In reading Erik Loomis’ post at LGM, The Polls Probably Aren’t Lying, I was struck by the following:
Fundamentally, the problem is that we are a nation of adrift individuals who lack any kind of political education. Nothing has changed on this since 2016. Liberals or the left or centrists have not built anything like institutions that can do this. I’m not blaming them per se, it’s really hard. But there’s also very little attempt to actually do anything like this either. The union movement is the closest thing to it and we know that union members vote for Democrats at significantly higher rates than other working class people, but it’s too limited and as we see from our Trump/Baldwin moron up above, lots of union members just blow off their own unions anyway.
First, I largely agree with the assessment.
Second, it struck me that this is an example of one of the key consequences of weak parties in the United States. In theory, the party ought to represent a finite number of philosophical/policy positions, and the label of the party ought to be the signal to voters as to whether the party aligns with a given voter or not. For this to function properly, the party as an institution should be actively engaging in educating the public.
Our parties barely do this (if at all). Instead, because parties-as-organizations in the United States are weak, they rely on the candidates themselves to spread the word. And that can mean, as we see, what a given local candidate says their party is can vary from a co-partisan under the same label (especially during the primary process). Parties end up being largely defined, especially at the national level, by the party’s candidate for the presidency.
If US parties were stronger and more coherent, they would be performing a stronger civic education role than ours currently do.
We need stronger, more coherent parties that fulfill the role of helping to organize civic life in our representative democracy.
And we need more of them.
I also think that Loomis has useful admonition to the LGM readership that applies as well to many here at OTB.
I also want to push back against LGM’s favorite horse to whip–the mainstream media. Do you know who reads the New York Times? None of these people. None. They watch Fox News. Or they might watch a little bit of this and that. The most you can argue is that the kind of narratives that get created by the Times funnel down into other media and maybe there is some truth to that. But the idea that if the Times and Post was to do real reporting on the evils of Republicans and end their Both Sides crap, this would have a meaningful impact on voter behavior seems extremely projection-based to me. I don’t see it because, again, elites read this stuff, not the average person. The average person in this country reads nothing.
Indeed.
And clearly part of what we have not yet sorted out is the way in which the shared media environment of the 1950s-1980s is gone and is never coming back.
