The political bubble and how it affects your opinion

[Dill]

(07-22-2019, 04:48 PM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: . . . do you think this tendency of politicians to "demonize and caricaturize the opposing party" is of equal magnitude on both sides?

Well, recency bias would lead me to think that the Republicans are much heavier offenders of the first question. But, of course, that's about 99.9% due to Donald Trump, who I think is the manifestation of this entire article.

But think back to the Presidency of George W Bush. The left's readiness to call him and his followers racist, in hindsight, seems pretty demonizing, doesn't it? (See: Kanye West saying W doesn't care about black people). Like, comparing him to Donald sure makes me feel like I was too hard on W and the people who voted for him. So if that's the case now, then I find it incredibly likely that at least a degree of that is occurring now, even if Donald is kind of making Democrats feel like it's 100% warranted right now.

I don't think that is just "recency bias." Think back to fights-make-news Gingrich and his 1994 GOPAC memo on the control of media through control of language, emphasizing the importance of words like "traitor" and "hypocrisy" in describing political opponents. https://fair.org/home/language-a-key-mechanism-of-control/.

Not sure West was wrong about Bush; though I have more respect for Bush's judgment than West's.  Trump has not yet sent 4,500 Americans to their death in an unnecessary war, but he is doing more "infrastructural" damage to government than Bush did.

"They do it more" is not the point of my response though. I am concerned with how the OP/Common Ground has framed the issue using poll results. We are told in the Common Ground poll that 79% of Republicans think racism is still a problem in the US.  But 57% agree with Trump's tweets against the squad, according to a USA Today poll.https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/17/trump-tweets-poll-unamerican-offensive-partisan-divide/1748737001/. Only 45% found the tweets "racist."

And a Marist poll showed that Trump's popularity increased after the tweets. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/07/22/trump-approval-rating-new-high-npr-pbs-poll-after-racist-tweets/1796556001/.

These are not fringe numbers. So if one asks people "Is racism still a problem today?" there need be some further qualifying questions to ascertain what they mean by this. E.g., Dems could mean that racism, as in discrimination against minorities (especially black), is still with us. Others could mean that whites are now more discriminated against (like Christians! lol).  So if Dems guess that only 50% of Republicans think racism is a problem, as Dems understand racism, they might not be so far off as 79% suggests.

Also, when formulating poll questions, it is good to remember that Americans as a group sound "progressive" when asked about principles. E.g., is equality good, racism bad etc. But when you ask about specific policies or cases, results are often flipped, as we have seen with the Trump tweets.

The question of "demonization and caricature," in my view, is made more difficult by media bubbles, and in turn makes describing/defining media bubbles more difficult. E.g., is it "demonizing" Obama and Susan Rice to claim they used government power to spy on the Trump campaign? Not if one believes they did, and certainly not if they actually did.

In my view, people striving for "common ground" or to repair division would do much better to address the issue of how "alternative facts" and the like come to circulate so little contested in the current mediascape. Part of this has to do with the discrediting of institutions like the MSM and the FBI, which enables new "bubbles" to arise protecting disinformation, in part by making people resistant to counterfactuals and counterarguments from the get go as "far left" liberal media propaganda.