Pew: Political Polarization In The American Public
If this is right, then Mann and Ornstein are wrong about polarization being primarily the fault of conservatives. I used to buy their line, but I've been skeptical for awhile now. Liberals became "progressives," and progressives lean pretty far to the left. The extreme fringe on the left has almost fallen off that end of the spectrum and basically lost its mind. And-whereas I'm basically still a Democrat because, unlike the GOP, the Dems seem to have generally kept their crazies at arms length--I'm now worried that the Dem's firewall has broken down. The Dems all broke for same-sex marriage pretty fast--and, though I agree with them on that, that's a very big shift to the left. Many Dems now defend a virtual open-borders position, and single-payer health-care seems to be extremely popular. And lefty Dems now seem to me to be every bit as intolerant as righty Pubs...or more so.
Anyway, it's not going to surprise me a lot if the Pew study turns out to be right.
Anyway, it's not going to surprise me a lot if the Pew study turns out to be right.
posted by Winston Smith at
6:16 PM
6 Comments:
Wouldn't the more obvious observation be: Mann and Ornstein were right, but the Democrats are quickly becoming just as (if not more) culpable?
And that data is circa 2014 when the SJW phenomenon was really in its early stages. What happens in the Trump era?
Yeah, I don't mean to poke at a sore spot, Winst, but if your concerns regarding your crankiness impacting your rationale persist in this matter, I'd say this is a good example of an otherwise-extremely-rare rudimentary rational oversight of yours...
...probably induced by crankiness.
Could be, obviously, but all I really said was that I've been skeptical for quite awhile...which seems consistent with the Pew data... Also, I suspect Mann and Ornstein are wrong...though I didn't intend to say that they've *always* been wrong. Apparently Ornstein, at least, denies the Pew conclusions....
But there's no doubt that I'm getting pretty annoyed by all these topics, and that almost always undermines objectivity.
Ah, well I read that as you suggesting that Mann and Ornstein's argument (which was made in 2012) that the Republicans were causing the majority of the issue with political polarization was somehow disproven by a Pew study showing significant political polarization in 2014.
The fact that there has been near-equal tendencies toward ideological extremes on each side of the aisle doesn't seem to me to provide much evidence against the argument that these tendencies were initially and largely caused by the political representatives on the right.
People are reactionary, and I would expect that such divergence could just as easily be triggered by one particular side as it could by both sides simultaneously. So I'm not sure what the Pew study says to you that I'm missing which would equally distribute the cause among parties rather than the effect.
I didn't say--or didn't intend to say--that the GOP didn't start it. IMO Newt Gingrich basically started it...unless you count the Dems' misdeeds with respect to the Indiana 8th...which...maybe we should...
But anyway, as for the craziness in *Congress*: it was IMO the "Gingrich revolution / Contract on America. I do think that the Dems have been better about not giving into their crazies...but...for at least 5 years, that seems to have been breaking down.
Ornstein seems to *still* thinks that it's on the Pubs... Me, I'm less sure.
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