- correction - speculative rant on political rhetoric -


a couple of days ago i posted a link to the Political Compass . My brother David said me a sagacious and corrective email:

>2 things
>
> 1. your political compass test is not well written, many of the questions
> demonstrated a bias toward the "right wing".
> 2. i ended up one click right and exactly on the horizontal axis.
>
> I guess that means I am more balanced than you, and therefore from now on I
> should be considered the political moderate of the family.
>
> Thus all ideas differing from mine will be considered extreme

I deferred to him and wrote back:

> you're right. I didn't realize the negative affect of them framing the test
> that way -- though I certainly recognized it as I moved through (Five
> straight disagrees in a row) -- but after I took it i clicked on the link to
> find literature that reflected my position. apparently NO ONE has written
> from a liberal left perspective -- Of course the right wing literature was
> blossoming on this site.
>
> But what ends up happening -- if the test is skewed right -- is that
> leftists (eg. me) look like extremists -- and righties (eg. you) look
> centrist.
>
> BUT i'm happy to give you the political moderate slot in the family.

and now i've been thinking about the whole experience and wondering if its endemic about something larger that's happened / happening in the american political rhetoric sphere.

I think that one thing that conservatives have beat liberals at hands down in the last fifteen years (with the psuedo-exception of Bill Clinton and sorta Bill Maher -- though he's only SORTA a liberal) is POPULARIZING their discourse. From Rush Limbaugh on the radio to FOX news on TV to Focus on the Family in the religious sphere. These folks know how to articulate their message to everyday people. This is a huge shift in american popular discourse. Liberals, after all, used to be voice of the masses. And actually the TERM liberal, I think has become a polarizing one.

My take (and obviously pundits have already talked about this) is that the new "godterm" in our society is "moderate" or "centrist" but there's a subtle skewing of the MEANING of this term given the massive takeover of the government and the media ownership (not the reporters or editors -- because i agree -- they're liberals) by the right (of both political parties....). "Liberal" becomes a devil term to centrists, "conservative", on the other hand, I think, is only a devil term to the liberals.

I think that David would argue (am i right, D.R.?) that my last sentence is evidence that there's been an actual shift of the center, but my argument is that there's been a CONNOTATIVE shift to the right, that reflects how people respond to TERMS -- but that that isn't reflective of how people WOULD actually vote for social policy -- BUT the evil intercourse between the political parties (both of them) and the media industry has reduced our political DISCOURSE to a bunch of SIGNS divorced from the actual meanings that people are living...

Am I trying to taunt some of you into starting up your own blogs? Sure. Anything to share our lives together! :-)

PEACE (i mean it, even in diversity of opinion) ~
andrew