the Fox viewing audience is about one percent of the eligible electorate while news shows on MSNBC fall short of that. Sean Hannity’s is the highest-rated political show on cable television with an audience of about 1.5 percent of the eligible electorate. On the other end of the spectrum Rachel Maddow gets a bit over one percent. Anderson Cooper 360 draws in a paltry 0.4 of one percent.
If he is correct, then the people that you see sharing political posts on Facebook and Twitter are a small minority.
He also makes this interesting point:
Under current practices in 2045 the Census Bureau will record the children of Senator Ted Cruz’ daughters as Hispanic even if they are only one-eighth Hispanic by that point. Inter-ethnic and inter-racial marriages have dramatically risen, producing increasing numbers of children of mixed-race or ethnicity.
I have read Fiorina’s column just after leaving a comment on the previous post about Alberto Mingardi. I may agree 100% with Fiorina but he’s missing the problem: politics has always been practiced by a low percentage of the population and the relevant issue is under what conditions politicians and their supporters have a significant impact on their political jurisdiction.
Last month I visited China to assess what had happened since I worked there 20-25 years ago. I visited only Beijing and a few other large cities and I was happy to see that most Chinese people had opted for capitalism (my main concern in the 1990s because of my limited knowledge of China). I didn’t see any concern about politics, however. Perhaps today less than 10% of China’s population is involved in any sort of political activity. Although I have no idea of how well factions of Chinese politicians and their supporters are coexisting, I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow a breakup is revealed because I know (thanks to my work in the 1990s) that there are still a number of issues that have not been resolved and will be hard to solve.
So should the children of Ted Cruz’s daughters benefit from affirmative action? Preferences in hiring and collage admissions? Would it matter if Ted Cruz’s daughter’s children were 5/8 hispanic? Are they disadvantaged in any real sense? How about 1/8 hispanic, 1/2 black and 3/8s non hispanic European? Any extra points if black side is also hispanic?
The live TV audiences may be very small, but I wonder how much that increases when you include clip viewing online, including social media sharing. I’m sure it doesn’t grow to say 50%, but I wonder if it gets as high as 4-5%.
Fiorina’s approach to the topic is embarassingly out to lunch. Almost nothing he says can be sqaured with the empirical results on polarization, and I recommend everyone take a good look at the interactive graphs from Pew’s study of Political Polarization from 1994-2017 which shows that the normal distribution curves for the general public have pushed away from each other in ways that almost entirely mimic the trends for the politically engaged with a slight lag, which is what the classic “everything is always about power struggles among the elites and everyone else follows along” model of politics would predict (see anything by de Jouvenal).
Now, as to whether we are on the verge of an 1860’s style Civil War, the answer is no, because of the current state of weapons and surveillance technologies and the fact that we lack anything approaching the geographic coherence of that era. On the other hand, take a look at Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage for how ugly and violent things got in the late 60’s and 70’s. That’s how modern low-level “civil wars” work when conflicts start becomming violent, as one can see by looking, for example, at a few long, term Latin American examples. These are much more like interminable gang wars with a lot of small-scale murders and assassinations or bombings, and endless tit-for-tat, but expanded to politics and society-wide.
This can only go on for long if one party captures effective control of the government and the modes of information dissemination in a high-state-capacity country (like the US, or Soviet Russia or Communist China) , because it’s just a matter of time before they use that power to completely crush their rivals with whatever level of force and suppression is necessary and feasible.
With any luck, the inevitable rise of interracial and interethnic marriages will head off the rise of identity politics. Melting pot is the best antidote to tribalism. Politics will always be awful. Making it tribal only worsens it.
One can always find 1/1024 part of some race/ethnicity in their DNA
I’ve always thought that what scared political DC and caused the immediate use of sex-tinged slurs by the news media when the TEA Party marched to the Mall was that it represented a concerted effort by people who normally ignored politics and had made the choice to skip the kids’ soccer practice or recital to show up. Many say it wasn’t a lot of people, but it was a lot of people new to political activism.
Whether is was sustained or not is best left to the historians, but it seems apparent that it “woke” a lot of people who previously didn’t pay a lot of attention.