Political Science

Media villagers like to falsely equate people who are not registered with a political party, whom the media prefers to call “independents,” as being “moderates” and “swing voters.” Nothing is further from the truth, as I have posted the political science research to explain many times over the years. (Yet the media villagers persist).

Anne Kim at the Political Animal Blog has the latest research. The Last Swing Voters in America:

While “Independent” voters now make up the largest share of the electorate, most Independents – as many as 87%, according to the Pew Research Center – “lean” toward one party or another. Moreover, many Independents aren’t centrists – rather, they claim that label because they are further to the right or further to the left than the parties that most closely represent their views.

The true size of the swing electorate is therefore much smaller than the growth in the number of “independent” voters implies. In fact, says a new survey by the research firm Lincoln Park Strategies, just 4% of the American electorate is truly independent – unaffiliated with a political party and ideologically in the middle.

Note: This is down from previous studies that pegged this number around 7%.

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I took apart this falsehood, GOP leaders: No place for bigotry in the Republican Party, in yesterday’s post. ‘Super Tuesday’ – the Republican race. It bears repeating:

This idea that Donald Trump is engaged in a “hostile takeover” of the GOP or has hijacked the party is ludicrous. Trump is winning over a key voter constituency that the GOP has methodically nurtured for decades and fed their fears and prejudices with the conservative media entertainment complex. Trump is just a symptom of the disease. The disease of racism and bigotry has been festering in the GOP’s soul for decades. The day of reckoning has been a long time coming.

Andrew Rosenthal writes at the New York Times, The Myth of Trump-Hating Republicans:

Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, said that if “a person” wants to be the G.O.P. nominee, “they must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices.”

Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, talked about “one of our presidential candidates and his seeming ambivalence about David Duke and the K.K.K.”

“I condemn his comments in a most forceful way,” said Mr. McConnell, speaking in an unforceful way.

The comments by Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell had two things in common.

First they misrepresented (I think deliberately) the position of the Republican Party on issues like racism and the politics of division. O.K., maybe an actual former K.K.K. grand wizard is a bit much, but both racism and divisiveness have been at the heart of the G.O.P.’s governing and electoral strategy for many, many decades. George H.W. Bush won the presidency in 1988 with a campaign designed around appealing to racism and fear. Mr. McConnell was fine with Confederate flags flying from government houses in the South until the political pressure to take them down became too intense. The Republicans don’t have a “seeming ambivalence” about this. Some are more than seemingly ambivalent, and some are ready and willing to embrace the forces of racism when expedient. Only a tiny handful truly distance themselves from those dark forces in American politics.

Second, neither Mr. McConnell nor Mr. Ryan actually used the word “Trump.” Mr. Trump is not, fundamentally, objectionable to them.

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Back in 2011, I posted about an important article from Mike Lofgren, a Republican staff member serving the Senate Finance Committee. Lofgren published an insightful analysis at Truthout that is a must-read warning about our political system and the Republican Party. Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult (snippet):

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

Four years later, Mike Lofgren has again written another important article titled The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge:

In the realm of physics, the opposite of matter is not nothingness, but antimatter. In the realm of practical epistemology, the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but anti-knowledge. This seldom recognized fact is one of the prime forces behind the decay of political and civic culture in America.

Some common-sense philosophers have observed this point over the years. “Genuine ignorance is . . . profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas,” observed psychologist John Dewey.

Or, as humorist Josh Billings put it, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”

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