To understand how the liberalmind thinks, and where they are educated. Go to www.democraticunderground.com hit the message forums, and any other hot topics on the web site, I’m sure this may answer some questions.
Bush= MY President
You are welcome to him. I can only wish the relationship were entirely personal.
I can well understand the American public’s hesitation when it comes to political labels. As to the specific label of “liberal”, it has some historical weaknesses due to unfortunate connotations.
Besides the calumny heaped upon it from the right, there is the suspicion from the left that the “liberal” represents someone who wishes well, but faintly. One who opposes evil machinations from the right, but will run for cover as soon as the going gets tough, the kind of man who will shrink away from criticizing the right the instant they begin to blubber about how “patriotic” they are.
Patriotism is not the last refuge of a scoundrel, as the adage has it, generally it is the first.
Thanks for the link, RSC0318. However, I will point out as at least one counterexample that I (who I think everyone on the SDMB will attest is a liberal in good standing) have almost never been to that website (maybe a few times before when someone linked to it).
First of all, thank you Sam Stone for raising this issue. Unlike others, I think this is a fascinating line of arguement, and many excellent pints have been made by both sides.
I’m going to come at this from a differnet angle. I’ll address Sam Stone’s assertions in the OP from my curent state of being - ie. I’m taking this out of the realm of academia and into the area of data.
I am a liberal and proud of it. I have two college degrees, graduating cum laude & summa cum laude. I was also a political cartoonist for our college newspaper for three years, so I paid very close attention to the news. I also studied art, politics and philosophy in college.
I used to get my news from many sources - our local paper, CNN, the internet, talk radio, CSPAN, etc. I used to live and breathe news and commentary.
However, I tired of the conservative drumbeat. Where I live, you cannot find one liberal talk show host - not even at 3 a.m. While this is not necessarily bad, I grew weary of the shear nastiness of conservative pundits. They expected liberals to treat them with respect and dignity while they were spitting on and harrassing liberals. So after awhile I turned off talk radio - it said nothing new, did not engage me intellectually, and raised my blood pressure.
The local papers are consistently conservative, so I started looking for more liberal elements - I subscribed to magazines like Liberal Opinion Week and The Nation. The analysis and commentary were fine at times but often the liberal sources looked like they were trying to emulate the conservatives and become nasty and ferocious themselves. They were very tired and didn’t offer new solutions in my opinion. This turned me off of those sources as well.
I recently stopped watching the news for another reason: the “if it bleeds, it leads” philosophy. I tire of death, destruction, mayhem, crime, and nastiness. There is rarely good news reported. Rarely do I see good investigative journalism. I don’t see how learning about a bus crash in Jakarta or the latest shooting in my home town elevates me.
I occasionally watch Sunday morning talk shows, but I watch them with a jaundiced eye. I work in PR, so when I hear Colin Powell or Dick Gephart answer a question, I know they’re not really answering the question. They and every other politician are saying things that politically are safe. They rarely speak exactly what is on their minds. They filter what they say to make it palatable. This is not news, it is spin, and this lack of political candor tells me I am wasting my time listening to soundbites, half-truth and factoids. I refuse to base my political decisions on such “information.”
If this makes me “uneducated” on current events, so be it. But my philopsophy is firmly intact and I live my life according to my philosophy, not according to what a pundit spews forth.
I have enough stress in my life. I work hard, I have a family to raise, I’m trying to make a positive difference in this world. I have chosen a job that allows me to live my liberal ideals, even though it doesn;t make me a boatload of money. The news and talk shows only increase my stress. It serves me no purpose to spend time on such news outlets.
Conservatism, IMO, is self-serving. Liberalism asks me to think outside of myself. I realize liberalism can get into petty politics as well, but not as much as conservatism.
To be fair, there are few good, dynamic liberal leaders. It’s hard for liberalism to thrive when there’s no one on the national level of any serious credibility willing to stick their head out, proudly proclaim, “I’m a liberal!” and lead.
Maybe liberals don’t need to be continually affirmed by the the media. Maybe we simply tire of the mainstream (read: conservative) media. Maybe we don’t have the money and the time as one person previously posted (I sure don’t). But I am happy with who I am politically.
I am not serious anymore about politics in the way Sam Stone states - buying books, watching CNN. It does bother me that the nation is growing more conservative. But all I can offer is my experience. I hope this sheds some light on the assertions put forth in this thread.
Limbaugh and O’Riley, The Great White Hopes of conservative media blitz, offer nothing more than a forum to humiliate and denigrate what ever guest appears. But I guess the low brow appeal in getting them snooty Liberals with the same verve of Mortin Downy or Jerry Springer is just a sad effect of a commercialized media wasteland that only requires low attention spans and product tie in’s …If straight out dimissing these “valid journalists” and their ilk is the bellwether of liberality I shall wear that banner with pride, and continue with my local newspaper, PBS and National Public Radio.
Sam Stone: I’m actually interested in trying to figure out how much more leisure time there might be as you move up the income ladder, but while this appears to be assumed in the economic literature, it appears no one’s bothered to actually study it, which is annoying. So the only indicator I can come up with is the indirect one I cited above, where the poorer you are the more likely it is that you have more than one job, which will certainly cut into your leisure time. So much for the time part of our information budget.
As for the money part, since the Democrats do less well with the more affluent, which is a reliable indicator of how liberalism negatively correlates with higher incomes, and since magazines, cable, and the Internet all cost, the question is how much more media do affluent folks consume than less affluent folks?
Once again, I can’t find a direct way to study this, but there is a workable if not totally satisfactory indirect way: by the age of the person. The below data comes from the U.S. Census, and shows that the older you are the more income you get, up to age 55 anyway. If we take 15-24 as poor, 25-34 as lower middle, 35-44 as upper middle, and 45-54 as rich, the figures on how much is spent on reading are interesting:
Age Income Expenditures Reading
15-24 23564 0.00% 19436 0.00% 64
25-34 40069 70.00% 34779 79.00% 135 111.00%
35-44 48451 21.00% 42154 21.00% 162 20.00%
45-54 54148 12.00% 45475 8.00% 209 29.00%
Median 38885 0.00% 35535 0.00% 161
Notice that for the “poor” in the above example, those making less than 25k, which is where the Democrats hold a commanding majority, the amount spend on reading is less than half of that spent by the next income level up.
For the “rich” in the above example, expenditures only increased 8% on a 12% increase in income, but the increase in expenditures on reading was 29%. They also spend three times more on reading than the heavily Democratic poorer segment. Now the median income for the 45-54 age group is well below the 95k level where the graph I linked to in my previous post shows the Republicans gaining the majority, so if this disproportionate increase in the expenditures on reading holds through that level, that would mean that upper income people are spending way more on “consuming media” than the poorer and more liberal part of the population. If you’re running a media company, that’s a pretty powerful argument for slanting yourself to the right, so I’d expect that the trend will continue to get stronger in the future.
Limbaugh very seldom has guests. When he does, they are invariably conservatives with whom he agrees.
So?
Why must “political” understanding be solely drawn from contemporary political thought? Why will reading, say, an interview with David Hockney or HR Geiger, or an analysis of the religious themes in 16th century Italian friezes, make you less informed about politics in general?
Seriously.
Politics is not only happening today. It also happened at every point in history, every time people had conflicts of interests and started arguing or beating each other up about it. And, just like today, art reflected the political themes of the times. Analysis of the arts tells us many things about society, and since politics is all about society, (what else would it be about?), it stands to reason that understanding the arts would provide an alternative method of appraising the mindsets of people in history. And if we understand how and why Group X thought in 1753, and what Leonardo daVinci thought about the actions of Civic Leader Y, we understand a little bit more about the world.
Sure, it won’t necessarily help us to understand the budget deficits correctly, but, and here’s the kicker, neither will:
A) listening to Rush
B) watching TV news
Reading a good daily newspaper (AND paying attention to the special reports in the business and economics sections, rather than, for example, turning straight to the sports section (another omission in the Pew study, by the way, at least if you want to use it to support a theory that “liberals” are less educated)) or The Economist might well provide you with a broad enough understanding of the basics, but you’d only learn about economics if you, you know, studied economics.
[aside]How many conservatives vs liberals vs moderates (capitalise them if you want) actually understand the issues at hand, ie. what Bush’s tax cuts mean for the economy at large, what deficit spending is, etc etc? Can this be answered by looking at reading lists? Not one iota. Not one solitary sausage of evidence is available from the sources you cite to give any indication of this, which is surely the really important information, going either way on the political spectrum.[/aside]
On the other hand, a decent, rounded knowledge of many disparate fields of knowledge, such as politics AND the arts AND history AND how to cook Italian food, will enable you to draw on many different fields and make relationships between them, and possibly come up with conclusions that a narrower study of “just” news would have enabled you to do. There is only so much you can say about the War in Iraq from the current political situation before it gets boring. You’re far more likely to appreciate and understand the subtlety of the situation if you have a knowledge of, say, the history of Mesopotamia, or the Ottoman Empire. And most of this will probably come from “artistic” sources, as a lot of our information on these cultures comes from their art. And that certainly won’t be “liberal” or “conservative.”
december
Limbaugh very seldom has guests. When he does, they are invariably conservatives with whom he agrees.
My brother, who also worships at the alter Limbaugh, delights in pointing out the biased flaw in my world views - as I do tend to condemn before thorough investigation. Not very liberal of me I know…I have never listened to Limbaugh other than his radio show(that I don’t even know if it is still on the air)and the few times he has guested on panel programs that I have viewed…I have based my assumptions of this wonder-boy upon these sound bites, and the conclusions I’ve drawn are at best inconclusive… but what purulence I’ve witnessed coming out of his talking head is just ratings generating hateful hyperbole, and thinly veiled bigotry. And as to the type of individual ( my brother included )who hold this guy in high esteem, this is not likely to be the type to consider circumstance over substance…even though my brother’s collegiate and post grad financing, and ensuing sucess’ is owed to governmently installed social programs so reviled by the Limbaugh bunch. So I am comfortable with my prejudice towards this radio bozo and his bunch, and in the knowldge that mom always liked me best anyway.
Making ill informed judgements is something everyone does all the time. Technically, we’re always ill-informed.
On the other hand, if you get more information and refuse to consider it because it would make what you believed wrong, that’s when you have a problem.