Comment by flir
5 days ago
BoingBoing is still very much made in Doctorow's image. Michael Moore is an earlier example.
Not suggesting equivalence, in fact I would be really interested to hear theories as to why right-wing polemicists are so much more popular (and numerous) than left-wing polemicists. On the face of it, there are a lot of left-wing things to be justifiably outraged about (especially right now). So why isn't left-wing outrage reliably bankable?
I don't think it's a pattern tied to the zeitgeist, because you see it in talk radio too, which predates social media's Skinner box algorithms by decades.
Side-question: why are there more left-wing political comedians than right-wing ones?
I think most Americans don't want to be morally lectured. Today's far-left is most similar to the religious right of decades ago. Outside their fervent base, everyone else is annoyed by them.
See these are interesting questions. I don't have great answers.
IQ gap between the sides?
Me either. I think that's possibly a self-serving guess, to be honest. But how would we test it?
On the comedians question: some people think it's because it's easier to be funny when kicking up than kicking down.
Comedy requires deep thinking, powers of observation, and self-reflection.
This is a just-so rationalization, which feels good, but people have looked into many of these, and they don't really hold up.
The most common one is that poor white people are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. The average household income of a Trump voter is something like 75k - hardly poor (depending where you're at).
Anecdata: I know plenty of Trump voters who are very smart. A friend's dad has multiple PhD's and accomplished career as a theoretical physicist. He's also pretty racist. My father is a retired engineer, and doesn't like Trump, but keeps voting for him, because the Democrats are on the wrong side of issues he cares about. (Gun control, namely)
The reality is likely to be - they have used the mountains of publicly available data, and fine tuned their messages with the help of a highly partisan rage-baiting media ecosystem to capture more voters. It seems to me, the right wing is more organized, and manages to keep their voters and party members more aligned and on-message. They also have a much more voracious appetite for fighting dirty (rough talk, conspiracy theories, whisper campaigns, untraceable mailers giving wrong polling place info to black communities, etc.) - something the Democrats do not have the stomach for.
This explains election results (agreed) but I'm more curious why outrage-generators and conspiracists seem to have culturally taken a stronger hold on the right over the course of decades.
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I suspect part of it may be due to resources. The far right commentator has a pretty solid career path ahead of them, and support from large backers who find that far right beliefs don't threaten their profits. As a result, someone on the right who gets into this sort of content can get funding from both a certain percentage of billionaires/large companies, plus the right wing media machine and potentially foreign adversaries like Russia.
On the other hand a lot of far left beliefs are very unfriendly to capitalism/large companies/billionaires/foreign adversaries, to the 'abolish capitalism' or 'eat the rich' degree. So the far right folks can more easily afford to make it their full time job, since they have other sources of funding rather than just their fans.
I suspect that left wing audiences are also more skeptical of these types of figures, and more prone to infighting. So it's harder to bring together a large audience of fanatics for left wing content, since they're divided over 50 ways to 'solve' a problem.
Good thoughts. But I don't buy it; Capitalism eats everything. Che Guevara t-shirts are the ur-example, but it took capitalism about 15 minutes to turn grunge from a bunch of kids hanging out in Seattle basements to worldwide catwalk fodder.
If there was money to be made, someone would be bankrolling it.