It's All About Moving the Middle

There are an awful lot of Americans who view themselves as "middle of the road" folks, the kind of "ordinary people" who operate as much on a "gut feeling" of what's "common sense" as they do on a careful, time consuming analysis of details.

And, in my experience, these people don't tend to have a concrete viewpoint. They listen to what they consider to be "all sides of an issue" and then...split the difference. They have an unstated assumption that "the truth" or "reality" is necessarily 50% of the way between the most extreme views that they hear.

That approach has the advantage of being easy--no need for lots of thought, no need to change your mind once it's made up, no need to spend a whole lot of time reading, discussing, arguing. One side says 20, the other says 44, so it's "reasonable" that the answer should be 32. But if one extreme becomes even more extreme, so does the position of the middle of the roader. Change the competing positions to 20 and 80 and, just like that, the middle of the roader thinks that 50 is a nice, moderate choice. Even though that "moderate" choice is now more extreme than the number, 44, which used to be the extreme.

And these people tend to view themselves as "independents" who "think for themselves." Of course, these independents are the swing vote. Ask any political consultant worth a contract which group is most likely to decide a public election. The independent folks, those common sense-loving, complexity-fearing middle of the roaders.

And guess what? The people who want to manipulate public opinion know that this is how the middle of the roaders think. Which means that the smartest tactic for any group which is outnumbered among the electorate--as the super-rich and mega-corporations always are and always will be--is to move the middle much closer to the extreme end that they favor.

That's really what Fox, the Koch brothers, and others of that ilk have been up to for these past several decades: injecting ever more extreme positions into the public debate, so that the "middle," as computed by the independents, moves ever closer to the extreme positions advocated by the Murdoch, the Kochs, and the billionaires you don't even know.

If the extremes of the debate are that Social Security should be expanded and the benefits increased, at one end, and that Social Security has gone far enough and should be left alone, at the other end, the "split the difference" thinker is likely to decide that Social Security is pretty good, and we could reasonably expand it, but let's not raise the benefits. Change the extreme opposition view, however, to a claim that Social Security is a Communistic device doomed to failure and likely to play a role in the subjugation of the citizenry by a power-mad government, and where is the "middle of the roader" likely to end up?

That's where Fox news has really changed the game far more than most Americans recognize. That is where the mouthpieces--ranging from the rabid like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, to the pseudo-rational like Neil Cavuto--have really earned their propagandist stripes.

And that's where today's "mainstream" media play into the hands of the monied few and their highly compensated mouthpieces. The knee jerk approach of reporting all claims as plausible means that there is no one in the media, no one in a position of power, to point out that the claims at one extreme are, in fact, not only super extreme, but demonstrably untrue.

It does not matter that income tax rates during the heyday of America's success during the 20th century were far higher than they are today. What matters is that Fox and frauds present the current rates as "Socialistic" or even "communistic." The choice then is between whether we should raise the rates a little bit for people at the top end of the income scale, or whether we should cut the rates considerably for everybody, especially the super-rich. Split the difference and you get....

It's the mindless middle-of-the roader who is going to do us in if something doesn't change, and change quickly.

Ignorance Will Do Us In For Sure

What passes for public debate in America right now is a joke.

What passes for media coverage in America right now is a joke.

What passes for an economy in America right now is a joke.

The common cause of these wonderful facts is ignorance.

You can't, for example, have a serious public debate when a significant chunk of the debaters think the president is a Communistic Muslim who was born in Africa and hates freedom.

You can't, for example, have serious media coverage when the media is owned by commercial interests which are ignorant of the long term need for real information in order to maintain a country where freedom can flourish.

You can't, for example, have a serious economy when the voting public is completely ignorant of the real state of the economy, completely ignorant of the reasons why the economy is in that state, and completely ignorant of the available alternative approaches to "fixing it."

So let's all wring our hands about "the state of things," let's all sorrowfully hope that we can "learn a lesson" from the shootings in Tucson, let's all lament the rhetoric of violence and treason from the right, let's all hope that civility can prevail, let's all hope that things get better.

I'm pretty sure that all this hoping, hand wringing and lamenting served as the sound track for the downward spiral of many, many civilizations before this one.