Comment by rayiner
4 years ago
The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic. We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values. Even the notion of “blue America” and “red America” is misleading. What would be unremarkable in San Francisco would raise eyebrows in Baltimore.
I noticed this acutely living in Atlanta for the better part of a decade. Politics was not a big deal when I lived there. Atlanta was “blue” and the rest of the state was “red” but politics was forward looking and productive. The mayor when I was there, Shirley Franklin, was truly put the city above partisanship. A Democrat, she endorsed Mary Norwood, an independent, in 2017, because the Democratic candidate was a protege of a mayor she believed to have been corrupt: https://www.wabe.org/former-atlanta-mayor-shirley-franklin-e.... She waved aside criticism suggesting that she (a Black woman) should have endorsed the Black Democratic candidate instead of Norwood, a white woman.
Then in 2018 all hell broke loose when Georgia’s governor’s race became the subject of national attention. The state became a battleground in a proxy war between New York and Mississippi. Racialist rhetoric reached a fever pitch in the New York Times and Washington Post (but notably, the Atlanta Journal Constitution was far more prudent). They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater, instead of a state that’s the destination for huge numbers of Black residents leaving California, Illinois, and New York, attracted by plentiful jobs, low taxes, and an excellent public university system. The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.
> The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic.
This. I read it somewhere a while ago that prior to information revolution of late 90s onwards news travelled very slowly. Which meant people consumed more news of happenings around 50KM-100KM radius of their living place. And this reduced exponentially with increased radius. I could totally related to this as when I was in school (late 80s, early 90s) I read physical news paper that carried mostly my district and state news. Once a week I would be exposed to national news and maybe once a month to international news.
But now it's exactly reverse. I get minute by minute update on ongoings of Ukraine war which is half way across the world but have no clue about local politics. The net result being I get more enraged/impacted about happenings on which I have close to zero control but totally oblivious to things that I have control over such as reasons why there are so many broken roads in my vicinity.
>>I get minute by minute update on ongoings of Ukraine war
Worse than that, you get multiple often conflicting minute updates on on-goings <<insert current event of interest>> often filled with less and less facts and more sensationalism chasing maximum number of clicks, follows, thumb ups, likes, etc.
This is true if it is random person, small organization, a non-profit, or a "trusted source" main stream media outlet
In the race to own digital media, we've effectively replaced subscription fees and stable advertising revenue with the crumbs of said clicks, follows, likes, etc. The internet adage that "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is apt here because outlets benefit more from being first than being right. This is a fundamental problem with digital journalism.
> Worse than that, you get multiple often conflicting minute updates on on-goings
And, strangely enough, that multiplier is usually exactly 2.
There should be serious scientific studies done as to why the magic American news constant is always 2. Then again, I'm sure people would claim those studies are biased and then complain about their funding.
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I wonder if the fact that the local population has a murkier view of local events also has its beneficiaries.
I remember stories about local corrupt politicians trying to silence local outlets of uncomfortable news. Now they likely don't even have to.
Agree. With 330 million people I'm pretty sure you can find at least a few bad ones every. single. day.
I'm glad we give them air time.
Exactly. Let's find a few adults behaving badly, and amplify it. Do we really need to hear about every shooting or robbery, day after day? Can't be good for our mental health. But apparently there is a market for it.
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> They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater:
Electing Marjorie Greene Taylor and the coverup attempt around this killing might have contributed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ahmaud_Arbery
Although, I would not say rural areas of GA are special in being unreformed Confederate backwaters.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in South Georgia, as a visibly non-white guy with a Muslim surname. Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.
Majorie Taylor Greene was elected in 2021. She’s a reaction to national media efforts that started with the governor’s race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as “deplorables.” People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
As to Ahmed Aubury, it’s an unfortunate fact that police fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn’t portraying the Uvalde police department’s efforts to cover things up as an indictment of the whole community? Do you think it has nothing to do with the community being 80% Hispanic in addition to the police chief? If the community and shooter had been white, we would have been treated to story after story about how “mass shootings are a manifestation of white supremacy.”
> As to Ahmed Aubury, it’s an unfortunate fact that police fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn’t portraying the Uvalde police department’s efforts to cover things up as an indictment of the whole community?
The difference is that in Ahmed Aubury’s case, there was clear evidence of corruption along racial lines amongst local leaders, and which there is a long history of in the area Aubury was murdered in.
Obviously, this was not the case in Uvalde and so it would not be portrayed as such.
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As someone with family from the Dalton area, I would warn against trivializing the difference between Greene's district (NW corner of the state) and places where sane people tend to congregate in larger numbers. People I love have lived there, but it's exactly the kind of place where three out of four people would think voting for Marjorie Taylor Greene is a good idea.
Marietta is a cultural Mecca, comparatively, not to mention Atlanta.
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>She’s a reaction to national media efforts...
This comment goes a long way to rationalize your initial assertion that "it's the media's fault".
You're essentially saying that MTG's constituents voted for her out of their resentment over the media believing they were ignorant enough to vote for her.
Could it be that they actually voted for her because they like her? How are you so sure that's not the case?
>an indictment of the whole community
Again, I actually live in GA and there was largely no such indictment of the overall community. That indictment was overwhelmingly reserved for the police department and the perpetrators. And, yes, there was some discussion around systems and conditions that produce such perpetrators and coverups.
You seem to be picking up these threads that just don't exist here and forcing them into a frame of media blame. Of course, you must be getting these ideas from...the media.
In other words, you're railing on about false media narratives and the entire basis for your claims seems to rest on false media narratives.
>story after story about how “mass shootings are a manifestation of white supremacy"
The only instances of this I've seen were in the cases that involved actual manifestos or other evidence directly espousing white supremacist beliefs.
Do you have evidence to the contrary?
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> People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
That is a piss-poor excuse for electing the worst representative instead of the best.
Folks are nicer to everyone anywhere than in NYC or DC. Your anecdote doesn’t tell us anything for or against South Georgia.
As for Uvalde, you’re straw-manning like mad. White communities have had school shootings and were not represented as w.s. stories.
Everyone who cast a vote for MTG should feel shame. Everyone who can vote for MTG should be getting involved in a way that results in a much more sane election result.
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> I’ve spent quite a bit of time in South Georgia, as a visibly non-white guy with a Muslim surname. Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.
I won't dare to tell you your experience but I will say that the southerners I've known (about half of my extended family and their friends) are very friendly to your face while capable of hating your existence just under the surface. They say "Bless your heart" instead of the NYC or DC person simply saying "Fuck you!"
> When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
"The Left got a little too PC so I changed all of my opinions about the economy, social issues, systemic racism, health care, and history."
If someone criticizing you for being racist makes you act out in a racist way, then you're not really proving to anyone how not racist you are.
You're instead proving that the criticisms were valid.
Replace racist with gun-obsessed, conspiracy-minded, uneducated, psychotic, or whatever other associations you want to build with "deplorable".
Also.
> Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.
Rural areas are more friendly and cordial than urban areas. They have more time to do so. This isn't news.
The real question is not whether they'll be nice to you at a checkout register, or let you borrow their car.
The real question is how would they feel if you were actually Muslim and started discussing your respective religions - or lack thereof if you were atheist.
Ask them how they would feel about you marrying their daughter, then tell me if they are still nice.
> She’s a reaction to national media efforts that started with the governor’s race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as “deplorables.” People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
Tribalism and reactions to attacks from outside might explain why she won the general election.
But before she got to the general election she had to win the primary. That was Republican only and there were 8 other candidates.
I haven't been able to find biographies on all of them, but the 7 I did find seemed to be normal Republicans, several of which had held state elected or appointed offices in the past, rather than promoters of QAnon and various antisemitic, white supremacist, and 9/11 (and many other) false conspiracy theories.
Getting to the runoff could be explained by all the reasonable candidates splitting the vote, but how to you explain her winning the runoff?
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This is the text version of this comic[1].
[1] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-Y...
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Georgia elected Marjorie Greene Taylor and Raphael Warnock. States aren't red or blue; it is a divisive over simplification. To paraphrase that parent comment, What would be unremarkable in San Francisco would raise eyebrows in much of the rest of California.
Georgia didn't elect Marjorie Taylor Greene. A tiny subset did. She received 230,000 votes in a rural district.
Raphael Warnock won a statewide election with 2,280,000 votes.
I've pointed this out before but after the 2016 election after the Democrats lost their dangerous gamble to put the wife of a previous president in the Whitehouse. I looked at the hyper local results.
Yeah there aren't red and blue states. There are states where either rural or city votes dominate. Both the tiny cities in Montana and the huge metro's in Texas vote blue.
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To be more accurate, Georgia elected Warnock, and a particular congressional district within Georgia elected Magic The Gathering.
There wasn’t much of a coverup. The tastemakers happened to have some convenient video to work with and used the opportunity to fabricate a myth that a petty criminal was a hero. It’s a testament to the power of media and gullible minds in great numbers.
Ahmaud Arbery was the one who was murdered by three dudes while out jogging. "Petty criminal"?
> coverup attempt around this killing might have contributed. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ahmaud_Arbery
Did a quick search through the article, can't find a mention of any attempt to cover up the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, can you elaborate? Is there an ongoing investigation into this and is there some way we can help? It is insane that in 2022 the authorities in America are still complicit in lynchings and that nobody does anything, it disgusts me. How long will this indiscriminate murder of BIPOC continue, why can't America do better? What is it about Americans that drive them to murder BIPOC?
The whole second paragraph describes how no arrests were made, and the only reason anyone was punished was because one of the murderers ordered his attorney to send the video of the murder to the news.
>Former Brunswick District Attorney Jackie Johnson was indicted in September 2021 for "showing favor and affection" to Gregory (her former subordinate) during the investigation, and for obstructing law enforcement by directing that Travis not be arrested.[42][43] I
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Although, I would not say rural areas of GA are special in being unreformed Confederate backwaters.
Fucking true. People think hicks are unique to the South and are oblivious to the hordes of hicks living in eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, and northern California. In fact, they're even more extremist over in the west because they don't feel like they're represented at all.
As a citizen of Portland, OR, I can verify that national news outlets heavily distort reality to draw eyeballs.
I’m not sure local news is a whole lot better, but at least you can count on readers to call bullshit.
Yep. I've been in PDX for 22 years. Back during the BLM protests, my FOX-loving family back east would call me and see if I was OK whenever FOX ran some bullshit story about the city burning.
Once you step outside Portland, it is terrifyingly red. Jefferson Secessionists are the scariest. I've been harassed in small towns outside PDX when I go camping and they see the PSU parking stickers on my car. Heck, I met a guy at a bar in Plush, Ore., who was telling me how he and his buddies made sure no black people ever set foot in his town. And this was in 2018.
Also, KATU news is owned by Sinclair Media. Even OregonLive is dubious. Willamette Week, The Mercury, and OPB are reasonable, IMHO.
Yep. My elderly parents have listened to Rush religiously for decades now. Fox news is on constantly.
They repeatedly contacted me in a panic wanting to arrange for a change of locks n my house, security cameras, etc. They honest to god thought BLM protestors were randomly invading homes in Portland because of these trash news outlets.
And then the bigger national media outlets do their "both sides means we pretend bullshit is worth taking seriously" nonsense and make the lunatic positions seem less fringe.
It's maddening that my own family is convinced they understand what is happening in front of my porch and downtown at protests I literally attended, better than I do. And it's all because of these news outlets selling a cravenly dishonest narrative that BLM protestors demanding police reform are actually some sort of race war against white people.
The media misrepresentation is a two-way street. The area around my wife’s office in DC was boarded up and dead for a year because of the BLM protests. Didn’t see anything about that on CNN.
Maybe the biggest BLM protest in the country rallied almost daily at the park in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I'd take my kids to play there in the morning and you'd never know anything had happened the evening before.
Leaving the extremely uhhh paisley/tie-died Oregon Country Fair and returning to WA on the backroads was wild. Stopped to get gas a says away and got out of the car wearing tie-dye, etc... Was immediately approached by two locals who got into the whole thing - hippies killing people, breaking into people's houses, raping and drugging kids. (This was before Trump, there was still the satanic baby abuse thing. Not that one, the one before!)
As a disguise because I live in rural WA which is Red and dangerous I had a complete set of typical "rigging/logging" clothes which I do wear working in the woods. I was talking to them, changing my clothes to logger jeans, ripped stained hickory shirt suspenders, the lot. They were very confused
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I'm tired of people saying Chicago is like John Wick and Mad Max had a violence baby.
Can't count how many times the people saying this live in rural areas that have, per capita, higher violent crime rates than Chicago.
The city has its problems, as all American cities do, but it is a wonderful place with amazing people and a ton to offer. Except for the winters. Those are awful.
A while back I had some of my relatives ask me if we were doing OK with all the rapes happening in California. I had no clue what the hell they were talking about.
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I'm not from Chicago, but all I ever hear about is the murder rate being higher than most countries. It's like that is the only thing people do in Chicago: go out and murder each other.
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I’ve visited Chicago a few times (not in winter, though), and I loved it. Maybe my favorite American big city. Great people, fascinating architecture, middle finger to TFG tower along the river. Also, I never got crimed.
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I feel like People experience or learn about a place once and that paints their view of it for years to come.
Someone else in this thread mentioned the Simpsons and I can't help think about the episode where Homer was vehemently against going to New York, because he had been there in the 70s when it was at its worst.
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Oakland, CA has more violent crime than Chicago - and never gets national news coverage. Why?
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It was less than an hour after today's events when right-wing Twitter was saying "LOL, Chicago" when Highland Park is the polar opposite of the Chicago they love to blame.
Unfortunately this didn't age well.
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yeah the general impression of chicago must be so inaccurate after today
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>>We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.>>
This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true - I think it's manufactured (I assume due to all mass communication being a large ad server that requires a quick and easy way to stimulate engagement - but that could be wrong too, I don't know). I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that we are remarkably together on values. Where we're apart is a) facts, and b) the tactical approach to getting our society as a whole to express those values (eg. trusting that if left alone the society will be "good" vs. trusting that codifying the "good" in law will genuinely reach the same end).
>>We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.
> This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true
My personal experience is of a diverse USA. In the late 90s I toured the states, a gig in a different city each night then back to the tour bus and off to the next one by daybreak. Okay, not a great sampling of ordinary life because on the road you mostly meet audiences, people in bars, diner waitresses etc. But while I recall how the USA looks superficially similar (giant cars on giant roads and the same brand logos in every city) it's not. I saw quite a range of poverty and wealth, segregation and integration, friendliness and aloofness, dense cities and wide open country. Much like travelling around Europe.
Maybe we're working off of different overloads for the word "values". While there is no doubt a great diversity of experience per all the things you mentioned, to me "values" is a very small set of first principles that maps closely (or is identical) to ethics. I believe there is little to no diversity in that regard.
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> I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that we are remarkably together on values.
I don’t think that’s true any more. Major schisms have been opening up over the past couple of decades. For example, a significant portion of the elite is now opposed to color blindness. That’s a fundamental thing to disagree about in an increasingly multi-ethnic society. The same people also oppose the “melting pot” ideal of American immigration. The Democratic Party’s “safe, legal, and rare” has turned , in NYC at least, into “abortion until the moment of birth,” at least in NYC. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/05/23/....
When my family came to this country in 1989, Carter Democrats and Reagan Republicans didn’t disagree on the fundamental notions of a good life. You got educated, got married, had 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, etc. They both venerated the founders and the history of America, and agreed on what qualities of that historical America led to the prosperity that Americans enjoy today. They disagreed on the role of government in achieving that ideal, on economics, on a few social issues at the edges.
Why link to an opinion piece by an author with a known right-wing bias? The article was paywalled but the fact that it is an opinion peace and the biased reputation of the author makes it suspect.
It's not only the media but also the political campaign industry. Some inner city council person somewhere says they hate Jewish people and suddenly their opponent for city council has nationwide fundraising support. Same for some small town mayor saying they don't want "those people" in his town. Now there's money flooding in nationwide for his opponent in the election. In a country of 330 million, there's always a politician somewhere saying something reprehensible. Political parties and their fundraising wings love finding these incidents and then making money off of them.
330M is large, but not so large that national news stops making sense. Japan is roughly comparable - it has 126M people, and it was composed of competing (and sometimes warring) feudal lords until the Meiji Restoration (1868), a few years after the US civil war.
Yet go to Japan and suggest that it's toxic for people in Tokyo to care about what's happening in Fukuoka, and people will look at you as if you've grown another head.
I mean, what is a nation if not a group of people subscribing to the same central authority and sharing a rough idea of a society? On the face of it, saying that "nationalization of news and politics in a country is toxic" is so absurd that I'd like to see an argument for supporting that, instead of using it as a starting point of an argument.
If people in SF stop caring about what's happening in Atlanta (and vice versa), it won't bring peace. It will merely accelerate the disintegration of the USA as a single country.
I would argue that USA has already disintegrated as a single country with respect to its foundation, which is the society itself - basically, there's no single "American society" anymore. The only thing that still keeps the country together is the formalities of governance, and even that will only last for as long as people are willing to tolerate them (which is less and less with every passing year).
It might be possible to reboot it in more or less the same format as the original was way back when (i.e. by moving most political questions out of the federal level). But there needs to be some motivation to try to keep things together at least on some level. For the original colonies, it was clear that they would simply not survive on their own. But for many states today, they have numerous independent countries of similar size (in terms of territory, people, economy etc - you name it) as a showcase that it is possible.
yeah but the population density of japan is 10x that of america, and the distance between atlanta and los angeles is well over 3x that of tokyo to fukuoka.
I doubt GP was intending to speak strictly about population count itself.
idk, but in japan i get the sense that there is alot less money in politics and media, whereas in the us money == politics, so you get full-tilt media insanity which push people further and further apart
i really think the us needs serious campaign and media reform; there is just too much money sloshing around from all these donors and its creating all kinds of havoc
> The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic.
The "nightly news" used to be a much more common experience that people shared: "Twenty-seven million to 29 million viewers, on average, tuned in every night to hear Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Today, though, the viewership of evening news programs on CBS, NBC and ABC combined is smaller than CBS' when Cronkite sat in the anchor's chair."
Today the most popular news channel is Republican propaganda. I don't use that term to be dramatic. I do not think there is a more accurate description.
The top cable news channels are propaganda for the two major political parties.
This isn't a "both sides" issue. FoxNews has markedly higher ratings and is overtly partisan. Republicans get their TV news more from FoxNews than Democrats with one particular news network.
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It seems doubtful people are leaving California due to jobs, taxes, and public universities, but I would certainly believe it was due to cost of living. CA is the world's 5th largest economy, the universities are world-class, and most people are unwilling to give up their family, friends and life to establish something new simply to save a few percent on taxes.
But “most people” aren’t leaving California, you need to look at the margin. A marginal mover might very well be swayed by high taxes to a significant degree. For example, when I was moving to the States, one major factor for choice of Washington over California was exactly state taxes. I also have friends who are planning their move out of California to Texas, and for them taxes also play a significant role in their choice. It’s not only taxes that made them decide to move, but it’s rarely only a single factor that makes people move.
But taxes are trivial compared to cost of living.
For example median rent in Austin is $1360 vs $4150 for San Francisco. Over 300% higher.
On the other hand, how much higher are taxes in SF? Like 10% higher at most. Completely trivial.
I get your point about marginal costs, but I think in general SF taxes contribute to making the city a more developed and attractive place to live and ultimately make people more, not less likely to move there. If the rent was the same nearly everyone would choose California over Texas.
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The university system may still be world-class, but the public schools are definitely not. CA isn’t a great place to live, if you are blue collar.
This is a big oversimplification the same way that the national news is a big oversimplification.
Many of the nation's best public high schools [1] are in the Bay Area - Saratoga (#16), Gunn [Palo Alto] (#18), Lynbrook [San Jose] (#33), Paly [Palo Alto] (#34), Monta Vista [Cupertino] (#46), Lowell [SF] (#59), Los Altos (#85), Mission San Jose [San Jose] (#89), San Ramon (#96), Homestead [Sunnyvale] (#101), Cupertino (#105), Amador Valley [Pleasanton] (#112), Miramonte [Moraga] (#114), Mountain View (#121), Piedmont (#127), Foothill [Pleasanton] (#164), and this is just the top 170 out of 17,000 (1%). That's a huge portion of the region. SF & Oakland get a bad rep because a lot of their schools have legit problems and they're lottery assignment, so there's no way to avoid them other than going private. But outside of lower Manhattan, Silicon Valley probably has the greatest density of top-ranked public schools in the country, beating out even traditional powerhouses like suburban Boston and Westchester County NY.
And yes, the region is a terrible place to live if you are blue collar, but that's because blue collar people can't afford to live in the region.
[1] https://www.niche.com/k12/search/college-prep-public-high-sc...
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I actually have a coworker moving to California for their university system. Like taking his sophomore daughter and 4th grader and moving there.
I would put taxes in the cost of living column.
Taxes are only paid to the extent that you're making money. Cost of living hits you equally no matter how much you make. If you're making money, when it rises, you consider whether you'd rather be living in a different place for that price. If you're not making money, you leave (or the bailiffs drag you out.)
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Offset by quality of life represented by the spending of the tax dollars.
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One thing that makes this worse is the collapse of local information economies. Papers can no longer make money by acting as pay-to-post message boards for the communities they serve. Instead, the best way to make money is to convince people from outside your region to use your organization for their news needs. So now every paper writes news for a national audience and what determines the financial health of the paper is how effectively it can attract readers that aren't from its area.
Abolish the electoral college and people in NY will stop giving a shit about what happens in Georgia immediately.
And that’s why the founders set up the electoral college. We are a federal republic of states.
The federal government was supposed to be small, because the founders understood the downside of a large federal government.
> The federal government was supposed to be small, because the founders understood the downside of a large federal government.
Those that want to return to this need to start advocating to abolish freedom of movement and permit states to implement residency requirements to access services. That way State A can go ahead an implement locally the "large federal government" services like Medicare or Social Security, while State Z can choose not to. At the moment our constitutional rights mean State Z residents can freeload by moving to State A. This kind of problem simply wasn't conceivable when the country was founded.
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Having a small federal government has no relationship with eliminating the Electoral College.
The "land votes, not people" scheme of the US is a holdover from appeasing wealthy landowners and slavers. We need at least one branch of the federal government that is directly democratic.
The way things are going, an increasingly small minority of extremists will make decisions at the federal level, as we are starting to see now.
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The founders were not that homogenous, and plenty of them wanted to recreate the British government for the new United States.
The founders think they understood the downside of a large federal government.
But I don't like being a federation. Having 50 states each infighting, competing to race to the bottom and attract business from each other, like 50 tiny nations, it's not what I want.
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Actually it was more about making sure slave states were represented. Not as noble of an idea as you're pitching.
This sounds like a great recipe for disintegration, Yugoslavia- or at best Spanish American empire - style.
If a distant metropolis does not have to care what people in the flyover land think, why not declare independence?
It is a small wonder that the US had, so far, only one secession and civil war crisis, and a testament to your resilient constitutional order.
> If a distant metropolis does not have to care what people in the flyover land think, why not declare independence?
The distant metropolis is rich enough to pay a lot of taxes to support a long war. Flyoverland is definitionally low density meaning it has relatively few people. All they have to fight the war is some extremely stubborn people. That can be enough but an awful lot of people are going to die. There’s a great deal of good on avoiding civil war.
Yeah, that right to bear arms against the tyranny of the state sure is working well . . .
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Yeah because then the entire country will only have to care about what NY thinks
This is just ignoring basic math. As it is right now, it's drastically easier to win a national election with far fewer voters in the most populous states than it is to win a direct election - and in each of those populous states, with the electoral college you only need to win a plurality, meaning you can ignore up to half the state.
Consider it another way - to win the electoral college, you only need to win the 10 most populous states with a plurality. To win the popular vote, you still need to win basically the exact same set of 10 states but now you would need to win every vote in them (which is functionally impossible).
We also have to agree that even with the EC candidates don't care about the majority of the country. Any voter in a state that goes consistently opposite to them is made completely irrelevant, with no point to trying to reach out to them. If the EC was gone suddenly all those voters actually get a voice.
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No. I don't even know how you get to this idea. First of all, there is only one national election, you still have your Representative and 2 Senators in addition to your State, County, and Local governments. Second of all, there are more Republicans in New York and California then in a significant amount of the middle states combined. The idea that NY or California has some singular voice that will be force upon you is just a ridiculous concept.
The country clearly leans slightly center left as a whole, but we are trending hard right right now and that is a recipe for disaster and the electoral college is in large part to blame.
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A few years ago my friends started call NYT "Pravda", saying that it's turned into the mouthpiece of the "party line".
Grudgingly, I had eventually to agree.
> They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater
They wouldn't be wrong. For example in April 2021 a black woman from Md was drummed out of a wealthy town in GA for the crime of being black and an educator[0]. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time in the south and west.
0. https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-dei-crt-schools-p...
>Cecelia Lewis was asked to apply for a Georgia school district’s first-ever administrator job devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion.
They disagreed with her politics.
She had no politics that they knew of. They disagreed with willful misrepresentations of politics that she had never expressed, and felt that they could get away with it because of race politics in Georgia.
And they did.
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Are you saying that being asked to apply for a job is a political act?
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She was drummed out of town because she was supporting DEI and CRT, not because she was black.
Did you read the article?
"This is not about the color of her skin. It’s what she’s going to bring into our district and what she’s going to teach our children"
Your statement suggests that you did not actually read the article.
She was drummed out of town because white radical Republicans made up positions that the educator in question did not hold and had never hold (that you can pretend to talk about CRT with respect to primary or secondary school is indicative that you have bought into the propaganda; it is a post-graduate law school concept, unless you’re a radical republican hell bent on fighting anything that does anything other than support a white supremacist distortion of history).
The reality is that the moment someone in Georgia says "this is not about the colour of her skin", it’s about the colour of her skin. Everything about what she was going to "bring into" the district was fabricated out of whole cloth and had nothing to do with either (a) anything the educator in question had said or (b) anything the educator in question had been hired for.
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I agree with your remarks. Adding one aspect for thought:
> We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.
Problem is: from the perspective of massification efforts, we're all equal.
The same principles that make Facebook addictive to a person in San Francisco also govern the psychology and neuro-chemistry of a kid in Miami.
That holds not just to US citizens. Anywhere in the world it's like that.
Thank you for an excellent example of a national narrative that does not match the true local flavor.
I've spent a ton of time in SF and Baltimore, wondering what specifically you had in mind? I think it's less socially acceptable to be right leaning in SF? Sure you would be looked at weird if you used a koozie or wore croakies in SF, or if you went up to people at a coffee shop to ask them to pitch their startup in Baltimore, but the differences feel cultural not political.
> Then in 2018 all hell broke loose when Georgia’s governor’s race became the subject of national attention.
Because local elections have national consequences.
Then in 2020, GA's special elections determined control of the US Senate, and therefore the fate of the Biden Admin.
Shouldn't the nation pay attention to GA? At least as much as say Iowa and New Hampshire?
> The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.
Nonwhite voters are systematically disenfranchised in GA. Enough so that in a straight up fight, Stacey Abrams would be governor.
Those "misrepresentations" of GA are packed with history. Slavery, Confederacy, Jim Crow, Southern Strategy, etc. Centuries of denying nonwhites their right to vote. Sure, white people feel resentful about being constantly reminded. For everyone else, it's present reality, not history.
If you're curious, I recommend the books These Truths, 1619 Project, and The Sum of Us.
> ...a state that’s the destination for huge numbers of Black residents...
That's the plan. Immigration back inland, to flip those reds states blue.
Were their any progressive do-gooder billionaires, they'd be paying people to move inland. To start farms, businesses, families.
> The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.
The national media everywhere is full of shit. That's the norm. It's the norm, because it works.
> an excellent public university system
Why don’t you tell this to the several UGA math profs who quit recently (including an acquaintance of mine from high school) or the GA Tech faculty unhappy with state COVID policies
You sound like somebody who hasn't waited in line for many hours because you live in a Black neighborhood in Georgia.
You are all one people!
No!
That’s right—you are all either on Team Blue or Team Red!
Yes!
Amazing how widespread such dichotomies are.
Your analysis somewhat conspicuously omits the massive nationwide shift that was the ascendance of Trump and the far right over the time period you've noted. Is it reasonable to expect local news and politics to be insulated from such dramatic national shifts?
I've lived in Atlanta for over two decades. What's happened in Atlanta politics tracks with what's happened nationwide. It is not strictly a function of media or a random, spontaneous racialization.
Nor do I know anyone who feels we've been characterized as an "unreformed Confederate backwater". The idea that we've been so maligned is itself a media narrative. In fact, I live in an area that is staunchly conservative, majority white, and upper-middle class. The people I speak with abhor Trump and the style of politics he represents (which have been noted as favorable to your "unreformed Confederates"). This was visible in their repudiation of him in 2020, even while they voted GOP down balllot. It was visible again in the recent primary wherein the candidates Trump endorsed were largely shellacked.
So, it's somehat ironic that you're bemoaning the media's role in mischaracterizing Georgia politics, when you seem to be a victim of the same, and repeating certain narratives.
Likewise with your comment that black people are leaving blue states in droves to come to Atlanta, as if this is some recent phenomenon. That is simply a new right-wing media narrative that seeks to malign blue states and peel off support. But, black people have long sought Atlanta as a mecca, which has featured black political power for decades now and was even labeled an ascendant "Chocolate City" in a Parliament song of 1975.
Perhaps there was some national media painting of Georgia. After all, narratives do sell. But your analysis here is somewhat superficial and features its own skewed media-driven narratives.
> the massive nationwide shift that was the ascendance of Trump and the far right over the time period you've noted.
This never happened. What happened is that Democrats started to center the far-right in order to scare their constituents into voting, and Republicans stopped resisting Trump, who they were only against because he was an outsider to their patronage networks. The far-right haven't risen, the Democrats just spend all their time doing PR for them and trying to associate them with Trump to attract centrist Republican voters.
>This never happened. What happened is that Democrats started to center the far-right
That's a pretty remarkable statement. Trump is the far right. Are you arguing there hasn't been a hard right shift in the GOP since Trump?
BTW, your statement that Dems falsely centered the far right is actually true in the reverse. Republicans center folks they consider "far left", like AOC and "The Gang" as representative of some sort of scary communist takeover of Democrats. This is, of course, silly on its face. They have virtually no power to drive policy in the party. And, of course, they are not communists in any case.
Add to that, Dems rejected even Bernie to nominate grandfatherly ol' Joe...the most moderate Dem around who, quaintly, still believes in bipartisanship.
Other than Bernie and The Gang, the only "far left" I've seen is so-called "Antifa", which has no membership, but magically self-assembles and appears during election cycles to scare Republican voters to the polls before mysteriously dissolving again.
Still, GOP ads feature ominous threats about the far left and communism.
I get that things tend to appear mirrored from the other side, but there are facts. On 1/6, elements of the far right, to include actual militia members, did Trump's bidding. Their ongoing affinity for one another is no coincidence. He represents their interests and they clearly know it.
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Like the other commenter said, the current Republican framing of "it's not us that changed, it's liberals!" is revisionist nonsense. All of the previous most popular Republicans in the last 15 years, Bush Jr (president), Romney, McCain (presidential nominees) all despised Trump, the current direction of the far right usurping the party, and are/were basically voting Democrat now because they're scared of the far right's threat far more than centrist Obama/Biden positions. FFS, Republican cheerleader #1 Tucker has been praising Russia: https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1497035201196617733