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The Half Liberal-Half Conservative Lie
Why America’s Divide Isn’t Ideological
It should be as clear as a cloudless sunrise in the era of President Donald Trump that the United States is a center-right nation. One Gallup poll after another has shown the US to be mostly made up of conservatives and moderates. As recently as May 2016, between 66 and 75 percent of adults Gallup surveyed fell into the conservative or moderate ideological camps through either their cultural or economic beliefs. Yet so much of what journalists covering US politics repeatedly report is the idea that the US is evenly and toxically divided between Americans with conservative views and Americans with liberal ones. One week apart at the end of 2015, The Atlantic and New Republic published the polar opposite articles, “Why America Is Moving Left” and “America Is Not Becoming More Liberal.” This is misleading, and mostly a ludicrous navel-gazing exercise.
The real question is, why do news organizations continue to cover American political culture with such breathtaking and inaccurate simplicity? Perhaps part of the answer lies with what America’s reporters, editors, and politicians have in common — each other. Journalists are often as affluent as the political elites they cover. The news organizations themselves crave unfettered access to the American political elite. The standard elitist…
