If Michael Gerson is right and the Republican Party is being ripped apart by the business imperatives of right-wing media outlets and personalities, I’d note that those same imperatives drive left-wing media, organizations and personalities.
If people want less polarized politics, and by this I do not mean that suddenly everyone agrees about everything, then they need to start thinking about how to strengthen the parties again so that they can do what their members want without being so influenced by blowhards, greedheads, and charlatans.
I’ve noted many times before that even well-meaning idealistic people get chewed up in the cynical world of political activism where success is judged by the size of your donor/email list, or how many members you can create with an action, or how many names you can get on a petition.
Unfortunately, the best way to succeed in that business is to stir up people’s outrage and to demonize your political opponents. It’s true that this is nothing new, but clearly things have changed in the internet era.
It’s the Republicans who are coming apart now, but the left is not immune at all to the same kind of forces.
Arguably, the Left did sort of come apart in 2000 when a decent smidgeon went for Nader. Full Republican control of Congress, the White House, and the Iraq War managed to bring people back into the Dem column.
There must be some physiological reason why people need to hate. That is all writing about politics is at this point, and to argue the left is any better than the right is delusional.
I am sure research exists, but hate must release some chemical in the brain that is addictive, and makes people want more of it.
It is destroying politics. It is betraying the Enlightenment idea of rational discourse that gave rise to Democracy.
And we ain’t better than the other side.
Oh I don’t know.
I haven’t heard anyone on my side call for Trump’s assassination. I haven’t heard anyone on my side tell me that they believe ONLY one person could possibly keep me safe. I haven’t heard anyone on my side start chants to kill the other candidate. I haven’t heard anyone on my side say that ONLY my followers should be allowed to contribute to governing. No one on my side has investigated the other candidate 7 times for one supposed flawed act (and come up empty 7 times). No one on my side has millions of followers who accuse the opposition candidate of murder, drug running, fraud, rape, same sex perversions, and on and on and on. Perhaps you have. After all, David Brooks maintains that both sides do it, so it must be true… at least for you.
I’m going to be open minded and assume you wrote your comment in a moment of pique. Probably without having had enough coffee?
Because otherwise, I’d have to assume that you are as full of shit as a Christmas Turkey.
In which you prove my point.
How many pieces have their been on the left suggesting a Trump election is the end of Democracy? Booman cited one here.
But then, you think George Wallace ran on his personality rather than on segregation.
So, are we talking hate or hyperbole here? There’s an argument to be made for out of control hyperbole.
Now hate.. only one candidate is actively inciting hatred and stoking racial and ethnic tensions. There’s at least an acceptable level of hyperbole needed to convey the seriousness of the threat. If more took Trump seriously then maybe the hyperbole wouldn’t seem as outlandish.
No, it’s not the same, because there’s no substantial left media. Even so-called liberal MSNBC is controlled by arch-conservative Sumner Redstone. The Republicans have a large media force seeking to get them in power. People like Stein and Nader may get media support, but the media barons don’t want them elected and are only using them to try to stop liberals who might actually be elected. If they ever had a chance of winning, the media would turn on them in a fury.
Social media might someday turn into a similar force but I doubt it would ever be the same. There’s a lot of craziness in left social media but it’s not steered like craziness is in right social media. The majority seems to get steered by default by the right-wing media, spewing the usual nonsense about Clinton as dishonest, corrupt, illegal emails, etc., like Rush Limbaugh on endless repeat. There will never be corporate steering from the left because left policies don’t make the elite rich. Hypothetically there could be ideological steering a la old-timey Communist parties but I’m not seeing it.
MSNBC is owned by Comcast, not Sumner Redstone or Viacom.
Amen to that!!!
AG
“If people want less polarized politics, and by this I do not mean that suddenly everyone agrees about everything …”
What DO you mean by that?
That the right suddenly believes in governing? Because that’s asking them to agree with us on a fundamental issue which is currently extremely contentious.
If your ideology and your paycheck both dictate that government must remove itself from any mediating role between powerful people/institutions and anything that powerful people/institutions want, why should you care about any governance other than police/military? Drown it in a bathtub.
He’s talking about bullshit sites like usuncut, forwardprogressives, occupydemocrats, and many many more that use the language of outrage to motivate people to open their checkbooks, click on links, and share stroes on Facebook and Twitter. I cannot even BEGIN to count the number of times I have had to gently (and often not so gently) correct someone for sharing an article that was demonstrably false.
The worst about this -IMNSHO- is how sites like this affect younger and first-time voters. A LOT of young voters I know believe all sorts of totally insane crap about Hillary Clinton because sites like usuncut spread totally insane crap. A LOT of young voters have completely crazy ideas about how the government works (or doesn’t work) because sites like usuncut take advantage of their ignorance.
And don’t get me started on all the “liberal action groups” I’ve deleted or blocked from my email.
Our County Party Deputy Chairman was posting a lot of stuff from usuncut and forwardprogressives on our Party Facebook page. I had to diplomatically point out that most of what was in their stories was generally misleading or based on unreliable information and hearsay.
Like you, I have seen tons of young people posting and retweeting all sorts of bullshit from these sites. It really has contributed to a lot of disenchantment, rage and apathy among them and their peers. Most of those young people were Bernie supporters, and the shit on usuncut was like catnip to them. They didn’t seem to give a damn that most of it was utter fiction. They ended up sounding just like the right wing consumers of conservative media propaganda.
So ‘polarized’ means ‘false’ or ‘lying?’
A way to decrease the power gained within a party by whipping up hatred is to use internal voting mechanisms that benefits being broadly liked over having most hard-core followers. Instant run-off voting seems to have such an effect, because given that there is more then two candidates for an election of one (chair, seat, candidate, whatever), being the second-most liked candidate of those that are eliminated is the key to winning.
Good point. In California we have two Dems on the Nov. ballot for the open Senate seat; Repubs could not even come in second in a state-wide primary.
And that is just wrong as is all one party government.
The “jungle” primary system we now have in California was first brought to us as a result of a budget deal, of all things. A moderate Republican State Senator was term limited out of the Legislature, and he was planning runs for future office but knew he might have problems getting through future GOP primary elections. So in exchange for his vote on the budget, he forced a public vote on nonpartisan primary elections, which passed relatively narrowly.
Here’s a retrospective look with the Senator who started it all:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/california-top-two-open-primary/421557/
I don’t have a sharp opinion on whether it’s been good or bad overall; it has its strengths and weaknesses.
The main reason Kamala Harris is running against another Democrat in the general is that the California Republican Party is a mess, unwilling to moderate their policies and rhetoric even as the electorate has shown itself increasingly unwilling to accept such extremism.
Polarization is fine. Its our system that was too badly designed to handle ot.
Immune? The left is the classic case of being torn apart by the forces of moderate success, greed, envy, jealousy, and schism.
The failure of the left is in accurately discerning who their political opponents actually are. Or where the outrage actually is.
The right profoundly changed when Richard Viguerie made a mint in the 1970s by keeping mailing lists and Rush Limbaugh made a mint on shock jock radio.
The left never recovered from the Red Scare of the late 1940s. Even the New Left of the 1960s had its share of blowhards, greedheads, and charlatans. They only had command of minor subcultures and not of the larger media.
But no era was nearly as chaotic for all as the era of the competing local newspapers with brand-name editors distributed by the US Mail. That media environment in the efficient mail service of the 1850s, beginning to be carried by rail, created the information environment that created the Civil War.
With respect to Gerson, when political realignments happen, political parties get ripped apart by conflicting ideas. The manifest failure of movemental conservatism to produce anything of value in 52 years since the Goldwater run is one of the things tearing apart the Republican Party–running out of ideas. Running on empty. Having produced only perpetual war and a nascent militarized police state and a hobbled economy for most workers. Democrats are divided by that failure only to the extent that they buy into some sort of bipartisanship that treats Reagan as something other than a policy disaster.
Folks who are honest with themselves on the left don’t have that particular division, just the fear of the knock at the door from the 1940s.
With respect to Gerson, when political realignments happen, political parties get ripped apart by conflicting ideas. The manifest failure of movemental conservatism to produce anything of value in 52 years since the Goldwater run is one of the things tearing apart the Republican Party–running out of ideas. Running on empty. Having produced only perpetual war and a nascent militarized police state and a hobbled economy for most workers. Democrats are divided by that failure only to the extent that they buy into some sort of bipartisanship that treats Reagan as something other than a policy disaster.
Folks who are honest with themselves on the left don’t have that particular division, just the fear of the knock at the door from the 1940s.
You’re forgetting the crappy state of the Democratic party in Congress and the states. There are only about 5 states that the Democratic Party is in good shape. That will come back to bite pretty soon.
In my estimation, the failure of Democrats trying to out-Republican the Republicans with a moderate business-centric conservatism. Those who are honest on the left have been screaming about this for a couple of decades. To great hearing impairment.
But the go along to get along Democrats soon either were defeated by Republicans or went along in something that was a career-ending scandal.
What is needed is not parties, but a Party.
The insanity of Trumpism is really incredible.
and yet the tribalism is so ingrained in the Republican base that he’s well within the margin of error of pulling an upset.
If Ross Perot had been a better politician – this fracture would have happened in 1992.
This is a serious conflation. On the one hand, you’re pointing to the fact that one of the two main political parties has created a crisis for itself by allowing a situation in which the business imperatives of its privately-owned comms arm are undercutting the credibility of the political compromises on which its legitimacy rests. On the other hand you’re talking about “the left” — a political tendency that you’ve left completely undefined, that runs all the way from conventional liberal Democrats to people who have absolutely no use at all for liberalism or Democrats either. It’s a usage of “the left” that’s very different from that used in your previous post on the TPP. There’s such a world of contradictions and inconsistencies buried within your use of “the left” here that it’s almost useless as an analytical category.
However, if you meant “It’s the Republicans who are coming apart now, but the Democrats are not immune at all to the same kind of forces.” then you’re on much firmer ground. There is indeed a class war going on both within and from outside the Democratic Party and your TPP post highlighted just one of the major battlefields. On one side is the corporate/neoliberal/DLC cabal that controls the national and state Party infrastructure, most of the elected officials, and most emphatically Clinton herself. There’s an insurgent group in the Party as well but it has no institutional power or organization at the moment and it’s unclear how much progress it can make.
On the outside you have what I’ll call “the left” and I set the distinctions up that way because “the left” really does take a dim view of the Democrats. Done that way, the tendencies within “the left” come into sharper focus. You have people who behave like anarchists by putting their individual conscience at the center of their decision-making and look at the campaign as a moral conflict between personalities or platforms: they’re voting for Jill Stein. You have people who come out of the Trotskyist tradition and hold dogmatically to a purist view of bourgeois parties: they’re voting for Stein too, if they’re voting. These folks have some following but it’s pretty negligible.
You also have people who recognize that tactical necessity requires a truce for the next 70-odd days in order to get Clinton elected. For example, meet Alicia:
70 days. Then it’s game on.
The Venn diagram you’ve just described contains one circle for “the Democrats” and one for “the left”, with zero intersection between them.
That’s just silly. Ridiculous.
Yes. I was trying to make the point with what I said about “insurgent group in the Party” and then I blew it in the next sentence. To claim that there’s no intersection at all is not correct.
In SE Wisconsin we’ve had some experience with polarized politics. There are people here who are of a more or less liberal persuasion or who are, frankly, new at the game who want to think that they can get to a place where they’re beyond being attacked by the right-wing by being studiously “non-partisan”. They want to take the position that it’s not about being Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, big-govt. or small govt., taxes or no taxes. They want to get beyond all the labels and talk about the issues and “what’s best for the X” where X might be kids, elderly, whatever group du jour that’s under attack.
Problem is, nobody is fooled. The right wing calls them out for being liberals and then they go into this defensive crouch and talk, again, about being not-liberal and non-partisan but by that point the damage is done no matter how much they deny it.
They want to get back to “Wisconsin nice” but that ship has sailed. And now it’s sunk in the harbor, didn’t even get beyond the breakwater: it’s the right that polarizes the politics here, and they do it because it works: it’s not that different from red-baiting back in the early 1950’s. If being afraid of being attacked is driving your whole strategy, it’s a problematical place to be starting from.
No compromise with the right wing will work. If they can drive their agenda, they will; you can take your compromise and stick it where the sun don’t shine. If they can’t drive their agenda, they’ll compromise with you until they can and then come back and demand more.
To your point about “strengthening the parties”. I assume you mean the Democrats and I’m all in favor of strengthening the Democratic Party of Wisconsin because it could sure use it. But to do that would mean exactly driving out the “blowhards, greedheads, and charlatans” that run it (right into the ground). Now that might be possible in some states, I really don’t know. But here the consensus among the people who might be willing and capable of undertaking that project is it’s not possible in finite time and the people you’d be fighting along the way are not Republicans but nominal Democrats. Meanwhile the Republicans would continue to eat our lunch.
This week shook out all the extremes of Trump, what with the Mexico trip, crazed AZ speech and now a new Richard Mercer addition to the top tier of his campaign. The newest addition underscores that Trump will not recognize any boundaries with his dirty tricks.
Clinton, wisely, chose to work on fundraising in August and she’s going to need every penny of that $140+ million to offset the attacks that will surely come.
The Dems better recognize that these next 10 weeks will need every hand on deck. Trump hasn’t yet recognized that Mercer owns him, just like the Chinese investors and the Russian oligarchs. Helluva game.
To get a less polarized politics, people like mr longman will have to stop writing. From talk radio to blogs… The political media just sucks. NBC made trump. Limbaugh made the angry right. Fox News nurtured it. The political media sucks.
If there were ever a righteous revolution in America, it would only succeed by destroying the political media. They are the enemy of civil society: Politico.com and all the rest who profit from conflict and misery.
Get a new job booman.
Take it elsewhere. This is my last, little oasis. Nobody agrees with any one thing here yet we persist in largely good will, it’s great.
That’s either excellent parody, in which case I say hurrah, or you’re a fucking idiot.