Real Diversity

Jeanne D'Arc made a worthwhile point yesterday, jumping off from a discussion of women and blogging:

The political monolith at the top of the blog ecosystem concerns me as much as the gender monolith. It doesn't exactly mirror the bias of the media in its assumption that reasonable opinion runs from center-left to extreme right -- Atrios, Kos, and even Kevin are well to the left of what passes for left in most of the mainstream media -- but it's not as much of a challenge to that political box as one might hope for.

This is true, and it's much truer of the "real" commentariat than the blogosphere. And it's not just a matter of the marginalization of the left (one never even hear adocacy of what would be a tame center-left view in, say, France). There are, to be sure, plenty of frothing-at-the-mouth rightwingers given access to the media, but their rightwingery is largely expressed as just that -- froth. Vile smears against Democrats, liberals, etc., rather than actual advocacy of positions that are well to the right of the status quo. I've read, for example, many columns in major newspapers advocating that we privatize Social Security. I've read zero that state -- even as an impossible dream to which privatization is the feasible second-best -- that we ought to simply abolish Social Security and replace it with nothing (other than lower taxes) even though I know perfectly well that this is what many people think. I linked a while back to a poll showing that only 80-something percent of people would vote for a woman as president. Where's the case against women in office? Where's the argument that gay sex is intrinsically wrong and that in order to deter it practitioners should be thrown in jail? I don't exactly regret that these views don't get aired, but it does impoverish our discourse in its way.

In my (admittedly limited) experience as a consumer of European media, the debate is much more wide open over there. All kinds of crazy shit -- from both the left and the right -- gets a little space to be heard. Here in the states, pundits are expected to act like press secretaries, always trying to hew to the dictates of the median voter theorem and not admit to having any policy preferences that are far from the mainstream. But in a country of almost 300 million people, on any given topic there will be lots and lots and lots of folks whose views are far from mainstream. The world would be, at a minimum, a more interesting place if this was better reflected in the public discourse.