Why The Media and Many Democrats Don’t Understand Politics

In the wake of a calamitous election that was a wholesale rebuke of the Democratic Party writ large, a lot of confusion has emerged. Should the Democrats move left to try to compete in this new world? Or should they move right? Or are the people making these points trapped inside a construct of political thought that would fail them out of any political science 101 class?

What about the notion that the Democrats should move up? Or down? Do you even know what I’m talking about right now? It’s OK if you don’t. Our elite pundit-driven media is wholly unaware of how actual political science works, so unless you’ve studied it, you’re likely never going to be exposed to it unless you go searching for it. As I wrote last week, perhaps the main reason that liberals are so out of touch with America and have failed to understand the populist strain this century is because of their mainstream media-centric diet that provides them with a torrent of bad information. Fake news is an accurate term to describe them in the literal sense. If you just cannot wrap your head around any reason why America can elect Trump other than racism, the first thing you should do is turn your TV off.

People who are well-versed in memes know what I’m getting at, and it’s entirely accurate to say that people who have been exposed to the endlessly customizable meme of the four ideological quadrants have a MUCH better grasp of political ideology than our braindead elite media class who thinks that ideology is only plotted along an x-axis.

There is a non-idiotic and extremely logical self-serving reason that the media plots ideology on a scale no political scientist does. It allows them to simplify their portrayal of the average American voter towards one that is more flattering to their bankrupt political ideology. The media, in slavish devotion to their bothsides instincts, like to pretend that being socially liberal and fiscally conservative is the center of American politics, where they, the Very Serious people reside.

If you actually want to talk about this like someone who understands how political ideology is measured, people who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative are not in the center, they are concentrated around the bottom right quadrant. Generally, economic ideology is plotted on a left-right scale, and social ideology is plotted on an up-down scale. According to this study done by the Voter Study Group on the electorate after Trump won in 2016, the supposed “center” portrayed by the Beltway is by far the sparsest group of voters in America and it’s not remotely close.

This is how Democrats’ media diet costs them elections. They watch self-serving cable news and think that the whole country likes Liz Cheney and believes that she’s a hero when polls show the only people who broadly have a favorable opinion of her are Democrats, and the Republican and Independent voters Dems think they were reaching with the daughter of one of America’s most notorious war criminals hate her guts. The Democrats’ warm embrace of the Cheneys is one of the best examples I have ever seen of how the party fundamentally does not understand the American electorate.

If Democrats looked at political ideology the way that political scientists do and not how braindead cable news pundits do, they would know that Liz Cheney ideologically sorts into the top right quadrant, where, as Kamala Harris’s pollster notoriously told her, “Republicans vote Republican.” Actual swing voters in America, as demonstrated both by this study and the wild swings between the revanchist Trump vote bookending Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, are generally socially conservative and fiscally liberal, sitting around the x-axis on the left.

This flies in the face of how so many Democratic partisans and almost the entire media views politics. There are world-historic frauds like Phillippe Reines going on TV and saying the Democrats need to ditch the left and tack to the center, proving that reactionary Zoomers who elected Trump and are currently half-asleep and hungover in their political science class know more about politics than this four-time presidential loser does. Democrats don’t need to tack to the center to get more votes, they need to find a sweet spot in the top left quadrant that wins them swing votes while not alienating their base in the bottom left. Drifting to the bottom right quadrant where idiots like Reines reside both alienates their base and swing voters, as they run a diametrically opposite campaign to the electorate’s political persuasions. It’s really not inaccurate to say that Democrats primarily run national campaigns for a cable news audience.

It’s time to get rid of this overly simplistic and childish left-right notion of politics. It’s another media distortion, a way for them to make things seem simpler than they are that double as a way to push the country towards their own politics they share with very few people outside their safe space for oligarchs in Washington. If you find yourself entertaining the simplistic notion that Democrats only need to move left or right, stop what you’re doing, and remember that only the dumbest people in the world, AKA cable news pundits, think like that, and you’re way smarter than they are.