I think any hope of uniting the country is negligible as long as Fox News continues to make money by driving a wedge between the left and right.
As their on air talent continues to say reprehensible things to get themselves boycotted, at some point, advertisers are going to just drop the whole network.
Or at least, I could hope.
Here’s the problem, data doesn’t say anything - it has to be interpreted from a point of view. The implied part of this is “use data to achieve what is good” or “use data to achieve the best result.” Defining “good” or “best” requires beliefs.
Fox News is simply filling the void. If it weren’t for Fox, some other source would fill the vacuum. As long as half of the nation is conservative, and as long as many millions feel that CNN/MSNBC/NBC/ABC and the bulk of the mainstream media panders to the left, there will always be a powerful market/customer base for something like Fox News. Getting rid of Fox will be cutting off a hydra head; another (or more) will grow up in its place.
I understand your point, but that’s not what I meant by my statement.
I pass a law making X the way we do things. As X is trialed across the country, the data doesn’t support that X works for what I had intended. Ergo, I revoke X. No harm, no fowl. No cries of flip-flopping or not holding true to my “vision” of what the world is meant to look like and how humanity is supposed to behave.
But anyways, as to the titular question of the thread, I think the problem is that centrists are fundamentally excluded from the process. In order to become known as a politician you either need to hold a partisan position or be willing to take on partisan views.
There’s no path for centrists to get out there, make proposals, and gain visibility for third, fourth, and fifth ways to accomplish things.
Is a person like Kasich really a centrist? Or is he just a Republican with a few Democratic positions? Even if he is a centrist, well great, that’s one option. There are hundreds of politicians who are partisan and maybe a dozen who aren’t. The odds that you’re going to get a partisan politician with the charisma and platform to win a partisan primary is significantly higher than that you’ll find a centrist. There just aren’t enough of them for the odds to make it good that one of them will be impressive and most people will just hear “Republican” or “Democrat” anyways, because of the optics of running for one of the two parties.
If nature had its way, we’d probably expect the political leaning of the general population to follow a bell curve, with most people in the center. The math favors a Centrist and should offer the most Centrists for consideration. It’s almost certain that most of the sane and reasonable people in the world - i.e. those who you would want running the country - are more Centrist than they are partisan. It’s really unfortunate that there’s no platform for them. Our country ends up weaker for not having access to them.
That’s what I was going to come in to say. Kasich would have been (and was) a right-wing extremist only a few years ago. That people can call him a centrist with a straight face now just shows how far out of whack the current GOP has become.
Nonsense. Rupert Murdoch didn’t start Fox News to meet a demand for conservative-biased news. He started a media empire to deliver conservative-biased news in order to indoctrinate people. He packaged and sold conservatism the same way other companies were selling beer or soap.
Sorry to sound so partisan in this but reality is reality. Large elements of the GOP would ALWAYS be foaming at the mouth the have anyone with a D attached impeached and locked up, no matter what the policies or who they were. So no Democratic candidate can meet that definition of uniting us.
A traditionally moderately conservative GOP candidate OTOH would have some of the most progressive Democrats bitching and moaning but not foaming at the mouth to have him impeached. But there’s very little chance that any such candidate could win the GOP nomination. Agreed on Kasich, he at best plays a moderate on tv and is in fact far in the conservative camp … and the party has left him. That says lots.
So the answer is no.
Related question: how many voters are really centrist now? *What is “centrist”? *At best I think some are a mix of left and right depending on the subject or easily swayed by a crowd.
Half of America was conservative before Fox News ever existed.
Kind of. But it would also take the right kind of candidate to carry this off. Nobody is going to trust someone with the political background of Hillary, or anyone from California, even if they shout to the high heavens that they are pro-gun.
On the other hand, I know guys who…well, I don’t claim to read their minds, but I’m 99% sure that these guys - who voted for Donald Trump - would have voted for Jim Webb over Trump if Webb were the nominee. An avowedly pro-gun Marine officer and infantry veteran of Vietnam who was secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, vs. a loudmouth asshole from New York? They would have yanked that lever so hard for Webb, its threads would be stripped by the end of the day. (Yes, I know voting machines don’t literally have levers.)
I initially thought Webb a very promising candidate, and were he to have had more success, I would have been out there campaigning my little ass off for him enthusiastically, rather than resignedly voting for Hillary and wishing I had a better choice. Unfortunately I was horrified and disappointed by his poor performance in his one and only primary debate, and I knew it was over for him.
That’s sort of by definition, half one side of the middle and half the other, but what was “conservative” before Fox was not the same as it is now, and it was less sorted than it is now.
Do you really think old school conservatives like Barry Goldwater or Sam Rayburn would have stomached people like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz?
If you look for the midpoint where you get equal amounts of frothing from the left and frothing from the right, you probably end up with Paul Ryan, who most Liberals recognize as an ideologue Ayn Rand devotee, who won’t say boo to Trump, but on the right is viewed as a Rino because he has the gall not to hate immigrants with sufficient fervor.
This is far from “center” as we usually understand it, and is hardly the recipe for uniting the country. Defining the center this way is like giving a teacher plate of 8 cookies to two kids. The first says he wants all eighte, the second says no they should each get 4, so the teacher says that in order to fairly compromise, the first kid should get 6.
I tend to agree with that assessment. As another point in its favor, around a year ago I Googled to see how many lefties made fun of Tucker Carlson using a puerile, obscene variant of his first name. While there were a few, they were outnumbered by right-wingers cursing him. I don’t think the right conclusion would be to place the center to the right of Tucker Carlson.
If you looked through the people associated with or funding them, probably a name or two of people who seemed like reasonable, realistic candidates might pop out.