The 2018 elections marked a notable increase in the influence of ideological media over both major American parties. Conservative media sources, led by Fox News Channel, further solidified their power within the Republican Party, main-taining their traditional role of informing and mobilizing Republican voters while extending their reach to become […] Read more »
Our Culture of Contempt
… Millions of people organize their social lives and their news exposure along ideological lines to avoid people with opposing viewpoints. What’s our problem? A 2014 article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on “motive attribution asymmetry” — the assumption that your ideology is based in love, […] Read more »
How politicians leverage our survival instincts to influence our votes
The term “tribalism” has become ubiquitous in discussions of modern-day political conflicts. It’s a useful metaphor because it’s grounded in historical fact. For most of our species’ history, humans lived in tribes, and there’s evidence that these groups sometimes battled for scarce resources. This ongoing struggle shaped our primitive brains, […] Read more »
The Deepening ‘Racialization’ of American Politics
… Heading into the 2020 election, President Trump is prepared for the second time in a row to run a racist campaign. He continues, for example, to denigrate, in virulent terms, immigrants from Mexico and Central America. At the same time, Democrats are doubling down on a racially liberal political […] Read more »
Can the center hold? Populist challenges, liberal democratic responses
During the past decade, a populist revolt against long-established political arrangements has erupted throughout the West. This surge reflects deep-seated trends in contemporary market economies—in particular, the shift from mass manufacturing and resource extraction to information and services, which worked to the advantage of large metropolitan areas at the expense […] Read more »
The GOP is the party of Trump — but not for the reasons anti-Trump conservatives think
… No one who runs against Trump will have any realistic hope of defeating him. Polls consistently show 80 percent or more of Republicans approve of the job he is doing. That figure rises to 93 percent among people who voted for him, according to the most recent Economist-YouGov poll. […] Read more »