It begins - a discussion of politics

FiveThirtyEight is running a post today on how the medium of talk radio has dumbed down the right.

It may have gone to their heads a little bit; they may have forgotten about radio's idiosyncrasies as a means of communication. The failures of the Bush administration have woken the country up; conservatives now need to find a way to communicate with people who are actually paying attention.

This is a follow up to Nate Silver's hilarious interview with John Ziegler, which was posted on Tuesday.

JZ: Misinformed? You're a piece of work! You are never going to have the guts to post a representative transcript on your website! I thought you actually ran a legitimate website!

NS: Thank you, have a good day.
JZ: Go fuck yourself.

Ziegler is a conservative radio host who is currently promoting an upcoming documentary on how the media downplayed negative stories about Obam and Biden, and how this contributed to Obama's victory. The interview was pretty shockingly uncivil. Ziegler was totally out of line, although after reading the beating he took in the comments thread for the post, I almost feel like taking his side. Nate Silver did make some strong criticisms of Ziegler's work without really doing his homework first.

This is in contrast to a post that he made in early October, in which Nate accused RealClearPolitics.com of cherry-picking polls to make McCain look stronger in crucial states. In this post, Nate's accusations, while perhaps over the top, were based on numbers and evidence.

The conclusion to Nate's (people call him Nate...) latest post seems off base to me. While he's raises some good points about the limitations of the talk radio format, I think he foolishly takes for granted that extreme conservatives are particularly more dogmatic than extreme liberals. While in recent years, Republicans have aimed their appeals towards the fringe of their base, this doesn't mean that the fringe represents the whole. This post sparked an interesting discussion in the comments thread. For me, the low point of all this was one poster (dubbed 'pixel' - read into that what you will) remarking that "Every group is defined by their extremists."

Maybe every group is reduced by critical outsiders (in this case, our beloved Mr. Silver) to their extremists. I would rather believe that extremists are defined by every group's extremists - that beyond the facade of their particular views, extremists have more in common with one another than with the mainstream of the movements that they supposedly epitomize.

The complement to Nate's argument was raised by various sources during the election and primaries, none of whom I can cite offhand. In particular, extreme liberals believe that their political views are the gospel of academia - that anyone 'of intelligence' who thought deeply about the issues would eventually come to the One True Path (sinistralism). But at stake in politics is more than just the right or wrong way to get things done. At stake is a true difference of values. And if we (the sinistralists) are the Cultural Relativists that we purport to be, then we should acknowledge the values of libertarians and fiscal conservatives, if not old school conservatives, are valid and defensible too. (Okay, I won't start in on the neo-cons.)

We all have a responsibility to examine our own views a little more critically, and to try to separate differences of values from differences in approach. Otherwise we come out looking like this little guy.