Interesting political analysis du jour

[solarbird]

Andrew Sullivan links to a site today showing that sales of political books imply that, in general, left and right aren't talking to each other anymore.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/02/red_books_and_b.html

I'm on a mailing list that would be a counterexample, but on the whole, it echos what I've seen myself - seeing people who I know - particularly on the right, tho' you see some of it on the left too - drawing information about what the left thinks based solely on what very right-wing authors have been writing, and discounting left sources for what the left thinks out of hand, and vise-versa. It's interesting, and, for my part, not at all reassuring given the social activism of the right these days.

In terms of what hurts me, the Republican agenda is currently far worse than the Democratic one. I would like to see that change, but I don't see it happening any time soon - and the growing isolation in the politically-active/opinion-leading reader segment of the process isn't going to help that. Having the biases that I do, I tend to think the Republicans have led in this era, in adopting the conservative evangelical Christian cultural propensity against the idea of a middle ground. (No appearance of sin by associating with things that might imply it; the whole emphasis on the line from Jesus about how you must "be either hot or cold in my mouth," etc.) Evangelical conservative Christianity has a rather abrupt spiritual view of the world - you're either with Jesus or Satan, either with us or with our hated enemy - and that's been an apparent component of their culture for a while as well, in my observations. As such, it's naturally spread to politics - and you see it echoed almost verbatim in the Bush approach to foreign policy.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that you can see this in book purchase patterns, too - and that there are apparently so few books not trying to bridge that gap, at this point. I mean, honestly, if you're on the right, do you really think TREASON or Useful Idiots is going to influence anyone on the Democratic side of things? And vise versa - who on the right is going to listen to anyone carrying around a copy of Big Lies or BUSHWHACKED!

Posted since, well, it was Caucus Day, and I went and did my little caucus thing - the first time I've done so on the Democratic side of things. (And I was immediately named precinct captain, or whatever the title is. And an alternate delegate for Dean. How does this keep happening? But I guess I'll be at the King County convention, or whatever the Democrats' next step is, too...)

Comments

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

I was immediately named precinct captain, or whatever the title is. And an alternate delegate for Dean. How does this keep happening?

Because you're one of the main characters, and almost everyone else is played by an extra.

I'm a main character, too, and that's why I have never in four tries not been selected as a delegate (I turned it down on two occasions, but not this time.)

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[solarbird]

Wait - how the hell did you get in my anime, anyway?

(And me either, on the delegate thing. Fucked up.)

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[wrog]

It is kinda weird.

I mean, last time around (Republican caucus in 2000) it was somewhat inevitable (4 delegate slots; 4 people showed up to caucus; done deal --- and then McCain dropped out the following week...).

But this time, the PCO question comes up, there's 27 people there and they're all looking at me. "Well, I'll do it if nobody else wants to." And the motion immediately passes by unanimous consent.

Granted, I had gone down the phone list calling people. On the other hand, nearly half of the folks there weren't on my list, and judging from the number of Kerry people who showed up (and outnumbered the Dean folks 2-1), I figure I can't have been the only one making phone calls.

[wrog]

I actually did try to give my parents a copy of Alterman's What Liberal Media? figuring that between the declarative sentences and the numerous footnotes, they'd at least get some sense of what I'm talking about when I try to (gently) point out that they're still stuck in a circa-1975 timewarp, that what the media did to Al Gore was very much like what they did to Gerald Ford, etc...

and a month later my dad is handing it back to me saying, "I couldn't get more than a chapter into it. It's just too angry..."

and I'm like, "WTFF?? Angry? That's not angry. You wanna see angry? Check out Al Franken's book, or get your war on..."

and then they're back at me with how they really do try to read lots of different things. But then I go into topics like how Bush was AWOL and why aren't they upset about that the way they were upset about Clinton being a 'draft-dodger', the utter absurdity of the notion that Saddam and Al Queda were working together and how this has distracted from the real war on the latter, how Tom Delay's hardball games are qualitatively different from the way Tip O'Neil ran things, and 20-some-odd other topics.

And they're like, "Where are you getting this from? We haven't heard any of this, so it can't possibly be true." And of course Rush Limbaugh is a witty comedian ("umm, he called 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton 'The White House Dog'!" "never heard that") and Ann Coulter has "a wonderful sense of humor", and clearly Robert Wilson leaked his wife's covert status himself because he hates Bush and that explains everything you need to know about the Plame scandal,

and ... argh.

I think part of the problem is they're living in a fairly upscale retirement community with lots of retired executive types, and so basically everybody they know is firmly in the cheap-labor-conservative camp and so there's just this huge echo chamber of reinforcement. They also got somewhat seriously shat on back in the '70s when inflation caused middle class folks like them to suddenly find themselves in 50-60% tax brackets, all the while having to put 3 kids through college and being just above the cutoffs for financial aid eligibility --- and then my dad gets screwed out of promotions because of affirmative-action quotas...
... so basically, from their point of view, everything that's happening now is just payback for 65 years of Democrats controlling everything (1933-2000, ... yeah, you read that right) and if we don't like it, well, too bad.

The hell of it is, they've always been fairly moderate liberalnortheastern Republicans. They consider Jerry Falwell to be a jackass. They give money to Planned Parenthood. They have friends who are gay and have attended at least one same-sex wedding that I know about.

But the fact that today's Republican party is totally different from what it was in 1975 is completely lost on them. I try to explain that the nutcases are running the show, and it's, "Don't worry about them; they don't have any real power." ("Uh, Mom? Tom Delay is Speaker of the frigging House; you can't get much more power than that.")

But, naturally, the real issue that we should be concerned about is, of course, Jesse Jackson's seekrit plot to get statehood for D.C. so that he can become a Senator.

... more argh....

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[wrog]

They have friends who are gay and have attended at least one same-sex wedding that I know about.

Hm. I guess I should clarify. They're completely horrified that gay activists are forcing the churches to include gay marriage in the liturgy. So they're not actually in favor of gay marriage.

(and of course when I try to explain that this isn't quite what the issue is, and that they might want to take a closer look at what's happening in the non-Episcopal churches, well,... I just lose).

[tinlail.livejournal.com]

I must be a background character maybe one day The leads will be off making a movie and I can have a whole show about ME!.

I think that books are not a good indicator of how much the country is divided. Books are about selling books, and I don't think that books in the past were more centrist, But crap books have a short shelf life and those books don't get remembered.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

When we re-released Fortunate Son a few years ago, a fair number of our buyers, judging from mail, were thoughtful conservatives interested in hearing another angle on the President.

FS is also still selling nearly five years later. Most political books sputter out within six months.

Part of why the set of "political" books listed above only sell to their target audience is because they aren't designed in any way to appeal to anyone else. A rigorously-written political book, on the other hand, can bridge some gaps.

[banner.livejournal.com]

I don't think the left has changed one iota in the last thirty five years in all honesty. However I do think that the right has changed. You never used to see books like say 'Treason' published by the right. However books like 'Bowling for Columbine' have been coming out since the 60's.

The sides haven't changed at all, it's just these days you get to hear -both- sides. Where as it used to be you only heard one.

Look at the way McCarthy has been treated by the press, history, and school teachers. No one is taught the truth about the man, nor has anyone publically gotten up and apologized for the things they said about a man who has been proven one hundred percent acurate in all the people he said were spying for the Soviets.

I do disagree with a lot of the moral crap the Republican party has picked up of late, as a Libertarian/Conservative I'm not crazy about it, but then the Republican party was never my party. My beliefs are still the core Conservative party old line: Less Government, Less Government control, Less taxes, Less regulation, Less laws, and more Self Responsibility. I think if schools spent more time teaching and less time indocrinating a lot of people would be willing to accept such a society.

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[agrimony.livejournal.com]

The Republicans have, since the Civil War, used 'wave the bloody shirt' tactics against the Democrats and other parties as a part of their political machine. I think how vigorously they wave that shirt has gone in cycles of the intervening time.

Of course, I admit that what I'm seeing in history resonates with me as a scary liberal Democrat, so. :)

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[banner.livejournal.com]

Compared to Democrats, Republicans are pussys. Look at what's going on with the memos that got leaked. The Republicans fired one of their senior staff members, rather than investigate definite ethical, and probably criminal, wrong doing by some Democrates. The Republicans don't know how to play politican hardball, the Democrats do, and do it all the time.

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[avram]

The Republicans don’t play hardball? What, did you sleep through both Clinton administrations? The GOP took a baseless accusation (Whitewater) and hounded the Clintons over it for years!

And would you care to list what actual laws you’re implying the Democrats broke, rather than just spreading vague slime around?

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[banner.livejournal.com]

If whitewater was baseless, why did Clinton take a plea bargin? You're the one asleep here.

[avram]

What are you talking about? Clinton copped a plea in the Paula Jones civil case, which had nothing to do with Whitewater. (And that wasn’t technically a plea bargain.) Ken Starr got Webster Hubbell to plea bargain, but Hubbell isn’t Clinton.

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[avram]

McCarthy [...] a man who has been proven one hundred percent acurate in all the people he said were spying for the Soviets.

What, the list of 205 people he talked about having? Or maybe 207, he kept changing the number. He never revealed the list, so we can’t actually know, but it’s likely he was bullshitting, having just grabbed the number 205 out of a letter Secretary of State James Byrnes had written in 1946 about loyalty screening at the State Department.

You never used to see books like say 'Treason' published by the right.

Does Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) count? How about magazines like The National Review (started in 1955)?

I don't think the left has changed one iota in the last thirty five years in all honesty.

The left has changed a whole lot in 35 years. The left of 1969 was concerned primarily with the Vietnam War. Since then, feminism, gay rights, animal rights, and the anti-globalization movement have all joined in. (If you think 1969-era leftists were feminist, you need to talk to more women who hung around on the left back then.)

But you don’t have to be a leftist (I’m not, I'm liberal) to dislike what the right wing is doing to America. An honest conservative ought to hate the massive deficit spending, being lead into an unnecessary war under false premises, the squandering of international good will, the alliances with sponsors of terrorism.

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[banner.livejournal.com]

First of all, your quotes on McCarthy are fiction. Just so you know.

McCarthy's 'list' of people was for private committees he never wanted them made public, it was the Democrats on the committees that released the names. And all the names were released. And it has since been proven that all were in the employ of the Soviet Union. Read up on the Medina project. The fact that a good many people are still saying he was conducting a witch hunt, etc, shows to what lengths his opponents are still going.

Both the Book and the magazine did not have the media exposure of say, the three major networks, or the majority of the newspapers in this country (say the NYT's etc).

The left of 69 was not concerned primarily with the vietnam war. I know, I was there.

And I do hate deficit spending, I wish they spend less on social programs and pork barrels. I do not think the war was unecessary, and it was not under false pretenses, saying that just isn't true. And last of all I really don't care what the rest of the world thinks about the US, my country's first obligation is to protect me and my fellow citizens, not make OTHER people in OTHER countries happy.

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[avram]

Banner, you are a waste of my time. You’ve got a full quiver of the usual right-wing intellectually dishonest debating tactics. You idly dismiss your opponent’s sources out of hand, without providing reasons. You ignore anything someone says that you don’t know how to address, and you just make vague smears without actually providing enough details for anyone to get a handle on what you’re saying and refute you, and when they do manage to refute you, you just change the subject.

It’s not good enough to just say “such-and-such is fiction”. Back up your claims!

It’s not relevant that Goldwater’s book and Buckley’s magazine didn’t have massive media exposure. No book has as much media exposure as a major TV network. So what? You said that there weren’t any of a certain kind of book published until recently. I provided an example of such a book, and you changed the subject. Stop moving the goalposts!

OK, fine, if you were there among the left of 1969, tell me what they were primarily concerned with. Talk about what you’re talking about! And how does that address my claim, that the left has changed since then? I listed some issues that the left is far more concerned with now then they were then, and you ignored it. Actually address the claims of the people you’re arguing with!

It’s nice that you hate deficit spending. Do you vote for candidates who care about balancing the budget, or those that just want to cut taxes and don’t care about what that does? (There aren’t a significant number of candidate in either of the two major parties who really want to cut spending, so what you’ve got is a choice between cutting taxes and balancing the budget.)

I don’t care about whether you care about what the rest of the world thinks of us. The fact of the matter is that we live in a world of international threats, and fighting international threats requires international cooperation. Even the Bush administration can’t hack it alone.

As far as the war goes, why was it necessary? What “grave and gathering” threat to the US did Iraq pose? And where are all those WMDs the Bush administration said were there? Rumsfeld said he knew where they were (“They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat”, though you’ll probably just claim that interview was fiction), so why can’t we find them now?

oh please

[wrog]

First of all, your quotes on McCarthy are fiction. Just so you know.

This is beyond ridiculous. The following quote

"I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five [people] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department."

was made by one Joseph Raymond McCarthy, on Febuary 9, 1950, in a speech given to the Ohio County Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. I have named the time, the place and the speaker. The speech was broadcast, and the quote itself was widely reported in contemporary newspapers across the country (here's one. A simple Google search turns up literally hundreds of publications corroborating it). There are eyewitnesses who were present in the audience at the time, who recall him saying it and who are still alive (see here scroll down to the end).

I do find a single National Review article asserting that no audio tape exists of the speech, but even if that's actually true, that's hardly evidence that the quote did not occur as reported (hint: magnetic tape was rather expensive back then and was constantly being recycled -- entire TV seasons from that era were lost; it was very expensive to preserve tapes). Add to this the small matter that there is no record whatsoever of McCarthy attempting to repudiate what he said or to claim that he was misquoted, which, given that the quote made it into Time magazine and other national publications, he almost certainly would have done if this quote were fictional or distorted as you claim.

So this is about as far from "fiction" as you can get.

[tinlail.livejournal.com]

It so great seeing each side work to understand each other.

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

I saw that site a week or so back, and it is a neat visualisation... but isn't the reason rather simple? Nobody wants to buy books that challenge their opinions; they want to buy books that confirm them in whatever tribe they belong to. Consequently, all political books that sell in reasonable numbers are of the preaching-to-the-converted style.

The most useful kind of political book you can hope for is one that, while coming from a similar perspective to the readers', provides more detailed information that they might not have known on a specific subject; something like Fast Food Nation, for instance. (Which I've read a sample chapter of, but no more :))

By the way, I don't exclude mys'elf from any of this criticism, if it is criticism; I don't read any political books, but I do subscribe to New Internationalist magazine, which certainly has its own point of view - one which generally corresponds with mine. I don't read it to have my views challenged, I read it to get the facts on the various topics. (It's good on statistics etc.)

Incidentally, did you do the 'political survey', the open-source one? (http://politics.beasts.org/) It's not new or anything but I came across it recently. It has a good-evil (er, left-right) axis and a rather bogus 'pragmatic/idealist' axis, but the interesting thing is that apart from the actual *names* of the axes and the text of each question, everything else about the analysis including the definition of the axes was obtained mathematically based on significance analysis of a sample set of survey results. Nice example of ensuring the absence of bias.