Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, July 16, 2008 10:14:00 AM
Earlier
I wrote about the change in tone on the right, and why our message sometimes fails to get through. While responding to a recent comment, I realized what the problem is. The right has bought into a myth that has been harming the left for some time, the myth of polarization.
On the left, the myth takes a somewhat different form. For years the left has adopted a self-defeating position which amounts to the belief that "if you aren't with me, you are against me". This has led to the left adopting a confrontational stance, even with independents. And, while that insistence that everyone take sides has brought in a few fence sitters, for the most part it has instead become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and driven the undecided voters to the right.
The right has, until recently, not acted in a similar way. To return to my previous essay's example, Rush Limbaugh in the late 80's and early 90's was focused on convincing those in the center that the conservative position was correct. So were most early talk radio hosts. There were a few "conservative shock jock" types, but most never made it out of local markets. The ones who succeeded were those who were interested in winning over the weakly committed conservatives and the undecided in the middle.
But it appears sometime between 2000 and 2004, or maybe a little later, the evenly divided red/blue map convinced conservatives that the media myth was true, that there was no longer any center and we were "hopelessly polarized". And, yes, within the parties the voters may have been moving to extremes, but not all party members, and not all voters. There was and is still a center, made up of the weakly committed members of each party and the true independents.
But it appears the conservatives have forgotten about these people, as the left did before them. To the credit of the right, at least most of them have not actively antagonized the center as the left did earlier, but they still have shown little interest in them. Rather than trying to win over new converts, or promote the message of the right, the conservative movement seems to have settled in to a comfortable pattern of preaching to the choir and fighting with the other side. (It is a little better than the left, which uses its web sites to just preach to the choir. For any real debate they have to visit conservative sites, as they allow no debate on their own sites. The same pattern applies to talk radio, in as much as a liberal talk radio can be said to exist.)
My problem is that this really leaves nowhere for the independents to turn. The left treats them as half-conservative and spurns them, while the conservatives just don't seem all that interested in them. And that is a shame, as just a little attention paid to this relatively large group of voters could bring pretty significant numbers into the conservative ranks.
But we seem much more interested in debating those we will never convince, and preaching to those we already have, rather than persuading those who really want us to explain our position.
POSTSCRIPT
I am sure someone will try to suggest that debate between opposing sides can help convince bystanders, and I have no argument with that position. However, the debates between left and right in recent times seem to rarely fit that description. A person here or there may bring forward some facts, they may debate a bit fo theory, but there is little that even comes close to an orderly presentation of beliefs. Instead we get bits of political shorthand, familiar to the true believers on both sides, but useless for independents who want to understand why one side or the other is the better choice.
So, while formal debate may help clarify a topic, the sort of squabbling the right and left engage in today is nothing like formal debate.
UPDATE
For those who are interested, many months ago I talked about why we appear more polarized despite a lack of any real political changes in my essay "
Clinton and Bush Killed the Center". Though it may appear that the conclusion of that essay contradicts this one, there really is no disagreement. In the earlier essay, I was talking only about those within the two parties, the center was simply not involved in my analysis. I did not then deny there was a center, the center just had no place in an examination of partisan politics.