and everything else that happened in the last ten years.
Translations:
"Things are too polarized" = "Just do what the far right wants you to do".
"We need to find the center" = "Just move closer to the far right."
It all worked, by the way, in this way, things slid to the far right, more and more and more, thus the situation we find today.
The author pretty much reveals his stance with the affinity for the views of OReilly and that he actually thought that GW would be a good president.
Of course someone like that will think that Democracts fighting back and becoming Democrats again are being too polarizing.
Of course he would.
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The actual message from the Right
A few years ago I spent a lot of time listening to conservative and religious right talk radio, watching right-wing pundits and news shows, and reading through conservative Christian blogs and web sites. One thing that all of these venues had in common was that everyone was angry about something, all the time.
I have a friend who knows a little about politics, so I asked him about that. The conversation went something like this:
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ME: I can't understand why all of these people are always mad about something. Everyone is angry. Christians are angry. Libertarians are angry. The pundits are angry.
FRIEND: You don't get it, do you. . .
ME: Get what?
FRIEND: This is what is supposed to happen. The purpose of all these shows and web sites and pundits is not to communicate information, but to keep people in a constant state of anger and umbrage. The goal is to keep people perpetually pissed-off. This is a case where the medium is truly the message. And the message is to be angry all the time. It is an appeal to the emotions, not to rationality.
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I think this is why it is difficult to make comparisons between left-wing and right-wing political discourse. While people on the left are angry about some things, that anger tends to be focused on specific individuals and events, e.g., Bush, the Iraq war, the use of torture, and so on.
Anger on the right tends to be much less focused. It is generalized, free-floating, and typically applied to entire groups -- liberals, humanists, secularists, environmentalists, immigrants, labor unions, the "culture of death," Hollywood, and so on.
In the time that I spent in the right-wing venues, I can't count how many times I heard people say that "liberals are stupid," or "liberals are evil." I have NEVER heard anything like that on the left. I've never heard any blanket condemnation of "all conservatives." I suppose it can happen, but I haven't heard it.
The closest thing on the left to right-wing talk radio is Air America. But even in that there is no comparison. On the left there simply is little interest in perpetual, free-floating anger. In comparison to the right-wing talk radio feral pit bull, Air America is a tame poodle, if even that.
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I think these ideas ring true
I've observed the truth of them myself, and in myself. I would really love to know where those civic spaces are where people can discuss important ideas and disagree with each other like grownups. At some point (and I guess my observation of it began with Newt Gingrich and crew after the '92 "revolution,") making your opinion felt seemed to become all about being louder, meaner, more of a bully, relying on sarcasm, misstatement of your opponents' position, and ad hominem attacks. I always thought, if you believe in what you're saying, if you think that's where the evidence points, why do you need to lie and be a bully to represent that opinion? At first I saw this - in a public way - as coming only from the Right, but now I'm afraid the Left has done a lot of work attempting to catch up. So everybody screams at one another and nobody listens, and worst of all, people dehumanize each other, because only evil assholes could hold that other position. Maybe the assholery isn't in the position so much as how we bludgeon each other with them. Now I'm pretty far left - I'm not a big fan of capitalism, in fact, but I really don't like the anger and suspicion in me; I don't like the fear and antipathy I feel that makes me avoid a large segment of my fellow citizens.
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Forget the stupid headline
“The Internet is making us stupid” which was probably not written by Sunstein but by someone at Salon, as a way of throwing blood in the water.
As pointed out by Augo Knoke at 6:10 am, the basic ideas, that humans surround themselves with like-minded people and ideas, and that groups of like minded-people usually come up with more extreme positions were demonstrated in social psychology experiments 40-50 years ago.
So, people acted like this long before the internet.
I agree with Tigerr at 1:42 who says “Sure, the internets will amplify it in a way, but it's definitely not the cause. We are.”
Modern communications, ready access to information, propaganda, diatribes, etc. do allow people to wallow in their own pre-conceptions. Quick thoughtless, emotionally driven emails proclaiming one’s heartfelt solidarity or disagreement provides an anchor that publicly links oneself to a position, and limits further consideration, regardless of one’s side of the political spectrum. It’s much, much easier to do this today, with the internet (a neutral tool) than it was in 1850 or 1950 or 1980.