The Runaround, Vol. 0.7
Election Headlines
Things to know this week. What’s missing?
*The* election news story is the second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. More on political violence below.
But it isn’t—and I continue to be stunned by how quickly Americans of all political stripes stop searching for, talking about, and reading stories like this. Here is what they’re searching for, instead.
Springfield, Ohio, is at the center of the political storm, instead.
JD Vance is at the center of the center, catching flak saying that he sometimes “creates stories” to get media attention.
A new poll finds that a majority of Americans support a mass deportation program.
This isn’t new, and an earlier poll found that a majority of Hispanic voters supported such a program.
For those of you that wouldn’t, this is one way to explain why the Trump campaign is quite happy to keep the focus on Springfield, even though the people that immigrated there did so legally.
Throughlines
What’s on your mind? I’m compiling questions to tackle over time.
On backing away from violence. In class on Monday, we talked about political violence. I borrowed an image from Russian author Leo Tolstoy:
Living together is a river, and acts of violence and hate are like layers of ice layered on top of it, obscuring what is possible. Each act of violence generates another.
We think we’re after justice, but more often we are layering on more layers of hate. If what we want is justice and peace, the task is to figure out how to melt those layers away. It is hard, slow, not always obvious work.
Reports suggest that some of the bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio this week were from foreign actors. That makes sense—foreign actors know that to weaken America’s democracy, all they have to do is spin up cycles of violence.
The opposite is true: efforts at connection aren’t always reciprocated, but it’s what we can do how we thaw the ice. If you view all Republicans or all Democrats as “alien, unlikeable, and morally contemptible,” it’s probably time for a gut check.
Is the partisan divide in the US really left v right? One of my favorite tools is the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart.
One of the things not obvious from the chart though, is the gap between two political universes in the United States.
That isn’t left and right, I don’t think—in fact, most Americans share a lot of news sources.
Instead, it seems to me that the gap is between the mainstream and what I’ll call the insurgents: Breitbart, NewsMax, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Allie Beth Stuckey, etc.
For a sense of what the mainstream might include: Kamala Harris is now endorsed by Dick Cheney and Bernie Sanders. Before 2016, these two probably couldn’t even agree on a pizza order. Trump supporters call this the “Uniparty.”
Fox News seems to me to try to straddle the two, but is losing mindshare to the insurgents.
What this means is that if you’re a moderate Republican, you probably have no clue what your MAGA friends are talking about, what they’re reading, or why they believe what they do.
If you’re in the mainstream, what can you do? I think it means listening to and reading stuff that confuses and irritates you. Dig in and let me know what you see.
Lagniappe
If this word isn’t in your vocabulary, we aren’t friends (yet).
Should you trust the polls? I’d argue that you should take them seriously, but maybe don’t trust the election forecasts.
Are there really two tribes in the US? No.
