Tea Party shocker: Even right-wingers become liberals when they turn off Fox News
America's center is to the left, and even Tea Partyers are liberals when they turn off Rush and learn real facts
And yet, as James Fallows pointed out in “Breaking the News,” in 1996, today’s elite media also thrives on superficial coverage of controvery, which makes it complicit in generating the very extremism it simultaneous deplores, condemns and needs to hold at bay in order to legitimate itself.
With such a profoundly self-contradictory practice, it should not surprise us that the poll was even more misleading than Pareene described. Polarization in some sense is real — and yet also partial, misleading and embedded in consensus as well. Tea Partyers ranting “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare!” may seem comical — but they also show just how broad a true consensus can be. In fact, they reflect two central (but routinely ignored) facts of American public opinion that have remained remarkably stable since the 1960s, despite all that’s changed since then:
- It’s not just the center vs. the extremes; there is broad consensus across the boards on the basic contours of government spending priorities — the historically most important dimension of political opinion.
- It’s just that the center is not where it’s supposed to be: It’s not somewhere in between the two parties, it’s well to the left of the Democrats in D.C.
Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.
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