If you think about it for at
least 4 seconds, you know this is true: the “Republican” and “Democrat”
categories are way too big to adequately explain differences on just about
every political dispute.
You know this is true if you
think about every one of your Democratic (or Republican) friends: they don’t
fit in the same bucket on every issue, not by a long shot.
I’m really serious about
digging into a new report from the Pew Research Center on the disparate
political ideologies of Americans.
This report got a little
airtime on Vox.com, but I didn’t see any mention of it anywhere else.
There’s really nothing in it
that can be easily reduced to a talking head sound bite, maybe that’s why it
wasn’t reported widely….maybe it’s not simplistic enough for our shallow,
staccato, stentorous, soundbite-ish news cycle….
Here’s a sample:
Andrew Prokop at Vox.com says:
“Pew argues that we should
think of the Democratic coalition as having a core of solid liberals — plus two
other somewhat more moderate clusters that agree with liberals on most issues,
but have very different views on a few. The first of these clusters is ‘The
Next Generation Left.’ Though the group skews younger than any other group
in the survey, don't interpret it as representing the views of young liberals
— only 33% of the group is under 30 years old. Instead, it's a group of
mostly-Obama supporting people who are liberal on most economic, social,
and foreign policy issues — but seem to have some very different views on
race, the safety net, and how fair America is.”
For instance, the “Next
Generation Left” massively voted for President Obama in 2012, but this segment
departs from the generally liberal Democratic outlook on the subject of racial
discrimination and racial equality—only a small minority of them think that
“racial discrimination is the main reason many black people can’t get ahead.”
There’s a lot of meat and a lot
of provocative detail in this report, take a look.
Very interesting....clearly see the divide among liberals and conservative...no wonder the Congress is stalled until either the right or the left prevail in persuading the middle of the roaders or maybe we should move on to 3rd parties like the Tea Party, Socialist, Libertarian, Communist, or The Rent is Too Damn High parties which are part of the major parties.
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