"... the idea that partisanship is bad, consensus is good, and that most Americans would like to meet in the middle.
But these are not uncontested assumptions. And, three days into their safari in flyover country, the researchers were hearing some things that disturbed them greatly —sentiments that threatened their beliefs to the very core.
Nearly a year after Donald Trump’s election shocked the prognosticators, ivory-tower types are still sifting through the wreckage. Group after group of befuddled elites has crisscrossed America to poke and prod and try to figure out what they missed ...
These were not the voices of an America that wanted to find mutual understanding with its neighbors. They were, essentially, separatists, proud of their extremism and disdainful of the unenlightened."
The Atlantic
Perhaps twitter et al. will achieve what the civil war did not - split the US into two different countries ...
6 comments:
>> proud of their extremism and disdainful of the unenlightened."
It seems to me that that would be the expected and not the surprising. Maybe these researchers all studied political science in college and are consequently expensively uneducated.
Well, one point the article makes is that the researchers are not exactly unbiased; the Third Way researchers of this article seem to expect that the "average American" is some sort of moderate Democrat ...
Well, most Americans did vote for Hillary.
CIP,
I agree with your implication that Hillary represents the moderate Democrat D the Third Way researchers have in mind.
I think we also agree that Trump is very different from Hillary and I leave it up to you if you imagine T as the exact opposite of D or in some sense orthogonal to D in some political vector space.
We should therefore also both agree that A = 0.52*D + 0.48*T is significantly different from D.
Whether you think A represents the "average American" or an average of US voters in a complicated always changing political space, the conclusion from your remark would be that the mental picture of a moderate Democrat (or a moderate Republican) representing the "middle" of US politics is (currently) very wrong ...
What we have right now is a sort of "excluded middle." Various factors have pushed big chunks of the electorate towards the extremes. It's not that the mean doesn't exist - it's just not the mode.
>> It's not that the mean doesn't exist
But if as you say, we have a distribution where the middle is excluded, it is quite unlikely that the mean will be found in any given individual. That's why I find it strange that the researchers were surprised. What they were evidently expecting to find isn't particularly consistent with evolutionary psychology, but is consistent with making up a story of how one would like humans to be and then believing ones own made up story.
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