Much has been made in recent years of how “divided” the United States is, and it is a reality. Yet it’s also true, new research has found, that rank-and-file liberals and conservatives aren’t as far apart on the issues as they themselves think. Rather, each group believes the other is more radical than it actually is — because of media misrepresentation.
Put differently, bombardment with pseudo-elite opinion has made conservatives think average liberals reflect pseudo-elites more than they do and has made liberals think average conservatives reflect the pseudo-elite’s negative portrayals of them more than they do.
As another testimonial to pseudo-elite power, liberals and conservatives are also more united in embracing certain establishment lies than many would think.
Addressing the matter of libs’ and cons’ misunderstandings about each other at the “progressive” Atlantic yesterday, Victoria Parker mentioned that last year, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson played clips of leftists advocating police “defunding”; he then stated, “They would like to eliminate all law enforcement for good.” Yet, Parker writes while citing research she conducted with colleagues, only “28 percent of the self-described liberals even somewhat agreed” with the principle of total police abolition, “indicating that this was not a solid consensus on the left.”
(In fairness, though, Carlson’s “they” referenced the powerful leftist pseudo-elite, not the street.)
Despite this, conservatives “in our sample estimated that 61 percent of liberals — more than twice the actual number — endorsed the abolition of law enforcement,” Parker then pointed out.
As for liberals and for example, they assume conservatives are “clearly blinded by racism or pro-police sentiment,” the journalist also states. Yet when “we asked conservatives if police were almost always justified in their shootings of [b]lack people, only 31 percent of respondents even somewhat agreed with the sentiment,” Parker informs. “Liberals, on the other hand, estimated nearly double that number of conservatives — 57 percent — gave police a free pass.”
Parker points out that this perception-reality gap appears repeatedly and that these “misconceptions have hardened into enduring stereotypes: liberal snowflakes and free-speech police, conservative racists and ‘deplorables.’”
“In reality, just a third of liberal participants agreed even a little with banning controversial public speakers from college campuses, but conservatives estimated that 63 percent of liberals held that view,” she continues. “Only 22 percent of conservatives expressed hostile and unwelcoming attitudes toward immigrants, but liberals thought that 57 percent of them did. Our data suggest that many people are walking around with an exaggerated mental representation of what other Americans stand for.”
No doubt, and this is why I’ve often stressed — I used this phraseology above — the chasm between the “pseudo-elite and the street.” While, for instance, rank-and-file Democrats are generally “liberal,” they don’t necessarily subscribe to the most radical of leftist proposals.
As to why the misconceptions exist, Parker blames “[p]artisan media outlets [that] have an incentive to stoke their audience’s outrage by making extreme views seem commonplace.” Yet her effort to appear even-handed obscures the Truth.
After all, do conservatives need to imbibe Fox News or OAN to believe flaming leftists are the Democrat norm? Consider police abolition and Parker’s own Atlantic. It has run numerous articles (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here) that range from giving the “defund” movement kid gloves treatment to providing it actual support.
In one entitled “Incremental Change Is a Moral Failure,” for example, radical Mychal Denzel Smith writes that when “asked ‘What would you have us do with the police?,’ I make a point of saying, unequivocally, ‘Abolish them,’ because that is what I mean. I seek a world without police.”
“In the past, I have been accused of hating the police,” he later wrote, “And I do.”
It’s not just that Parker need only look at her Atlantic colleagues to identify the problem, but that this is the mainstream-media norm. If these outlets mentioned facts such as police abolition is a radical idea that would lead (and has led) to higher crime — especially in black areas — and that polls show how approximately 80 percent of blacks want the same or more police presence in their neighborhoods, not less, it would be one thing. But leftist media rarely if ever make these points because if it did, well, it wouldn’t be leftist.
Instead, it’s “conservative” outlets such as The New American, OAN, and Newsmax that air such facts, only to be accused of peddling “fake news” and then censored by the liberal media’s conjoined twin, Big Tech — with the tacit or even overt approval of that liberal media. So who really is at fault for the perception-reality chasm?
Of course, this propaganda has its effect. Consider the “radical” statement that “only 31 percent” of conservatives agreed with: “Police were almost always justified in their shootings of black people.” The left-wing Washington Post itself, in fact, found via a 2015 analysis that this claim is radically right (as in correct).
In a nutshell, only about five percent of police shootings are at all questionable, the paper related. This means, of course, that far less than that are actually unjust shootings. But imagine that:
Establishment lies and Truth suppression are so effective that they’ve conned even “conservatives” (again) into believing a destructive misconception, one leading to bad policy that, just so happens, accords with the establishment’s agenda.
Then there’s what the top respondent under Parker’s article at MSN.com wrote, in another example of a commenter being more astute than a commentator:
How most people are not radical extremists in their opinion on either side is not the point. What is actually happening is what matters. Police departments have been defunded. Migrants are crashing our border. Criminals are purposefully not being prosecuted. Religious freedom/rights are being trounced in favor of LGBTQ rights (doesn’t have to). The top leaders of the country are calling 1/2 of us racists for not agreeing with them on social issues. You can’t look at that and smugly say “oh, but most liberals don’t agree”. So freakin what!! Look at what is being DONE.
For sure. As Duke’s First Rule of Politics states, “Under representative government, people do not get what they want.”
“They get what they vote for.”
People virtually never support evil by name. But if, motivated by ignorance and/or personal corruption, they vote for the Devil in a clever guise, that’s precisely what they’re going to get.
