Comments on: Reading from left to right

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 14:19:30 +0000

Yes, the red/blue coding in modern American political rhetoric is a recent historical accident, probably arising from which coding more (but not all) US TV networks happened to be using on Election Night 2000, when the close and contested election had people talking about the map a lot. I do think that the American distaste for the radical left has something to do with it, though. Here red is associated not so much with American radical-left parties, which are pretty insignificant today, as with the Soviet Union and Communist states, to the extent that associating red with the Democrats might be seen as a McCarthyite slur; whereas when used as a label for Republicans it just reminds one of Nancy Reagan’s dresses.

By: toni wuersch

toni wuersch — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 05:54:01 +0000

The clustering methodology looks at Amazon “people like you also read” links. I’d guess Amazon publishes links with the most connections to a book (easy hits), so links with fewer connections are censored from view. There are probably more centrist links in links censored by Amazon than in links shown by Amazon. So I’d take the graph with a big grain of salt.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:56:23 +0000

Anon, sorry, I was unclear, also slightly irrelevant, I was just talking about senators. The fact that each state has two senators; not electoral votes. Should have been talking about them but wasn’t.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:56:06 +0000

By: Senior Administration Official

Senior Administration Official — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 23:54:36 +0000

I dunno, this bridge sure has ‘politics’ written all over it.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 23:46:16 +0000

“Brett Bellmore breaks more ground on the academic domination of the university front. Liberal books are better documented and better-written than conservative books, proving that liberals are elitists.” Nah. Smart liberals like to go into fields where you play a lot of word games, while smart conservatives prefer more physical fields, such as engineering. So the smart liberals are more likely to be writing books, which tend to be identifiably liberal, while you can’t look at a bridge and identify it’s politics.

By: JX

JX — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 23:25:34 +0000

Re: “The Clash of Civilizations” and Islam Soon after September 11, while the US was preparing for Afghanistan, there was a sign at a protest in Pakistan that read, “Americans, think! Why you are hated all over the world!” Americans, seemingly in response, began asking themselves, why do they hate us? The Western left answered, they us because of our imperialism. The Bush Administration answered, they hate us because of our freedom. Neither answer is correct. We were, in fact, asking the wrong question, which can be corrected by the elimination of a single word. The question that should have been asked is, why do they hate? Akbar Ahmed, former Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK, points us in the right direction, “For the first time in history, Islam is in confrontation with all of the major world religions: Judaism (in the Middle East), Christianity (in the Balkans, Chechnya, Nigeria, Sudan and sporadically in the Philippines and Indonesia), Hinduism (in South Asia) — and even Buddhism, after the Taliban blew up the statues in Bamiyan.” Do Muslim fundamentalists hate Hindus and African animists? They sure do. Because Hindus and Africans are rapacious imperialists? I’d like to someone try and make that case. Muslim fundamentalists hate them for the same reason they hate Americans: because they’re xenophobic religious bigots. Neither Huntington nor myself level that accusation at all Muslims. Re: “The Hispanic Challenge” I don’t have a problem with Huntington’s habit of generalization as long as those generalizations are useful. I find that, in “The Hispanic Challenge,” Huntington overstates his case. I don’t think that the obstacles to the assimilation of Mexicans are insurmountable though I would agree with Huntington that numbers, isolation from the Anglophone mainstream and a multiculturalist (as opposed to assimilationist) ethos do not help matters.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 21:33:34 +0000

Re: Red/Blue. Another possibility is that the media have it right (although unintentionally)—that the ‘conservatives’, so-called, really are the latter-day Bolsheviks.

By: anon

anon — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 21:30:41 +0000

Ophelia, that’s not quite accurate. States have electoral votes equal to senators + representatives. Because no state has fewer than two senators, even the tiniest states have at least three votes. So, a presidential vote by someone in Montana is worth just under three times as much as a California vote.

By: bunny

bunny — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 21:06:22 +0000

I believe the comments pointing to the 2000 election as the culprit for the red/blue maps is correct. I don’t think it was done to minimize the size of Democratic wins, but rather to avoid charges of bias. The networks didn’t wan’t to be accused of painting the Dems as “red”. They could safely assign the color to the Republicans and maintain the overall RW&B scheme.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 20:56:38 +0000

“Short of that, any attempt to paint all manifestations of Islamic identity” Hmm. What does “Islamic identity” mean? Islam is a religion, not an identity. I realize people ‘find’ ‘identity’ (whatever that means) in Islam and other religions, but that doesn’t make the religions themselves identities. Religions are sets of ideas, not identities. If you conflate the two, that tends to help make it impermissible (or at any rate heavily frowned on) to criticise the ideas that those religions consist of. This tendency has its risks. See Julian Baggini on this in the Guardian the other day.

By: Senior Administration Official

Senior Administration Official — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 19:29:56 +0000

Sorry jx, but I don’t think Huntington has proven you wrong. No doubt his work has been vindicated to a certain extent by 9/11, but it’s still radically reductionist. There are fault lines within civilizations which he would rather ignore, and does in his revionist and one-sided assessments of history. Furthermore, the diversity of Islamic civilization defies any reduction into simple Wahhabism. Short of that, any attempt to paint all manifestations of Islamic identity as harmful or contrary to Western interests is, in my opinion, intellectually insulting or sleazy. When he applies this schema of reduction and revision to my friends and neighbors, in ways that echo some of the nastiest and nativist tracts in recent history, it’s just really damn insulting. For example: In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white American natives. I’m sure you’ve read enough to see the parallel here, it’s positively sleazy. Likewise, Huntington pushes a ridiculously skewed view of what immigration was like in the past, the oevrwhelming reference is to people who are happy to assimilate, and melt easily into American/White protestant culture (yes, the two are synonymous now). I’ve never seen the historical experience of black or Chinese Americans so glossed over in my life, and purposefully so. Huntington wants to paint a lilly-white portrait of American culture as a harmonious melting pot that never whipped a slave or interned a “jap.” Just as he wants to potray the Russians (synonymous now with all slavs) as the defenders against the overwhelming turkic/causasian onslaught. Let’s see, a half-million dead Chechnyans and a couple hundred Moscovians… that adds up. Throughout “The Hispanic Challenge,” Huntington uses anecdotal evidence as testimony to the unpatriotic, un-protestant nature of Mexican-Americans. I would have loved to have shown him what California looked like on September 11th, how many of those same threatening Mexican-Americans were flying the flag (or how many are serving in Iraq today). I think he could learn something about culture, our civilization and its own fault lines, maybe then he wouldn’t be so sleazy.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 19:26:08 +0000

Brett Bellmore breaks more ground on the academic domination of the university front. Liberal books are better documented and better-written than conservative books, proving that liberals are elitists. I’ve thought for a long time that the reason that working reporters tend to be center-left rather than center-right or right is that if you know what’s actually going on—which is what reporters are paid to find out—the Republican position is usually unappealing. Whereas if you live in some medium-sized Southern town and watch Fox, the Republican point of view is very appealing. Real media domination is at the top, and conservative, of course. Journalists who register Democratic and vote center-left, will not, from a mix of opportunism, neutrality professionalism, and snarky cynicism, write pro-Democratic pieces, and the editors and publishers succeed in defusing the stories that look like they might end up going that way. Kristoff of the Times has recently made himself a poster boy for the defeated media liberal.

By: Neel Krishnaswami

Neel Krishnaswami — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 19:18:36 +0000

I’m under 30, but I’ll second Patrick’s observation—I recall being surprised in the 2000 Presidential election to see Republicans marked as red, since that was different from the elections I remember from my childhood. I think that the colorings of the parties must arise from the fact that the US flag has red, white, and blue, and graphic designers obviously find it irresistable to color unreported districts white, and districts going for a major party one of red or blue. But there’s no particular reason to expect red and blue to map obviously to either party—trying to link red and communism and Democrats is just putting a little too much symbolic weight on that particular signifier.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 19:15:38 +0000

I’m wondering whether the “What Went Wrong” stat isn’t corrupted by the fact that there are two books of that title: Bartlett and Steele in America, and Bernard Lewis on Islam.