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Monday, June 16, 2014

Bare Sane Majority

I wish it was hard to believe four Supreme Court Justices think it's okay for a third party to lie their way into buying someone else a gun.

3 comments:

jimf said...

Packing the Supreme Court full of. . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/upshot/the-polarized-court.html

jimf said...

The political Lava Lamp:
http://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/856551367.gif

(via
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/06/12/our-cold-civil-war-intensifies-ctd-2/ )

Dale Carrico said...

I think the current punditocratic vogue of "polarization" narratives and theses conceal at least as much as they reveal.

The Democratic and Republican parties have gone through a Great Sort since the Southern Strategy (actually beginning with periodic betrayals by the "Solid South" during the Second New Deal), in which complex coalitions containing both liberals and conservatives instead came to map more directly onto the duopoly.

What now passes for polarization was still there but obscured by the divergence of party-ID and ideological orientation. The prevalence of white supremacy and its simultaneous amelioration (and also, for the white racist stragglers, exacerbation) exacerbation by the welcome and healthy demographic diversification, secularization, and planetization of the population is another force that is accounting for much that is being grotesquely oversimplified as "polarization" in these accounts.

But I also think "polarization" is just the latest form the punditocracy's inane mythic "independent voter" "moderate middle" and "false equivalency" fetish thesis is taking. Majorities still support progressive policy prescriptions, after all, but can be actively mislead or misdirected from voting in ways that reflect these beliefs by unscrupulous reactionaries on the right who are reconciled to the Noble Lie simply in taking up the politics of a plutocratic minority in a representative system that must somehow enlist support of majorities against their actual interests.

The anti-science views of the GOP which attract so much attention are connected to their systematic deceptions in my view. To speak of "polarization" is to appear to observe and analyze real phenomena but in a way that disdains the real substance of the actual views and practices and consequences that are presumably "polarized." You can say that the assertions of a liar or a charlatan as against the assertions of an honest witness or sound scientist are "polarized" -- but to put the difference that way is to miss the difference that makes a difference. Which, I daresay is the point.