Even if you don't withdraw, you do turn down your views.

destor23, that's what the Bill of Rights is for: so those other guys can't tell you how to live your life - and you can't tell them how to live theirs, either. It's the basic set of rules for everyone.

It's kind of ironic to me that this post is published on a site where many of the phenomena your describe I, as a long time reader of the site, saw happen in microcosm and in extremis in the first half of this year. The participating audience here became one that was not a "diverse" community in any sense of the word, it became basically an echo chamber with a narrow solitary goal: support Obama in the primary. Those who were undecided or saw the two as equal or were avid supporters of Hillary were mostly chased away (and in the blogosphere, of course, there were "pro-Hillary" sites where many went to form their own "echo chambers") leaving behind a small minority with many of the problems and behaviors you describe. The latter did not represent well the actual larger minority that is out in the real world. That mix of majority and unrepresentative small minority did not represent the actual reality out there in any way shape or form, in particular about Obama's candidacy, especially in that those who did not find either of the Dem candidates of interest were nonexistent. Truth was not served well in any way shape or form either by that virtual space community experience, mho.

I believe it also affected editorial decisions by management here; they covered all kinds of crap regarding Obama v. Hillary campaign minutae in preference over all kinds of other important stories that could have been covered, precisely because the unreal virtual communities were fixated on the daily campaign minutae. It got to the point where I would laugh when I saw a few who said they get all my news from TPM now, thank god there were some left that still had a sense of another reality out there.

I'm with the title of Bob Carlton's post, it says it well: Little Boxes Make Us Stupid. It's continually amazing to me how many complaints I see about "Fox News world" in the liberal blogosphere from people who in everything they do and say seem to want to recreate exactly the same kind of virtual community for liberals. Even the Amerocentrism of the political blogosphere tends to make for "stupid," much less limiting information exchange to the very narrow pro-Obama or pro-Hillary slants that happened. The whole concept of political "support" of an individual in a race or for an ideology nearly guarantees that one spin is going to dominate over any other.

The concept of creating "virtual communities" like that, for information gathering and sharing but only within a narrow spin range, is taking the worst qualities of what you are describing and trumpeting them as a big positive. I guess it's considered a positive because they offer supposed solidarity and grounds for political action. But they also are cause for much disinformation when relied upon too much for a sense of "reality."

What's especially ironic about this particular most recent example, the separation of the liberal blogosphere further into single minded pro-Obama and pro-Hillary echo chambers where any other opinion expression was difficult and discouraged and was only practiced by unsual people, is that one of Mr. Obama's core beliefs appears to be that separating into such community mindsets is a bad thing. No surprise to me that in keeping with that he has shown disrespect for the self-described "netroots" in the past:

"One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me. And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect."

Whereas I, being a socialist living in Arizona, am constantly thwarted by "ideological idiots" living next door to me ;)

I live in the most heavily Republican county in Texas. Needless to say, I have avoided talking politics much - until I started reading and posting on the Internet and blogging.

I have found my community here - but it carries over. Every time when someone complains about gas prices, I pop up with -"Yeah, those Republican did this to us." and I get agreement.

Now I am also in a segment of Tarrant County that belonged to Congressman Martin Frost, the Democrat that Tom DeLay pushed Texas redistricting to defeat. It worked, and my Congressman now is an obstretician in Denton County because there is this long tail from Denton down into Tarrant county designed to dilute the power of us Democrats in Eastern Tarrant County. Another similar tail from the South, belonging to the idiot John Barton, controls another part of what was Martin Frost's district, and the last third was given to Kay Granger, the reliable Republican and previous mayor of Fort Worth.

Until Obama and Hillary ran in the primary here ~and it mattered~ people rarely even turned out to vote. I am voting Judge for three precincts, and four years ago I had five people show up for the caucus and about 30 people vote in the primary. This year it was about 300 voters and over 200 at the caucuses afterwards.

This tells me that the advertising that drove voters to the polls got a lot of them out of the woodwork. The 50 state strategy matters! But some of us can open our mouths (so to speak) on the Internet and work out our understanding of the politics without seeming to be fools. (mostly.)

Bill Bishop's report is really important, but I think the Internet is going to make inroads against the tendency of minorities to shut up and slink away.

At least I hope so. The Republicans here are controlled by the Evangelists and conservative Baptists, so that even our local Episcopal Bishop is a fundamentalist who wants to take the diocese out of the Episcopal Church and (with the property that belongs to the church) affiliate with a Latin American Anglican Bishop, all over women and gays as priests and Bishops.

Tarrant County is BIG. We have close to 2,000,000 population and roughly 900,000 registered voters. This county has more population than New Mexico. And Dallas county, 35 miles to our east, is a little larger. But Dallas underwent a Democratic sweep in 2006.

If the minority simply shuts up, what happens when the minority and majority swaps? Do the members of the two parties start speaking to each other?

What's the mechanism that causes the minority to shut up? Do the leaders of the majority use the minority as a "whipping boy" to get their base to vote for them? That would mean that the leaders of the majority get more extreme than their base is. I know from personal experience that as the Republicans have taken over Texas, they have become publicly more extreme, and that I have become more extreme in my opposition to their obvious idiocies. See Tom DeLay. Rick Perry, our governor is no better, just more circumspect.

As a student of Strategic Management and Organization Theory, I watch as CEO's and top management (selected by the CEOs) become more isolated from reality and prone to failure. They don't listen to minority reports, and in fact generally actively suppress them as being "disloyal." I suspect that Circuit City is failing for that reason, and American Airlines is in much the same boat. It is completely clear that Bush and Cheney have followed this pattern, and they have failed because their beliefs are so totally out of line with reality.

Organizations, including government, fail when they ignore and even suppress minority objections. Yet enough ignoring and suppression and the minorities just shut up.

The other side of the problem is that to carry out a program means that everyone has to be on board with the program and refrain from sabotaging it. The executive carrying out the program does not have the time or energy to deal with "roadblocks." The executive wants a clear directive and them to be left alone to deal with making something happen.

I don't think that the two functions, dealing with objections and carrying out the task, can be accomplished by the same organization. That's why we need a separate legislature and executive.

It's the executives who want to ignore and suppress minority objections, and in areas where the majority is very dominant they can force submission. The minority simply "shuts up."

And something very important is lost.

I wonder how much the Internet can empower minorities in strongly homogeneous areas?

I wonder if conservatives can even deal with the idea that there is a major need to attend to objections to their plans and programs.

Oops. New thought. Progressives are in the minority currently, but organizing and gaining power. That process of organizing and gaining power is an executive process, one in which minority objections have to be squelched. Without unifying and squelching internal dissent (see Joe Lieberman), they will never gain the power needed to overcome the current idiots in the White House.

I think that Progressives are on the way to gaining the power they need. Can they, once in power, empower (realistic) minority objections? That is, will success in the political realm lead to the kind of loss of contact with reality that the conservatives are currently displaying? How would that be done in a winner-take-all democracy system?

I do think the progressives will be better at it than the conservative have been, but that does not mean the progressives will be good at it. Or is that ebb and flow what makes democracy so much better than a tyranny?

It's a beautiful thing to watch an area change. I live in DuPage County, suburban Chicago. Republicans around here have long bragged DuPage is the most Republican county in the country. That may well have been true at one time. Not anymore.

On Super Tuesday almost 133,000 people in DuPage took Dem ballots to 109,000 Republicant. It's not like the Pukes had nothing to vote for and just decided to vote for Barack or Hillary to mess with us. It was the last time they could realistically chose anyone besides McCain. Romney dropped out two days later.

I do a lot of phonebanking and canvassing. I can't tell you how many double and triple R's have said they're voting Obama and the rest of the Dem ticket.

Here are a couple of my favorites. I got a 61 year old white guy a few months ago when I was phone IDing voters. I have to ask three questions, are you voting for candidate x or y in this race, candidate a or b in this race, by the time I got to that point he said with a kind of wonder at the sound of his own voice, "hey, I'm voting for Obama" like "I can't believe this is me saying this but yeah and I am and it feels good".

The other time was toward the end of a day out canvassing. It'd rained earlier and now the sun was out, pretty hot and steamy. I found a guy 42 years old standing in his driveway talking to his female neighbor. I politely asked if he was Joe X as I handed him my lit and then told him I was IDing voters for my Dem congressional candidate. He agreed to answer my questions and pulled himself up straight as if to steel himself for trick questions. His neighbor stood there smirking at me. The look on both their faces said this is gonna be good, they were going to enjoy it.

I asked my questions with a unperturbed smile on my face as he let me know he was voting straight Republican. Toward the end his neighbor let out a nervous chuckle as if to say "this guy just doesn't get it". Then I pointed to the web addresses on the lit, suggested they check out the websites and with a sincere smile thanked them for their time and went on my merry way. The last I saw they were staring at me with worried looks on their faces.

People like that don't bother you when 7 out of 10 people you've talked to are in your camp.

The two single best part

Weeell doggies...

This is Bishop's second post, and the intellectual content, compared with yesterday, has fallen off the cliff. Gonna be a loooong week.

First, Bishop started out bristling with sociological "evidence", talking about what "we" (some team of statisticians in his basement?) had been able to ascertain. Today we are firmly anchored in the realm of...anecdote. A "Texas Hill Country town" is hardly typical of America in general. Further, in Texas, more than anywhere, political parties are ways of funnelling certain concrete financial advantages to people. Even in Texas, there are not many 80-20 counties (and some of them have extremely small populations!). But it isn't as if being a Democrat in such a county gets you burned at the stake. It just doesn't get you on the highway gravel list, or something like that.

Going on, we have a Republican who, upon being told that a community college in a Democratic neighborhood didn't need a Republican board member, became fearful when walking his dog. A Republican who drove a car covered with Republican political stickers into a heavily Democratic neighborhood in AUSTIN (where there are more than a few students) got his car egged.

Now, are these things in his book? Because up to this point what we have is warmed over bullshit. Not that these things couldn't have happened.

They just don't mean jack shit.

Next, we have:

"Fifty years ago, political scientist Warren Miller found that minorities in counties with heavy political majorities vote less. (An even mix of voters increased turnout.)

"Notre Dame's David Campbell found that minorities in landslide counties not only vote less, they are less likely to volunteer or engage in civic activities. Minorities find it healthful to simply withdraw from public life."

Now, in a very real sense, these are lies. Warren Miller did not "find" anything. He conducted some sort of survey (methodology unspecified) FIFTY FUCKING YEARS AGO and that survey indicated what was a lead pipe cinch from the getgo: heavy political majorities in counties have a sort of multiplier effect (or "landslide" effect) when they get past a certain point. Conversely, hotly contested races between candidates from different parties causes turnout to increase.

Does that mean we should fix it so there are no landslides?

Does the fact that there is a bandwagon effect in counties amount to creeping fascism? So far we have one car in Austin, egged. I submit that worse things happen in LOTS of places.

Notre Dame's David Campbell found that members of minority parties tended to volunteer less. But, ahem, where did he "find" this? How long ago? Sample size? Methodology to establish typicality of sample?

Time during which Bill Bishop will continue to try to give this audience a handjob? "Minorities find it healthful to simply withdraw from public life"??? Oh COME ON, this is tantamount to some sort of dragged-behind-a-pickup accusation and there is not the slightest evidence for it, no evidence is even alleged, Bishop is trolling for support.

""Polarized politics is not simply a matter of the actual positions adopted by Democrats and Republicans," according to political scientist Robert Huckfeldt. "It is also a direct consequence of the perceptions each side holds of the other, and these perceptions depend in important ways on the patterns of communication among and between citizens holding various political preferences." Exposure to different opinions does increase tolerance. There is good to hearing -- and listening to -- the other side."

Jesus, I thought 51-49 was polarized. Isn't that how they used to put it? So now 51-49 is not polarized, but 65-35 or 80-20?

I admit, I would like to see political scientist Robert Huckfeldt (who wrote what? when? for who? with what reception??) get slam-fucked with a rusty chainsaw - but only if Mr. Bishop is strangled with his entrails immediately afterward.

What I mean to say is that it was bad enough when Mr. Bishop began to retail stale anecdotes about that there Texas Hill Country (which we assume also apply to the hill country in Texas).

But when we have to have paragraphs from some Borg-pwned AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENTIST (shudder, retch) fobbed off on us...

...followed by deathless phrases like this:

"Exposure to different opinions does increase tolerance. There is good to hearing - and listening to - the other side."

OK, the first sentence is a stone truism. We cannot award any graduation credit for that. The author does seem to realize that his claim to have SAID SOMETHING has crumbled, and in the next sentences his English style itself falls apart: "There is good to hearing (the other side)"?? "There is good to...listening to (the other side)??

There is good to listening to self, too. And good to opening to page in grammar book, too.

Cretin.

Well, next Bishop stoops to what I was getting on Ellen about: mugging the hoi polloi.

"Surrounded by likeminded majorities, many Americans come to have inordinate confidence in their own opinions -- and a belief that their clear good sense is thwarted by ideological idiots who live...elsewhere. Elizabeth Theiss-Morse held focus groups with citizens in Republican Omaha. "People said, many times, 'Eighty percent of us agree," she told me. "'We all want the same thing...It's those 20 percent who are just a bunch of extremists out there.' It didn't matter what their political views were. They really saw it as us against this fringe. The American people versus them, the fringe."

Well, I guess I'll just have to take the radical step of questioning the results of a single focus group in Omaha.

It is just possible that Ms. Theiss-Morse (who may or may not have shared a cultural matrix and dialectal base with her interviewees) didn't have the discursive ability to get all the latent meaning out of her subjects. But Bishop is still trimming the frame. In fact, as we all know perfectly well, that CD including Omaha is a long way from 80-20 this year; it's only pale red on 538 and it can go blue independently thanks to Nebraska law.

But what is this "inordinate confidence" Bishop is talking about? Focus group interviewers usually try to find out what people think - not what they think about what they think. In other words, focus groups tend to push leaners, not to encourage people to give voice to their doubts or self-doubts. (I hesitate to point out - again - that we don't have the time, the place, the rationale, the script or the sample methodology. Sorry to be such a stick in the mud, Bill!)

Perhaps some of you have seen a certain map of the United States that starts off in New York City and goes all the way to LA - except that easily 80% of the map is taken up between the Brooklyn Bridge and 10th Avenue.

This focus-grouped attitude check - about people who think that the people "somewhere else" are "a fringe" is ubiquitous.

People in New York opine - when they are just gassing, and not particularly involved - that people in Nebraska are bound to be cross-eyed apple-knockers with all the intelligence of traffic islands.

People in Nebraska opine - when no money is riding on it - that people in New York are hopped-up, half-foreign hustlers that talk too fast to be understood.

Now these viewpoints:
1) are expendable if somebody from New York or Nebraska can help you make some honest money
2) mostly exist as media commonplaces trotted out on certain occasions
3) are based on a relative lack of direct experience of either place
4) are based on the undeniable but superfluous fact that "here where we are" is always the center, and "there where those people are" is always the fringe
5) not worth a pint of warm sugarless spit
6)all of the above

As far as people from California are concerned:

All my life, people from California have been considered weird. They're different from people in the East. It's hard to say why. But "weird" is a weird word. There's good weird and bad. For most of my life, people seeking a new and better life have gone to California. Often they stay; often they come back. And when they get back, they always say, California is weird.

But very few of them say they're sorry they went there.

But it isn't as if being a Democrat in such a [Texas] county gets you burned at the stake.

Perhaps not, but apparently, it does get your car "keyed and egged."

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