To your point, people do know they are being lied to and taken for a ride. That's why Bush/Cheney exited with approval ratings similar to syphilis. Bernie Sanders has been amongst the most popular politicians in America for years. Is it a surprise that a woman (HRC) with less charisma than Dukakis or John Kerry lost to a television performance artist who is beloved by the "Deaths of Despair" crowd and WWE fans?
As someone who has lived in both Canada and the USA and is a non-white male, who is ethnically ambiguous, your description is not the America I know. True, most Americans are affable (even when abroad and more so than Canadians), but they are not well informed nor are they cognizant on the details of why and how they have a lower average standard of living than Canada or Western Europe. (ref. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-of-life)
As far back as Tocqueville, Americas were described as pragmatic. However, I don't think that is true in a complex world, where even the president and his courtiers are woefully uninformed (and often wrong) about economics and history. Ask any American if they know what Operation Condor was or how many coups, attempted foreign state overthrows, or rigged foreign elections America has undertaken since WW2? That's not on the nightly news nor ever discussed in their joke of a K12 education system.
I'd push back on where people get their news. In Republican circles it is church, community, and usually closed networks. Yes, people can watch FOX or whatever rubbish, but it is self-enforcing peer-to-peer networks that control behavior, My friends (a Dutch and Surinamese couple) worked as chemical engineers in Oklahoma. Neither were Americans, but the locals decided that a Trump 2000 sign would do well on their front lawn without their approval.
Also, liberals aren't progressives. The former opposed MLKjr in the 60s, they supported Gulf War 1, the Iraq invasion, and for years condemned Snowden, despite court cases showing he was correct about the existence of unconstitutional global surveillance system. Biden was a weak candidate in 2020 and incompetent in 2024. Yet, how many educated and so-called informed liberals continued to support him to the end?
The divide IMO is not politics per se, but class, one's economic stability within the current system, and one's opinion on the plutocracy. That's why Jeb Bush and CEO clowns like Howard Schultz (Starbucks' CEO) got axed early.
You frame your observations as contradicting mine but I don't really see why. I mentioned cluelessness about the wider world. I didn't discuss class divides but quite agree.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. In retrospect, I think you are correct, in that the frame that you have provided is not contradictory, just different than mine.
True, you didn't discuss class. In my opinion, people self-sort and the differences between upper middle class whites and blacks, say in suburban Detroit, are not profound versus that group and low income minorities living within Detroit. I think economic issues are a stronger predictor of people's perspectives than sundry culture war boilerplate.
I agree with your take. Which is why I favor experimenting more with sortition (selecting participants in political debates at random, somewhat like for jury duty). That could diminish the hold of extremists in some key political discussions. I don’t know if you have seen that Adam Mastroianni just published his Ideological Turing Test experiments (
https://substack.com/@experimentalhistory/note/p-150284807?r=23z3ln&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action ) which suggest that Americans may actually know pretty well what the other side is thinking (democrats masquerade successfully as republicans and vice versa). This in turn suggests that Americans have real disagreements on some fundamental values and that may explain why a whole bunch of reasonable non MAGA people will end up voting for Trump. He and his party, no matter how demented it gets, is closer to their values than democrats. People may not have strict ideologies but they have values.
Yeah, I don't get the point of that Mastroianni piece.
Nobody has suggested Democrats and Republicans are complete mysteries to each other, or that there aren't real disagreements about important issues. All that's been suggested is that how extreme Democrats and Republicans are, on issues they are well known to have feelings about, is quite exaggerated by the other camp. And I don't know what that study changes about that.
He is criticizing the types of studies you cite to support your argument. He had an hypothesis that people are not as clueless about the other side as implied by these surveys and he tested it. I am not sure either what those results mean in the broader scheme of things, and neither is he. That is the way scientists think (I know I am one). At least he is trying something different. I am not one to dismiss it out of hand.
Yeah I got that. And I'm not dismissing it out of hand. I'm simply not grasping how what he has done contradicts the other results. Maybe I'm a little thick but I'm not getting it.
The other results are taken to support the claim that people don't know what their political opponents believe. Mastroianni's experiment supports the claim that people *do* know what their political opponents believe. The argument is straightforward: If people don't know what their political opponents believe, then they can't successfully imitate what their political opponents say in response to the question, "Why are you a Democrat or Republican?" But people can successfully imitate what their political opponents say in response to that question. So, people do know what their political opponents believe.
But that's a binary. "This sounds like a Republican / this doesn't sound like a Republican." It doesn't respond to the earlier research because the earlier research doesn't say "Democrats have no idea what Republicans think." It says "Democrats think the median Republican is more extreme than the median Republican really is." It's a matter of degree, not kind. Hence it doesn't rebut. Which is why I am confused.
One way to get a connection is like this: If people were really wrong about the distribution of views held by their opponents, they would produce imitation views that their opponents would assess as too extreme to be real. The too-extreme imitations would be obvious fakes. But they aren't obvious fakes. So, people aren't so badly wrong (if they're wrong at all) about the distribution of views held by their opponents.
Issues like abortion and guns are pretty zero-sum. Of course pundits like to talk about all sorts of edge cases. But such intellectual focus on the fringes, obscures that for the vast majority of the issue, it actually is very much a win or lose situation. I'd count configurations of the sort "Well, you technically can do this in theory, but there are so many legal hurdles to go through and qualifications which must be met, that it's near-impossible in practice" as essentially being a lose - that's the desired effect.
De-industrialization isn't a zero-sum, in the sense that it can be different for different industries. But it does tend to drive to overall, very high or very low, in terms of political policy.
Ordinary people you meet casually aren't going to give you a political seminar on the issues dividing the country. Yes, social media is a hate-machine, that's absolute true. But there are indeed very real disputes which could lead to what I call Civil War II: Red vs Blue.
I'm not sure your answer really resolves the paradox, Dan. If the vast majority of Americans are moderate, middle-of-the-road Ds & Rs, much as they always have been, then why have they stopped talking politics with each other? They used to talk politics. If they are largely in agreement, and only moderately in disagreement where they do disagree, what's that harm in chatting?
I recall reading not long ago about two polls, one taken in the 1960s and the other in the 2010s, asking the same two questions. (I'm sure the polls asked more than these two questions, but these are the two that are relevant).
1. If your son / daughter wanted to marry a person of the another race, would you approve?
2. If you son / daughter wanted to marry a person of another political party, would you approve?
In the 1960s, around 90% of parents would not approve of an interracial marriage, but would approve of an inter-party marriage. In the 2010s, the numbers were reversed: around 90% of parents would approve of an interracial marriage but not an inter-party marriage. (I believe the Democrat parents were even more intolerant of inter-party marriages than Republican parents.) This suggests to me that the current political divide is greater than your observations show.
My guess is that Americans have stopped talking to strangers about politics because (i) it is futile, and (ii) they don't want to be bamboozled by zealots who have more (mis)information than they do.
One might turn the hairy eyeball to Canada, where "everything is broken" is this mantra with conservative writers, when Canada is in fact ahead of every G7 member BUT America, economically, and growing, (it's now clear) TOO fast. When your big problem is that everybody wants in, clearly, things are not that broken. (Also, there was the stellar pandemic performance.)
Reading the National Post, one might think that not just are things broken, but they're at the boarded-up-storefronts, honest merchants cowering from crime, late stage of "Atlas Shrugged", with the junkies menacing all from dark alleys. (My brother writes to me about fearing the Calgary C-train for "guys sharpening steak knives" that I just can't see, myself.)
One small complaint, comparing the briefly-popular radical hashtags on Twitter in 2020 with American conservatives, is to compare Twitter activists that don't have to stand for election, with Republicans who could proudly run for re-election on openly fascist platforms. Democratic *politicians* did not arm-wave about defunding the bastards. One can always find a similarly-extreme activist on any side. But if you compare *party* *platforms" .... there's actually no comparison.
1. Per capita GDP has been falling in Canada ever since the pandemic.
2. A majority of young people believe they will never be able to afford their own home (with considerable justification).
3. It is generally recognized that health care is collapsing in every province, regardless of which party is in power.
4. University graduation rates are now more gender-skewed than at any time since the 1970s. But today the OVER-represented gender still gets the advantage of every public program to increase their numbers further, so the trend of shutting out men will only keep increasing.
5. The federal government alone spends over $50billion per year on interest payments on the debt. This is what I like to call our Basic Income Program for Bay street banks and investors - a larger program than any other federal department.
6. Our military is an international joke, and we have no plan to build it back up to come close to satisfying our NATO commitments, even as the world becomes every more in danger of descending into another broad conflagration.
7. The federal public sector has increased by over 25% in the past few years, while services have continued to decline. (The government also spends an additional $20billion per year on outside consulting.) This is unsustainable.
8. Immigration is 100% higher than the record-high level Stephen Harper put it at in his final year in power. Non-citizen residents are at an all-time high, increasing demand on all of our infrastructure and housing stock...
9. We have by far the most corrupt government in Canadian history - even refusing to follow a Parliamentary order to turn over documents that would expose more of their corruption. (Even Nixon handed over the White House recordings when directed to do so.)
Great examples of “declinism”, which Mr. Gardner’s readers can look up on their own. For fun, though, what the heck, I’ll try answers:
Difficult for “per capita” everything to not fall when you have the highest immigration rate ever. That darn denominator!
What I believed in 1983, with interest rates hitting 19%. I was wrong.
Again, fast growth stresses services that are hard to grow.
I’m sorry you are sad about the gender ratio; but Canada still leads the G7 for “most educated work force”, and a massively skewed gender ratio in 1950 did not inhibit growth during that decade.
We’re still leading the G7 except for the USA. Every nation took on massive debt during the pandemic. Compare to UK debts.
We have not been attacked in 200 years, so at least the coasts are safe.
Debt was also described as “unsustainable” until it was needed to bail out the banks in 2009, was used, and, umm, sustained.
You’re describing immigration as an inherently bad thing. Growth without infrastructure is, but growth WITH infrastructure is…Amazon, for instance … and other great successes.
I would suggest you read some Canadian history about ‘The Family Compact’ and ‘The genesis of the railroad’, if you want to read about some real corruption in Canadian History.
1. "per capita" is the only meaningful way to measure a country's prosperity. Otherwise China and India would be whooping Canada's butt! And yes, it is in some measure a function of out-of-control immigration under Trudeau. But Canada's labour productivity - the amount of output per hour of input - is also about 50% lower than America's. Because capital accumulation and business investment have been lousy for decades. Because taxes and regulations strangle initiative. Why risk anything when the government takes away your gains, and everyone bad-mouths you for being successful?
2. The proportion of income needed to own a home today is approximately double what it was in the 1980s, Roy. Then it was around 30%, now it is around 60%. The working class - whom it sounds like you never meet - have to commute hours from the suburbs...
3. Canada hasn't experience "fast growth" in decades - except for fast growth in immigration under Trudeau. It is moronic to invite millions more people into Canada before we have built the schools, hospitals, roads, houses, etc. to accommodate them. We haven't, Roy, we haven't - and that is WHY everything feels broken in Canada. You are proving my point.
4. The systematic discrimination against males in education is an evil all on its own, regardless of its economic impact. The fact you don't see that is revealing of a moral deficiency in you, Roy.
5. America has a much higher capacity to meet its debt obligations (see point 1 above). So comparisons are tricky. Besides, the fact that most other countries are making the same mistakes as Canada is not proof that Canada is not broken. That's what you originally claimed; now you admit that Canada IS broken, just not more broken than some others. <eye roll>
6. Dan did an article a while back arguing that "our coasts are safe" isn't a valid argument anymore with modern warfare. Canada wasn't at risk of invasion in WWII or the Korean War, either, but we thought it was our duty to save the world from Nazism and communism, and maybe it still is? Do our part and all. Or maybe those suckers south of the border will do all of the heavy lifting forever, while being berated for it.
7. I didn't agree with bailing out the banks in 2009, and that was an American thing, anyway. Canada merely provided liquidity, which was recovered. You don't have to have a doctorate degree in high finance to understand that throwing $50billion a year at the Bay street billionaires is not a healthy government program. Even Jean Chretien and Paul Martin understood that much.
8. All I said was that uncontrolled immigration is unsustainable. You infer from this that I believe immigration is inherently a bad thing. That is not what I believe at all. It reveals much about you that you make such a negative and invalid inference, though. You think that anyone who disagrees with you is not only wrong, they must be morally deficient. Because you are a saint whose views on public policy are beyond reproach. That is very typical progressive inference-making. It's also very childish and tribal.
9. Again, it doesn't advance your thesis that Canada is not broken today to argue that Canada was also broken in the very distant past. The family compact and the railroad were certainly blemishes in Canadian politics, but at least things got done that are still valuable today. The $billions in disbursements from Trudeau's green slush fund have accomplished precisely nothing, except made Liberal insiders fantastically rich in very short order. Same with most of the pandemic procurements. I would suggest you take out a subscription to Blacklock's Reporter if you want to read about some real corruption in today's Ottawa - roughly five examples every week day.
I want to comment, somehow, on this piece because it strikes me as completely wrong. But it's hard to know how or where to start and how to say what I think without being too disrespectful. Maybe I'll start here: I'll turn 45 in December; I live in the US (I started to write, "America," but that's really not as precise); I have lived in the US my whole life except for three months I spent in the UK a few years back. Talking about politics with strangers has always seemed extremely awkward and borderline uncouth to me. But before Trump's first election, I wasn't *afraid* of talking about politics with strangers, and I could talk about politics with friends and family, even when we disagreed. After Trump's first election, I tried for a little while to keep talking to my parents about politics, but before too long, it became obvious that we couldn't do it anymore while keeping the peace. That is to say, I couldn't tolerate what I take to be their more-or-less evil political views and their resistance to evidence; and they couldn't tolerate what they take to be my more-or-less evil political views and my resistance to evidence. They still love me, and I still love them. But we have to stay far away from politics in order to preserve the parts of our relationship that we value. So, to me, daily life is a constant reminder of how fractured my country is. It's not okay. But I think here is where I resolve the "paradox" a bit differently than you do -- or, rather, where I fail to see anything paradoxical. You say, "And for all the talking those friendly Americans do, I overheard precisely no one discussing politics." You seem to think that is evidence of political *healthiness*. But to me, especially given the other things you observe about our eagerness to talk, the lack of open political conversation in the US is strong evidence of political disease. I talk politics, usually in semi-secret (in our houses, not in public), with like-minded friends I know and trust. I am very, very uncomfortable and wary about talking politics with new people precisely because I want to make and have friends and to be friendly, and I see politics as a serious impediment to those things. I *can't* talk about politics with my parents. So, it seems to me that an America that talks freely about sports and weather and any old thing *other than* politics is not "doing just fine." I have other thoughts on the points about perceptions of political opponents and about what I see as very shoddy empirical work in this area, but I think those thoughts are less important here, so I'll stop now.
Do you know what percentage of American voters didn't bother to vote in this incredibly fierce, era-defining election? Current estimates say it's about 36%. They weren't intimidated. It's private. More than one-third of voters couldn't bother.
For most, maybe not all, that's a pretty strong indication of deep apathy. And I think it's more than reasonable to assume a big chunk of those who *did* vote were only modestly less apathetic. We might call the "the price of eggs" voters. They know the price of eggs. They don't know much else. And don't care to know.
Very little attention is paid to voters who don't turn up, and those who barely do.And I think that leads to serious errors.
Know what the failure-to-vote rate was in 2004, twenty years ago? Just above 30%.
One of the only advantages of aging is lengthening experience: In 2004, I did some unrelated stories in the US and spent a lot of time driving around. While I did, I took the opportunity to talk to random people (as I still do) and what I found was exactly what I reported in that piece: Amazing, friendly people who would talk your ear off about anything. But when I raised politics, they went silent. Not because they were intimidated. Because they didn't care. And that was an election which was universally said to be the fiercest in a generation, after 9/11, when war was raging in Iraq and cousins of the people I spoke to were in uniform.
Who do you think writes blogs and newspaper columns? Who goes on social media to debate? Who responds to an essay by some obscure Canadian scribbler by writing his own lengthy, thoughtful consideration? Not the average American.
So please consider the possibility - the hypothesis - that your experience is not typical. And, hard as it may be to imagine, detachment and apathy -- life overwhelmingly disconnected from politics -- is the norm for much of America.
• The “Donald Trump and fascism” Wikipedia page was created on September 21, 2024, the same day The Guardian published a 4,000 word essay titled, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” — and which is cited as a source in the Wikipedia article
• Contributions from just two editors comprise 91.2% of the “Donald Trump and Fascism” article’s content, suggesting a tightly coordinated effort to control the narrative
• While the “Trumpism” Wikipedia page argues that Trumpism “has significant authoritarian leanings,” describing it as “far-right,” “national-populist,” and “neo-nationalist,” it relies on a source that argues exactly the opposite
• One of the next major citations to the “Trumpism” article that claims that the movement displays “significant authoritarian leaning” is sourced to sociologist Richard Hanmann who was eulogized in 2021 as “a committed leftist, an anti-imperialist, and a true activist-scholar”
Read the full investigation from @AshleyRindsberg on Pirate Wires.
Zowie. Two people are arguably biased. Time to turn the lights off.
Or… maybe those who think this is biased — and I don’t much care for it — could go and edit it. Because that’s how Wikipedia works. You can edit it. And if you disagree with someone else, you can talk about the disagreement and see if you can find a mutually agreed way to reconcile your views.
Seems like a more productive use of your time than yanking my chain. But it’s your free time…
There's only so many times you can use the "Zowie, two people..." defense before it becomes unconvincing, Dan. And to repeat, the fact that wikipedia is "in theory" correctable does not negate that it is biased.
Grant, need I remind you it was *always* unconvincing according to you. And once again... the denominator you absolutely refuse to acknowledge is almost seven million. Seven million articles in Wikipedia. Seven. Million.
But, hey, if a critic with an obvious axe to grind finds one article he can portray as biased on an obscure conservative website, that obviously far outweighs seven million articles in the largest encyclopedia ever created by human beings. And no, of course, you wouldn't just think to yourself, "huh, I think that can be improved" and improve it yourself, because that wouldn't be nearly as much fun as nattering righteously at me.
Current NPR CEO Katherine Maher says that during her time leading Wikipedia, she abandoned a "free and open" internet, because this led to the platform to recapitulating a "white male Westernized construct".
No wokeness from the woman “leading Wikipedia” evident there…
Don’t feign being offended, Dan, I’m only trying to assist you with your research.
Oh, Dan, we have been around this barn before. I've addressed the "denominator issue" but you refuse to acknowledge the argument. Nobody claims that wikipedia is politically biased (i.e. "wokepedia") in the "Seven. Million Articles."(TM) that have zero political significance, The claim is that it - like everything else - is most biased where the political implications are closest to the surface and most consequential. If you genuinely want to test the hypothesis, start with those pages. That's what I do.
Meanwhile, a big part of your initial argument was that the [ah-hem, small sample of] wikipedia editors you have met in your travels seemed like genuine, decent folk! I'm not disputing that, either. But the present example was written by two wikipedia editors of the political pages...
Your observation reminds me of Susan Sontag's quote about normies reading Reader's Digest:
''Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?''
Apparently you can't. Otherwise you would not feel butthurt over someone critiquing you on the epistemological stupidity of the entire article you wrote .
Whiny self absorbed white boy who thinks he's special in the noggin when he's dumb as fuck-syndrome.
Using your own ridiculous word....an "average American" can always distort his or her "averageness" anytime they want for the most part too....as "average" is defined by your own use of the word
So, no...an "average American" can totally choose to be a fascist policy supporting voter when they relate to others in the public sphere with a smile in the voting booth and a (R) vote, using your own word "average".
Fabulous observations. Thanks so much for the attempt to put some solid ground under the rolling cacophony.
Behold! Well written and thoughtful. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
If Trump voters are actually quite sane and moderate then why are they voting Trump?
To your point, people do know they are being lied to and taken for a ride. That's why Bush/Cheney exited with approval ratings similar to syphilis. Bernie Sanders has been amongst the most popular politicians in America for years. Is it a surprise that a woman (HRC) with less charisma than Dukakis or John Kerry lost to a television performance artist who is beloved by the "Deaths of Despair" crowd and WWE fans?
As someone who has lived in both Canada and the USA and is a non-white male, who is ethnically ambiguous, your description is not the America I know. True, most Americans are affable (even when abroad and more so than Canadians), but they are not well informed nor are they cognizant on the details of why and how they have a lower average standard of living than Canada or Western Europe. (ref. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-of-life)
As far back as Tocqueville, Americas were described as pragmatic. However, I don't think that is true in a complex world, where even the president and his courtiers are woefully uninformed (and often wrong) about economics and history. Ask any American if they know what Operation Condor was or how many coups, attempted foreign state overthrows, or rigged foreign elections America has undertaken since WW2? That's not on the nightly news nor ever discussed in their joke of a K12 education system.
I'd push back on where people get their news. In Republican circles it is church, community, and usually closed networks. Yes, people can watch FOX or whatever rubbish, but it is self-enforcing peer-to-peer networks that control behavior, My friends (a Dutch and Surinamese couple) worked as chemical engineers in Oklahoma. Neither were Americans, but the locals decided that a Trump 2000 sign would do well on their front lawn without their approval.
Also, liberals aren't progressives. The former opposed MLKjr in the 60s, they supported Gulf War 1, the Iraq invasion, and for years condemned Snowden, despite court cases showing he was correct about the existence of unconstitutional global surveillance system. Biden was a weak candidate in 2020 and incompetent in 2024. Yet, how many educated and so-called informed liberals continued to support him to the end?
The divide IMO is not politics per se, but class, one's economic stability within the current system, and one's opinion on the plutocracy. That's why Jeb Bush and CEO clowns like Howard Schultz (Starbucks' CEO) got axed early.
You frame your observations as contradicting mine but I don't really see why. I mentioned cluelessness about the wider world. I didn't discuss class divides but quite agree.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. In retrospect, I think you are correct, in that the frame that you have provided is not contradictory, just different than mine.
True, you didn't discuss class. In my opinion, people self-sort and the differences between upper middle class whites and blacks, say in suburban Detroit, are not profound versus that group and low income minorities living within Detroit. I think economic issues are a stronger predictor of people's perspectives than sundry culture war boilerplate.
Finally, an injection of sanity…
I don’t always agree with Dan Gardner, but this is logical, timely and intellectually comforting.
I agree with your take. Which is why I favor experimenting more with sortition (selecting participants in political debates at random, somewhat like for jury duty). That could diminish the hold of extremists in some key political discussions. I don’t know if you have seen that Adam Mastroianni just published his Ideological Turing Test experiments (
https://substack.com/@experimentalhistory/note/p-150284807?r=23z3ln&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action ) which suggest that Americans may actually know pretty well what the other side is thinking (democrats masquerade successfully as republicans and vice versa). This in turn suggests that Americans have real disagreements on some fundamental values and that may explain why a whole bunch of reasonable non MAGA people will end up voting for Trump. He and his party, no matter how demented it gets, is closer to their values than democrats. People may not have strict ideologies but they have values.
Yeah, I don't get the point of that Mastroianni piece.
Nobody has suggested Democrats and Republicans are complete mysteries to each other, or that there aren't real disagreements about important issues. All that's been suggested is that how extreme Democrats and Republicans are, on issues they are well known to have feelings about, is quite exaggerated by the other camp. And I don't know what that study changes about that.
He is criticizing the types of studies you cite to support your argument. He had an hypothesis that people are not as clueless about the other side as implied by these surveys and he tested it. I am not sure either what those results mean in the broader scheme of things, and neither is he. That is the way scientists think (I know I am one). At least he is trying something different. I am not one to dismiss it out of hand.
Yeah I got that. And I'm not dismissing it out of hand. I'm simply not grasping how what he has done contradicts the other results. Maybe I'm a little thick but I'm not getting it.
The other results are taken to support the claim that people don't know what their political opponents believe. Mastroianni's experiment supports the claim that people *do* know what their political opponents believe. The argument is straightforward: If people don't know what their political opponents believe, then they can't successfully imitate what their political opponents say in response to the question, "Why are you a Democrat or Republican?" But people can successfully imitate what their political opponents say in response to that question. So, people do know what their political opponents believe.
But that's a binary. "This sounds like a Republican / this doesn't sound like a Republican." It doesn't respond to the earlier research because the earlier research doesn't say "Democrats have no idea what Republicans think." It says "Democrats think the median Republican is more extreme than the median Republican really is." It's a matter of degree, not kind. Hence it doesn't rebut. Which is why I am confused.
One way to get a connection is like this: If people were really wrong about the distribution of views held by their opponents, they would produce imitation views that their opponents would assess as too extreme to be real. The too-extreme imitations would be obvious fakes. But they aren't obvious fakes. So, people aren't so badly wrong (if they're wrong at all) about the distribution of views held by their opponents.
Issues like abortion and guns are pretty zero-sum. Of course pundits like to talk about all sorts of edge cases. But such intellectual focus on the fringes, obscures that for the vast majority of the issue, it actually is very much a win or lose situation. I'd count configurations of the sort "Well, you technically can do this in theory, but there are so many legal hurdles to go through and qualifications which must be met, that it's near-impossible in practice" as essentially being a lose - that's the desired effect.
De-industrialization isn't a zero-sum, in the sense that it can be different for different industries. But it does tend to drive to overall, very high or very low, in terms of political policy.
Ordinary people you meet casually aren't going to give you a political seminar on the issues dividing the country. Yes, social media is a hate-machine, that's absolute true. But there are indeed very real disputes which could lead to what I call Civil War II: Red vs Blue.
I'm not sure your answer really resolves the paradox, Dan. If the vast majority of Americans are moderate, middle-of-the-road Ds & Rs, much as they always have been, then why have they stopped talking politics with each other? They used to talk politics. If they are largely in agreement, and only moderately in disagreement where they do disagree, what's that harm in chatting?
I recall reading not long ago about two polls, one taken in the 1960s and the other in the 2010s, asking the same two questions. (I'm sure the polls asked more than these two questions, but these are the two that are relevant).
1. If your son / daughter wanted to marry a person of the another race, would you approve?
2. If you son / daughter wanted to marry a person of another political party, would you approve?
In the 1960s, around 90% of parents would not approve of an interracial marriage, but would approve of an inter-party marriage. In the 2010s, the numbers were reversed: around 90% of parents would approve of an interracial marriage but not an inter-party marriage. (I believe the Democrat parents were even more intolerant of inter-party marriages than Republican parents.) This suggests to me that the current political divide is greater than your observations show.
My guess is that Americans have stopped talking to strangers about politics because (i) it is futile, and (ii) they don't want to be bamboozled by zealots who have more (mis)information than they do.
One might turn the hairy eyeball to Canada, where "everything is broken" is this mantra with conservative writers, when Canada is in fact ahead of every G7 member BUT America, economically, and growing, (it's now clear) TOO fast. When your big problem is that everybody wants in, clearly, things are not that broken. (Also, there was the stellar pandemic performance.)
Reading the National Post, one might think that not just are things broken, but they're at the boarded-up-storefronts, honest merchants cowering from crime, late stage of "Atlas Shrugged", with the junkies menacing all from dark alleys. (My brother writes to me about fearing the Calgary C-train for "guys sharpening steak knives" that I just can't see, myself.)
One small complaint, comparing the briefly-popular radical hashtags on Twitter in 2020 with American conservatives, is to compare Twitter activists that don't have to stand for election, with Republicans who could proudly run for re-election on openly fascist platforms. Democratic *politicians* did not arm-wave about defunding the bastards. One can always find a similarly-extreme activist on any side. But if you compare *party* *platforms" .... there's actually no comparison.
Oh, my. Where to begin, Roy?
1. Per capita GDP has been falling in Canada ever since the pandemic.
2. A majority of young people believe they will never be able to afford their own home (with considerable justification).
3. It is generally recognized that health care is collapsing in every province, regardless of which party is in power.
4. University graduation rates are now more gender-skewed than at any time since the 1970s. But today the OVER-represented gender still gets the advantage of every public program to increase their numbers further, so the trend of shutting out men will only keep increasing.
5. The federal government alone spends over $50billion per year on interest payments on the debt. This is what I like to call our Basic Income Program for Bay street banks and investors - a larger program than any other federal department.
6. Our military is an international joke, and we have no plan to build it back up to come close to satisfying our NATO commitments, even as the world becomes every more in danger of descending into another broad conflagration.
7. The federal public sector has increased by over 25% in the past few years, while services have continued to decline. (The government also spends an additional $20billion per year on outside consulting.) This is unsustainable.
8. Immigration is 100% higher than the record-high level Stephen Harper put it at in his final year in power. Non-citizen residents are at an all-time high, increasing demand on all of our infrastructure and housing stock...
9. We have by far the most corrupt government in Canadian history - even refusing to follow a Parliamentary order to turn over documents that would expose more of their corruption. (Even Nixon handed over the White House recordings when directed to do so.)
I could go on.
Great examples of “declinism”, which Mr. Gardner’s readers can look up on their own. For fun, though, what the heck, I’ll try answers:
Difficult for “per capita” everything to not fall when you have the highest immigration rate ever. That darn denominator!
What I believed in 1983, with interest rates hitting 19%. I was wrong.
Again, fast growth stresses services that are hard to grow.
I’m sorry you are sad about the gender ratio; but Canada still leads the G7 for “most educated work force”, and a massively skewed gender ratio in 1950 did not inhibit growth during that decade.
We’re still leading the G7 except for the USA. Every nation took on massive debt during the pandemic. Compare to UK debts.
We have not been attacked in 200 years, so at least the coasts are safe.
Debt was also described as “unsustainable” until it was needed to bail out the banks in 2009, was used, and, umm, sustained.
You’re describing immigration as an inherently bad thing. Growth without infrastructure is, but growth WITH infrastructure is…Amazon, for instance … and other great successes.
I would suggest you read some Canadian history about ‘The Family Compact’ and ‘The genesis of the railroad’, if you want to read about some real corruption in Canadian History.
Great examples of denialism, Roy.
1. "per capita" is the only meaningful way to measure a country's prosperity. Otherwise China and India would be whooping Canada's butt! And yes, it is in some measure a function of out-of-control immigration under Trudeau. But Canada's labour productivity - the amount of output per hour of input - is also about 50% lower than America's. Because capital accumulation and business investment have been lousy for decades. Because taxes and regulations strangle initiative. Why risk anything when the government takes away your gains, and everyone bad-mouths you for being successful?
2. The proportion of income needed to own a home today is approximately double what it was in the 1980s, Roy. Then it was around 30%, now it is around 60%. The working class - whom it sounds like you never meet - have to commute hours from the suburbs...
3. Canada hasn't experience "fast growth" in decades - except for fast growth in immigration under Trudeau. It is moronic to invite millions more people into Canada before we have built the schools, hospitals, roads, houses, etc. to accommodate them. We haven't, Roy, we haven't - and that is WHY everything feels broken in Canada. You are proving my point.
4. The systematic discrimination against males in education is an evil all on its own, regardless of its economic impact. The fact you don't see that is revealing of a moral deficiency in you, Roy.
5. America has a much higher capacity to meet its debt obligations (see point 1 above). So comparisons are tricky. Besides, the fact that most other countries are making the same mistakes as Canada is not proof that Canada is not broken. That's what you originally claimed; now you admit that Canada IS broken, just not more broken than some others. <eye roll>
6. Dan did an article a while back arguing that "our coasts are safe" isn't a valid argument anymore with modern warfare. Canada wasn't at risk of invasion in WWII or the Korean War, either, but we thought it was our duty to save the world from Nazism and communism, and maybe it still is? Do our part and all. Or maybe those suckers south of the border will do all of the heavy lifting forever, while being berated for it.
7. I didn't agree with bailing out the banks in 2009, and that was an American thing, anyway. Canada merely provided liquidity, which was recovered. You don't have to have a doctorate degree in high finance to understand that throwing $50billion a year at the Bay street billionaires is not a healthy government program. Even Jean Chretien and Paul Martin understood that much.
8. All I said was that uncontrolled immigration is unsustainable. You infer from this that I believe immigration is inherently a bad thing. That is not what I believe at all. It reveals much about you that you make such a negative and invalid inference, though. You think that anyone who disagrees with you is not only wrong, they must be morally deficient. Because you are a saint whose views on public policy are beyond reproach. That is very typical progressive inference-making. It's also very childish and tribal.
9. Again, it doesn't advance your thesis that Canada is not broken today to argue that Canada was also broken in the very distant past. The family compact and the railroad were certainly blemishes in Canadian politics, but at least things got done that are still valuable today. The $billions in disbursements from Trudeau's green slush fund have accomplished precisely nothing, except made Liberal insiders fantastically rich in very short order. Same with most of the pandemic procurements. I would suggest you take out a subscription to Blacklock's Reporter if you want to read about some real corruption in today's Ottawa - roughly five examples every week day.
I could go on....
I want to comment, somehow, on this piece because it strikes me as completely wrong. But it's hard to know how or where to start and how to say what I think without being too disrespectful. Maybe I'll start here: I'll turn 45 in December; I live in the US (I started to write, "America," but that's really not as precise); I have lived in the US my whole life except for three months I spent in the UK a few years back. Talking about politics with strangers has always seemed extremely awkward and borderline uncouth to me. But before Trump's first election, I wasn't *afraid* of talking about politics with strangers, and I could talk about politics with friends and family, even when we disagreed. After Trump's first election, I tried for a little while to keep talking to my parents about politics, but before too long, it became obvious that we couldn't do it anymore while keeping the peace. That is to say, I couldn't tolerate what I take to be their more-or-less evil political views and their resistance to evidence; and they couldn't tolerate what they take to be my more-or-less evil political views and my resistance to evidence. They still love me, and I still love them. But we have to stay far away from politics in order to preserve the parts of our relationship that we value. So, to me, daily life is a constant reminder of how fractured my country is. It's not okay. But I think here is where I resolve the "paradox" a bit differently than you do -- or, rather, where I fail to see anything paradoxical. You say, "And for all the talking those friendly Americans do, I overheard precisely no one discussing politics." You seem to think that is evidence of political *healthiness*. But to me, especially given the other things you observe about our eagerness to talk, the lack of open political conversation in the US is strong evidence of political disease. I talk politics, usually in semi-secret (in our houses, not in public), with like-minded friends I know and trust. I am very, very uncomfortable and wary about talking politics with new people precisely because I want to make and have friends and to be friendly, and I see politics as a serious impediment to those things. I *can't* talk about politics with my parents. So, it seems to me that an America that talks freely about sports and weather and any old thing *other than* politics is not "doing just fine." I have other thoughts on the points about perceptions of political opponents and about what I see as very shoddy empirical work in this area, but I think those thoughts are less important here, so I'll stop now.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Do you know what percentage of American voters didn't bother to vote in this incredibly fierce, era-defining election? Current estimates say it's about 36%. They weren't intimidated. It's private. More than one-third of voters couldn't bother.
For most, maybe not all, that's a pretty strong indication of deep apathy. And I think it's more than reasonable to assume a big chunk of those who *did* vote were only modestly less apathetic. We might call the "the price of eggs" voters. They know the price of eggs. They don't know much else. And don't care to know.
Very little attention is paid to voters who don't turn up, and those who barely do.And I think that leads to serious errors.
Know what the failure-to-vote rate was in 2004, twenty years ago? Just above 30%.
One of the only advantages of aging is lengthening experience: In 2004, I did some unrelated stories in the US and spent a lot of time driving around. While I did, I took the opportunity to talk to random people (as I still do) and what I found was exactly what I reported in that piece: Amazing, friendly people who would talk your ear off about anything. But when I raised politics, they went silent. Not because they were intimidated. Because they didn't care. And that was an election which was universally said to be the fiercest in a generation, after 9/11, when war was raging in Iraq and cousins of the people I spoke to were in uniform.
Who do you think writes blogs and newspaper columns? Who goes on social media to debate? Who responds to an essay by some obscure Canadian scribbler by writing his own lengthy, thoughtful consideration? Not the average American.
So please consider the possibility - the hypothesis - that your experience is not typical. And, hard as it may be to imagine, detachment and apathy -- life overwhelmingly disconnected from politics -- is the norm for much of America.
• The “Donald Trump and fascism” Wikipedia page was created on September 21, 2024, the same day The Guardian published a 4,000 word essay titled, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” — and which is cited as a source in the Wikipedia article
• Contributions from just two editors comprise 91.2% of the “Donald Trump and Fascism” article’s content, suggesting a tightly coordinated effort to control the narrative
• While the “Trumpism” Wikipedia page argues that Trumpism “has significant authoritarian leanings,” describing it as “far-right,” “national-populist,” and “neo-nationalist,” it relies on a source that argues exactly the opposite
• One of the next major citations to the “Trumpism” article that claims that the movement displays “significant authoritarian leaning” is sourced to sociologist Richard Hanmann who was eulogized in 2021 as “a committed leftist, an anti-imperialist, and a true activist-scholar”
Read the full investigation from @AshleyRindsberg on Pirate Wires.
Zowie. Two people are arguably biased. Time to turn the lights off.
Or… maybe those who think this is biased — and I don’t much care for it — could go and edit it. Because that’s how Wikipedia works. You can edit it. And if you disagree with someone else, you can talk about the disagreement and see if you can find a mutually agreed way to reconcile your views.
Seems like a more productive use of your time than yanking my chain. But it’s your free time…
There's only so many times you can use the "Zowie, two people..." defense before it becomes unconvincing, Dan. And to repeat, the fact that wikipedia is "in theory" correctable does not negate that it is biased.
Grant, need I remind you it was *always* unconvincing according to you. And once again... the denominator you absolutely refuse to acknowledge is almost seven million. Seven million articles in Wikipedia. Seven. Million.
But, hey, if a critic with an obvious axe to grind finds one article he can portray as biased on an obscure conservative website, that obviously far outweighs seven million articles in the largest encyclopedia ever created by human beings. And no, of course, you wouldn't just think to yourself, "huh, I think that can be improved" and improve it yourself, because that wouldn't be nearly as much fun as nattering righteously at me.
If the link works, check this out: https://x.com/i/status/185635132688982028
The woman who had a leading role in Wikipedia thinks we obsess too much about truth. Truth is a “distraction.” Dan, open your eyes.
Found on X:
Current NPR CEO Katherine Maher says that during her time leading Wikipedia, she abandoned a "free and open" internet, because this led to the platform to recapitulating a "white male Westernized construct".
No wokeness from the woman “leading Wikipedia” evident there…
Don’t feign being offended, Dan, I’m only trying to assist you with your research.
1) She never led Wikipedia. She led Wikimedia. The latter administers Wikipedia but does not write or control content. This is not a small detail.
2) Wikipedia's policies and practices didn't change. And core policies directly contract what she says there. She speaks for herself. Period.
Oh, Dan, we have been around this barn before. I've addressed the "denominator issue" but you refuse to acknowledge the argument. Nobody claims that wikipedia is politically biased (i.e. "wokepedia") in the "Seven. Million Articles."(TM) that have zero political significance, The claim is that it - like everything else - is most biased where the political implications are closest to the surface and most consequential. If you genuinely want to test the hypothesis, start with those pages. That's what I do.
Meanwhile, a big part of your initial argument was that the [ah-hem, small sample of] wikipedia editors you have met in your travels seemed like genuine, decent folk! I'm not disputing that, either. But the present example was written by two wikipedia editors of the political pages...
Yeah it’s all mostly noise. I’ve driven around over half the country now and it’s all pretty normal.
Your observation reminds me of Susan Sontag's quote about normies reading Reader's Digest:
''Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?''
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-communism.html
Apparently you can't. Otherwise you would not feel butthurt over someone critiquing you on the epistemological stupidity of the entire article you wrote .
Whiny self absorbed white boy who thinks he's special in the noggin when he's dumb as fuck-syndrome.
Speak to a therapist, friend. You have issues.
Wasteland of fucking words.
There's no "Average American"
Only median American voter.
Using your own ridiculous word....an "average American" can always distort his or her "averageness" anytime they want for the most part too....as "average" is defined by your own use of the word
So, no...an "average American" can totally choose to be a fascist policy supporting voter when they relate to others in the public sphere with a smile in the voting booth and a (R) vote, using your own word "average".
You want to make a critical comment? I’ll listen. You want to do the verbal equivalent of spitting on me, there’s the door.
The world has more than enough nastiness, friend. Let’s not add to the stockpile.
Says the self absorbed rectum sniffer.
Appreciate the view from the other side of the medicine line.