US Political Demographics: Reality v. Perception

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_honorentheos
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US Political Demographics: Reality v. Perception

Post by _honorentheos »

There have been a number of events and articles the last couple of weeks that I find meaningful in what they say about the state of politics in the United States. In large measure these articles and events highlighted what to me is a gap between how we perceive ourselves and those we view as the political "other". And this gap between perception and reality is, in my opinion, largely the responsible force pushing the partisan divide wider and wider apart like two magnets that have aligned their same poles to one another.

The Atlantic's article on the 9.9% should be credited for providing structure around which my thoughts have organized. Below are a few links covering the variety in preference for either watching videos or reading articles:

Magazine article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... cy/559130/

YouTube video:
http://www.stashmedia.tv/atlantic-the-a ... istocracy/

From the article (and left out of the YouTube video):

These special forms of wealth offer the further advantages that they are both harder to emulate and safer to brag about than high income alone. Our class walks around in the jeans and T‑shirts inherited from our supposedly humble beginnings. We prefer to signal our status by talking about our organically nourished bodies, the awe-inspiring feats of our offspring, and the ecological correctness of our neighborhoods. We have figured out how to launder our money through higher virtues.

Most important of all, we have learned how to pass all of these advantages down to our children. In America today, the single best predictor of whether an individual will get married, stay married, pursue advanced education, live in a good neighborhood, have an extensive social network, and experience good health is the performance of his or her parents on those same metrics.

We’re leaving the 90 percent and their offspring far behind in a cloud of debts and bad life choices that they somehow can’t stop themselves from making. We tend to overlook the fact that parenting is more expensive and motherhood more hazardous in the United States than in any other developed country, that campaigns against family planning and reproductive rights are an assault on the families of the bottom 90 percent, and that law-and-order politics serves to keep even more of them down. We prefer to interpret their relative poverty as vice: Why can’t they get their act together?


While anecdotal, this reflects my own experience as a professional whose peer group is largely other college educated professionals who aren't wealthy per se but are doing well. There is a lot of concern regarding where one sends one's kids to school. One couple who is so left leaning it sometimes feels like a caricature to me is so concerned with ensuring their daughter is raised among the right kinds of people that one could replace very few words in a typical conversation with them and it could easily be converted into the most racist ranting imaginable; or the most aristocratic bourgeois "let them eat cake" disdain for white-bread eating 'Mericans imaginable. Idiocracy the movie is practically a documentary to folks in this demographic. It doesn't matter that it's one of the dumbest lowbrow movies made, and to sit through it almost requires one to be or become the subject it is mocking while overtly saying if you are laughing at this then you are safely in the know. It's targeting the right people so that makes it ok that it's a crappy lowbrow movie. Religiosity is the opposite of sophistication in this paradigm; where and what one eats are important social indicators; corporate America is divided between the bad Walmart-types from the need-to-own Apple and Whole Foods branded products.

In effect, there is an accepted, almost definitional, level of disdain for low-income white Americans who lack refinement, live in the wrong parts of the country, are not sufficiently cosmopolitan, are uneducated, and who are viewed as the reason Trump won the Presidency and are therefore to blame for what is not right. 'Mericans are their parallel to Trump's Mexicans. And this morally justifies enforcing further division and the lack of interest in understanding what is really driving lower income whites to vote how they vote or believe how they believe.

This then leads to a second article on Slate I read this morning and with some dismay:
https://slate.com/culture/2018/06/miche ... on-tv.html

I am a defender of free speech, particularly that of comedians being necessary if offensive in shining a light on things we might otherwise never look at with clear eyes. This isn't about Michelle Wolf. It's about a particular comment in the article that I think captures the shift in the public discourse:

It’s thrilling to watch Wolf take aim at media outlets upstream of the late night talk show entertainment complex, just as it was when Jon Stewart took down Crossfire. But Stewart’s bit—“it’s hurting America”—depended on the earnest idea that there was an America that needed, wanted, or was worth protecting. That’s the kind of unearned presumption of good faith that leads to missteps like having John McCain on your show or hosting some kind of “Rally to Restore Sanity,” and it’s refreshingly absent from Wolf’s closing:

"That’s how these beautifully-crafted news dramas come together: You invite someone on your show because you know they’ll say something crazy, and then they say something crazy and you get to act outraged and we all watch it and talk about it. It’s like one long brothel orgy from Game of Thrones where you’re all getting paid and we’re all getting screwed. Imagine if these shows just reported the news. They wouldn’t need any of these guests at all, all they’d have to say is “Immigrant children have been ripped from their parents due to Trump’s policies. End of news.” But that’s so boring! Sure, you guys aren’t nearly as bad as the racist catheter-peddlers over at Fox News, but you’re still an accomplice if you’re giving a megaphone to a liar. Hey, but as long as you keep doing it, we’ll keep watching it. That’s entertainment!"

There’s something more interesting than simple misanthropy going on with Wolf’s pivot at the end to condemning the audience for watching news-as-entertainment, given that a considerable part of the “we all watch and talk about it” phase of the Meet the Press strategy is talk shows clowning on whatever ridiculous thing Kellyanne Conway said on Meet the Press. The only way to get enough distance and perspective to be on firm ground issuing that kind of blanket condemnation is to move further downstream, maybe to a website that covers the talk shows that covers the news shows that invite Kellyanne Conway to lie on TV. Or maybe Wolf has figured out something important here: Since everyone is part of this rotten system, no one is disqualified from helping tear it to the ground. Your move, Chuck Todd.


While I agree with the target of Wolf's joke, I was taken aback by the dismissive description of Jon Stewart's belief in, "an America that needed, wanted, or was worth protecting."

I was struck by the almost nihilistic message the author of the article used to frame the joke, taking as a given that Stewart may have been well-meaning but ultimately misguided by assuming "good faith" existed among all parties such that concern for what was good for the nation could be a viable rally cry.

Add to this the debate around what is going on at the border, the tariff wars, the Russia investigation still rolling forward despite being on the backburner of the news except for the IG report, graffiti jacket wars, and the discussion of whether or not it is effective freedom of expression to refuse to serve the President's media spokesperson and it seems that our perception of one another is quite abysmal.

In short, the assumption appears to be those who do not share our political views do not deserve to be understood as having valid reasons for their positions that should be taken into account in any debate. Good faith has been brushed aside in favor of the whole system being rotten to the core and unsalvageable.

And that leaves one to wonder: If this is truly where we are right now, where do we go from here? If our perceptions of ourselves and others is so divorced from reality (and I argue that it is reality that both sides have much more in common and much more to gain than to lose were we to go back to assuming good faith) then without any overlap in our perceived realities where does one begin to reestablish good faith?

I think the article in The Atlantic gets back to this by pointing out that class divides and income inequality are a recipe for civil unrest. And as unpleasant as this sounds to many progressives, I believe the ball is really in the court of those who aren't in the 0.1% or the lower income demographics to effect change with any hope of avoiding anarchy. Middle America is the ball being played by the political operatives who have been very effective in protecting the ever increasing wealth migration we've seen over the last few decades while pinning it on boogeymen like taxes and immigrants. But in the name of protecting our cosmopolitan beliefs we aren't exactly putting out a counter message other than to put, "You're voting against your own interests!" on repeat while signaling we firmly believe we are better than their backwards selves.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_canpakes
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Re: US Political Demographics: Reality v. Perception

Post by _canpakes »

And that leaves one to wonder: If this is truly where we are right now, where do we go from here?

Burn your televisions ...
_honorentheos
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Re: US Political Demographics: Reality v. Perception

Post by _honorentheos »

canpakes wrote:
And that leaves one to wonder: If this is truly where we are right now, where do we go from here?

Burn your televisions ...

I don't know that Marshall McLuhan would agree that television is the problem in the 21st C. Unless you mean unplug completely from everything?
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_canpakes
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Re: US Political Demographics: Reality v. Perception

Post by _canpakes »

honorentheos wrote:I don't know that Marshall McLuhan would agree that television is the problem in the 21st C. Unless you mean unplug completely from everything?

Not everything. Perhaps a more selective approach is all that would be required to make a difference.

I cannot, and have not for years, watched any network 'news' program (save an occasional PBS News Hour) due to the problem you identify above. Partly because the time seems better spent on other things, partly because I can read faster through a diverse number of sources that present in text, but mostly because 'infotainment' and opinion - much of it bordering on the ludicrous as a device to draw in more viewers to watch the spectacle - has displaced the presentation of simple reporting and facts.

But this is just a response to what Americans want to consume, right? The same phenomenon existed within the publishing world (the Enquirer and similar ilk) before it was amplified a hundredfold by the Internet. What remains of broadcast and cable 'news' now seeks to guarantee its survival in the face of that new medium by joining the race to the bottom through force-feeding of sensationalized headlines, asinine conspiracies, and amplification of our innate sense of tribalism, to dangerous levels.

I'm not articulate or eloquent enough to type out an analysis on why this is the way that it is - and who's interests are, beneath all, being served - but watching how the viewing public so eagerly consumes ever greater amounts of crap reminds me of the process for creating pâté, and just who benefits in the end from that process. :wink:
_honorentheos
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Re: US Political Demographics: Reality v. Perception

Post by _honorentheos »

My favorite course as a freshman in college was a required general credit in critical thinking. The university required the class be taught by senior tenured staff from all departments, and whether or not I was just lucky my good fortune was to have the class taught in a way that emphasized the process of evaluating media sources and recognizing bias in ones self as well as the media. It was eye opening and I'm sincerely appreciative.

Since then, this has been dropped by the university as a general and to my knowledge it isn't even offered in the same format to interested freshmen as opposed to being considered necessary to taking the first steps on one's path to higher learning.

I've been told that my generation similarly missed out when basic civics courses were dropped from high school curriculums, though I could also question why the people who tell me this are usually Conservative seniors who often are bemoaning the state of the country being turned away from God and past American exceptionalism. So there's that.

Either way, I don't think that the mediums we use to get information are going to sanitize themselves, nor could we honestly assume that we are somehow privileged to have a media diet that is nutrient dense compared to that of other Americans. But being informed is essential to the operation of a democracy as described quite frankly by the founding fathers. I'm inclined to think there is no argument that is valid that assumes an undernourished Idiocracy of 'Mericans is the problem who need to wake up and shake off their Fox News blinders so much as our approach to engaging with media needs some form of personal responsibility inserted. Don't get me wrong, I view Fox News and conservative talk radio as very problematic and creating a damaging narrative that could be causal to the problems we are seeing. But it isn't that different than someone who is watching Bill Mayer's Real Time or John Oliver and simply assumes what they say is trustworthy.

If the problem is one of lost belief in good faith on the other's part, I can't see blaming or recusing the media as meaningful to resolving the problem. Both sides want us to believe the other is not worthy of our good faith. But I think that is human nature so if we are being sold what we want to buy, how does one start to move the needle on what we want to buy?
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_honorentheos
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Re: US Political Demographics: Reality v. Perception

Post by _honorentheos »

Not only still seems relevant, as we roll into the 2020 campaign season it seems even more relevant than ever.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
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Re: US Political Demographics: Reality v. Perception

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

wrong thread, my bad Nope. Right thread, I uploaded the wrong image. It's fixed now.

honorentheos wrote:Not only still seems relevant, as we roll into the 2020 campaign season it seems even more relevant than ever.


I went to the_donald today to get a sense of where they're at in relation to the massacres and gun control, and saw this flyer:

Image

which made me think of your post. It also made me think of 'The Drumhead' episode when Jean Luc Picard was discussing the events with Worf and made this prescient observation:

Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.


Whether it's the Thoughts n' Prayers generation or the Vegan Elitists, it doesn't really matter. Personally, I feel like I'm being forced in a 'lesser of two evils' situation when it comes to politics. My political party isn't exempt from some real turdballs who talk a good game, exploiting our own virtuous outrage, only to be closely aligned with everything we find detestable (just on the downlow). <- We have a candidate running for mayor here locally who's balls deep in bed with a corrupt lobbyist from LA, taking contributions from oil people in Houston, and is taking money from all sorts of people in the automotive industry; hardly anyone knows about it because our paper sucks hornet asshole.

Man. All you can do is be true to yourself, I suppose. For example, we all know nothing will come of these massacres. We know all sorts of stuff about all sorts of things that if people would just come around homicide rates would drop, drug treatment would soar, wars would ebb, global warming might be countered, etc, etc, etc.

But it ain't gonna happen, and I suspect that's why revolutionaries exist because they understand the system is responsive enough, if at all. And even when the do succeed at a revolution, because they're humans they “F” that up, too.

What to do, what to do...

- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
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