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 Atlanticand 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 assumption is that the non-elite American public can only handle soundbites and simple explanations. This combination of elite demographic and elitist truths remain so entrenched that even the most discerning of journalists cannot see beyond them. Making it easy for anyone covering American politics to report on it as only liberal/Democratic and conservative/Republican.

There is real commonality in the journalism world, and between it and American politics, local, state, and national. A clear majority who constitute what is America’s political news media today come from affluent backgrounds. Given the lack of diversity in experiences — and really, of thought — most in journalism can only see the US as two Americas: one liberal, one conservative — separate and evenly split between two political parties.

Sarah Kendzior, a columnist for The Globe and Mail, has also written about the increasingly elite nature of the American news media and its inability to cover American politics with depth and intellect. The “fear of unemployment leads to a host of other fears, and you end up with a climate of conformity, timidity, and sycophantic emulation,” Kendzior said during a 2013 interviewon the related topic of elitism and hypocrisy in academia. And though it is unclear as to whether America’s political media or news organizations in general have “sacrificed their own beliefs and ideas to placate market values,” Kendzior’s view of academia runs parallel with the elitist makeup of the fourth estate. Given the nature of American news organizations, with shrinking staffs and the quest for profitability, the idea that a political reporter or editor from an affluent background would question the ironclad assumption that there are these two Americas is beyond their experience. This is the America they know, where because everyone is on the same level playing field, there is no need to dig deeper.

Where the US news media has done the most work to repackage America’s center-right reality as the false liberal-conservative narrative has been through the Republican-vs.-Democrat two-sided frame. Rhetoric aside, efforts at deregulation and reducing the federal role in civil rights and social welfare have been Republican and Democratic endeavors for more than 45 years. Presidents Nixon, Carter, and Ford all helped usher in the deregulation era in the 1970s to provide a competitive advantage to US corporations. President Reagan campaigned hard with the racist “welfare queen” stigma in both 1976 and 1980, but it was President Clinton who turned Aid to Families with Dependent Children into Welfare-to-Work in 1996. For the past 30 years, every president has ramped up actions dedicated to deporting undocumented immigrants, particularly those from Latin America and the Caribbean. The ever-controversial Obamacare remains a health insurance-coverage plan that was once the conservative movement’s alternative to government-sponsored universal healthcare. Yet news organizations continue to promote the idea that the two parties are in constant diametrical opposition as ultimate truth.

Even those researching the liberal-conservative divide have allowed this narrative to reframe reality. The Pew Research Center based their 2015 report “A Deep Dive Into Party Affiliation” on a broad-spectrum 2014 survey of 25,000 Americans about their party affiliations and leanings. Like the May 2015 Gallup poll, the Pew report also showed America to be a center-right nation. But instead of concentrating on this revelation, the researchers instead focused on the more banal point that “one-in-five Americans are now either consistently liberal (12%) or consistently conservative (9%),” double from both 1994 and 2004. This is allegedly evidence that over two decades, the liberal/Democratic-conservative/Republican divide had widened, even though it also meant that 80 percent of Americans remain in the middle. The issue of centrist political perspectives never came up. The Pew researchers also never examined the actual policies of the two parties in comparison to their rhetoric or in contrast with Americans’ ideological beliefs.

It is up to those who do know better to tell the truth. The US has always been a center-right nation, with the Democratic Party having become more centrist and the GOP having moved further to the right in recent decades. The rhetoric machine that has been America’s two-party system has helped spin this false liberal-conservative reality. It is the elite nature of America’s political class and the elitist frame within the news media that covers them that has helped reinforce this narrative. And all while the real divides at the intersections of race, economic mobility, gender, and educational equity remain mostly sidelined by the easy “America is divided” trope.

 

It's not a political divide this nation is experiencing.....

It's ''law abiding'' vs. ''law breaking''

 

Well its not as divided as some might think. More than 60% of Americans agree the country is on the wrong track and only about 30% think we are on the right track.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/direction_of_country-902.html

 

No shit.

Without looking at your link, I suspct that the level is a bit higher today, and in the last 3 months, than it has been for years.

As for a divided nation, we have it, and it has nothing to do with your ''direction polling''.

 

I should have probably mentioned that in the recent past one thing that was cited often by the PR hacks and their many many socks was polls showing how Americans felt about the direction of the country.

And you can bet I am laughing about that right now.

 

When was the last time Obama and the leftists were/had above 30%?

 

The majority of Americans saw the direction the country was heading in November, which is why we elected for change. Unfortunately, the government was sicker than most Americans thought, so more action is required to clean out the infection that has set into our country. We are patiently waiting until 2018 for the next election to further eliminate the infection.

 

The election was about nine months ago and Trump has been resident for six months. So its all his ballgame now and about 60% say we are headed in the wrong direction.

 

We, as a country, waited too long before deciding to take back our country.
We may have waited too long. It will be a long hard fight.
We have made a good start but it will take more of the same to take our country back.
The U.S. is back on the track to greatness.

 

Always, given that Obama never fell that low.

 

Except the majority of Americans voted otherwise. Other than your entire premise, you might've had an idea. Not a good one necessarily, but an idea nonetheless

 

Take back the country from who, exactly?

 

Very true.


So when is Ginaforte going to turn himself in for his mugshot and fingerprinting?

When are Sessions, Kushner, Flynn, and Manafort going to jail for falsifying their SF-86?

 

And actually the polls show that more than 40% of Americans thought the country was on the right track in June of 2009, November of 2012, and 35% in February 2015. And more than 30% of Americans thought the country was on the right track for most of President Obama's eight years