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[Raphael]

I kind of question of the original assertion though. Has anyone actually counted? I remember lots of baseball in the books and stories we read.

High school age baseball? Or, on the one hand, adult professional baseball, and on the other hand, Little League baseball?

[Travis B.]

I remember a lot of softball and basketball being played by ordinary students in elementary school through high school, while only a select few ever played football.

[Raphael]

I remember a lot of softball and basketball being played by ordinary students in elementary school through high school, while only a select few ever played football.

My question was mainly why so little of that seems to appear in movies, TV shows, and other pop culture.

[Moose-tache]

I can think of two high school baseball movies of the last generation, and one where the stock jock character played baseball. That's way less than, say, basketball or soccer. Hell High School Musical has a major basketball subplot. That movie might give us a clue: baseball is a pain in the ass to film, and nobody talks except in the dugout. This is why when you do have a baseball movie, the climactic scene is always when Our Team is at bat, because it's the only way to have them close enough to talk to each other. High School Musical had players blatantly conversing on the court when they were supposed to be practicing. The baseball equivalent would be having a picnic in the outfield. Football overcomes this because you can frame the motion as being very dramatic: keep the camera low and shaky, weave back and forth between the other players. You can also have some conversation when the players huddle (a kind of standardized sports hug). But with baseball? Unless you're really invested in the mechanics of the game, how do you make that interesting? It's almost as boring as soccer ;p

[Raphael]

Oh, ok, that might explain it.

[Ares Land]

Oh, another question on the US!

I'm always surprised at you Americans' politics. I mostly interact with Americans online, so there's certainly a lot of bias showing.
But it seems to me Americans are either far-right or far-left.

Most Americans I interact with are way, way to my left. I think of myself as a moderate, I'm still the kind of person who thinks France is not socialist enough. By all rights that should make me some kind of a Stalinian by American standards. But that is not the case.

On the other side, whenever I come across American right-wingers, they're always on the far-right, and quite openly so. Tucker Carlson fans and the like.

It all looks like the American political spectrum comprises the far-left, the far-right, and nothing in between.

Am I simply wrong? Is there some bias I'm not aware of? I mean, there must be American centrists out there (someone has to be voting for Biden, after all?) Are all the centrists on Facebook where I can't see them?


The interesting point is that it all changed, I think, about ten years ago. In the early 2000s as I recall, there were some socialists and a few libertarians, but most Americans identified as centrists.

[zompist]

It all looks like the American political spectrum comprises the far-left, the far-right, and nothing in between.

Am I simply wrong? Is there some bias I'm not aware of? I mean, there must be American centrists out there (someone has to be voting for Biden, after all?) Are all the centrists on Facebook where I can't see them?

Yeah, you're getting a distorted picture.

This article, though it seems to come from a conservative writer, has useful numbers:

"28% of Americans identify as liberal, 31% as conservative, and the balance of 37% are in the middle as moderates. In contrast, 50% of college students are liberal, 26% are conservative and the minority – 23% – are moderates."

Also see this Gallup article which has some useful breakdowns. E.g. liberals have increased from 25% to 50% of Democrats since 1990; Republicans have gone from 58% to 74% conservative.

I think the people you're likely to interact with from abroad are going to be much more like college students than like the general public.

Polls for some reason rarely ask about fascism (or alt-right or whatever label people would admit to) or socialism. You can gauge something, though it may not be clear what, from the 2020 Democratic primaries, in which Bernie Sanders got 26% of the votes, Biden 52%. If everyone who voted Bernie was a red-blooded socialist, that would be half the liberal wing (and thus just 12% of the population). But that's certainly not the case: a lot of liberals like Bernie, not least because his "socialism" is far from extreme. Or simply because they liked him better than Biden.

Democratic Party politics is complicated by race, and not perhaps in the way you'd think. I can't easily find a nationwide total, but in many states Biden got the vast majority of the Black vote. Black voters tend to be highly pragmatic, and more moderate candidates like Clinton and Biden are very comfortable with Black leaders.

Also be aware of self-selection bias: I'd guess that even here on the ZBB most people don't care too much about politics. Some of us do, and talk a lot about it, but not everyone on the board. And, well, the Americans who talk to you about politics are likely to be the people who care about politics; if not, they'd prefer to talk about something else.

[hwhatting]

Also be aware of self-selection bias: I'd guess that even here on the ZBB most people don't care too much about politics. Some of us do, and talk a lot about it, but not everyone on the board. And, well, the Americans who talk to you about politics are likely to be the people who care about politics; if not, they'd prefer to talk about something else.

Plus, the ones who do talk tend to have strong views about which they are passionate, which isn't typical for moderates (there is this old adage that you never get a politcal rally where people chant "What do you want?" - "A balanced compromise!" - When do you want it?" - "Implemented gradually over a reasonable timeline!").

[Raphael]

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

[Ducane]

It all looks like the American political spectrum comprises the far-left, the far-right, and nothing in between.

Am I simply wrong? Is there some bias I'm not aware of? I mean, there must be American centrists out there (someone has to be voting for Biden, after all?) Are all the centrists on Facebook where I can't see them?

The purportedly extreme partisanship also seems to be greatly inflated as a spectacle of media and the Internet specifically. This probably begins for entertainment reasons but then has the interesting side effect of dissipating emancipatory ambitions common to both far Left and far Right (e.g. opposition to war, heavy-handed coronavirus policies, and state surveillance). There appears to be an algorithmic tendency to privilege narratives associating anti-authoritarian sensibilities with the "Right" to make it unfashionable. IRL you tend to encounter a lot more moderate, disgusted post-partisan, and apolitical types.

The way you bring up Tucker Carlson is interesting, as my wife and I have observed him as a sort of Oprah Winfrey (i.e. mainstream absorption/watering down) of bi-partisan dissident politics. Despite the fact that his viewers, I'm sure, are overwhelming conservative on social issues, there's a whole swarm of Democracy Now and indie media-type Progressive Leftists who are shunned by the cable news networks including Fox with the sole exception of his show, where they are generally very well received.

On the other hand these types of Progressives tend to label most "Democrats" as being "Right-Wing" mostly because they're not anti-war, which has rhetorical power and fairly accurately associates their policies with those of the likes of George W. Bush but still doesn't make very much technical sense.

[linguistcat]

On both extremes, it's a matter of the minority that shouts the loudest. Then again, there's very few actual Socialists in the US let alone Communists. Most of what the US "Far Left" proposes are things that I've heard considered moderate or barely left of center by other developed countries. And now with SCOTUS trying to throw out Roe v Wade, it feels like we're sliding further away from the Left as a government even if there are people who are fighting against it. That said, within the spectrum we DO have, most people are in the middle of it and just less active/vocal about politics.

[Karch]

It's not that the US "far left" is centrist, it's certainly leftist, but left-liberal at most (and, conversely, "left-liberals" are simply progressive centrists). And it's not like the US Overton window is extremely large either, it's just that there are two competing hegemonies, "liberal" and "right-wing" - one has soft power and the other hard power, whereas in other western countries everything's either liberal or not.

[zompist]

It's not that the US "far left" is centrist, it's certainly leftist, but left-liberal at most (and, conversely, "left-liberals" are simply progressive centrists).

I'm not sure you've hung out with actual US leftists much? I know plenty of actual socialists and communists; since they can't actually do anything about that, it's mostly theoretical.

[Moose-tache]

To be fair, this is an easy mistake to make, since even on the Left "socialism" is increasingly used to mean left-leaning liberal capitalism, a la Bernie Sanders. The generation coming up is a little more open about being far-left, but what that means to them is very different. The old school hammer-and-sickle types accuse Zoomers or not caring about ownership of the means of production, instead "wasting their time" on a bunch of "identity politics" that will fix themselves anyway as soon as we put stevedoors and teamster in charge.

[Travis B.]

To be fair, this is an easy mistake to make, since even on the Left "socialism" is increasingly used to mean left-leaning liberal capitalism, a la Bernie Sanders. The generation coming up is a little more open about being far-left, but what that means to them is very different. The old school hammer-and-sickle types accuse Zoomers or not caring about ownership of the means of production, instead "wasting their time" on a bunch of "identity politics" that will fix themselves anyway as soon as we put stevedoors and teamster in charge.

People do often misleadingly call social democracy "socialism", it definitely is true. However, there do exist actual socialists who believe in worker ownership and self-management of capital. The key thing is this is often presented in the form of things such as favoring worker cooperatives, which at their core are socialist yet seem non-threatening and not all too radical.

Of course, a lot of the left-liberals out there today are obsessed with identity politics but fundamentally are pro-capitalist and couldn't care less about having the workers be in charge. These people very much are not socialists.

[Moose-tache]

I think a lot of it comes down to how people identify the problem. I think for most leftists under the age of 30~35, Capitalism is just a thing Racists made to help them racism more racistly, and trying to address economic mechanisms is pointless, because it's just a part of a larger issue that you could attack directly. Solve racism, and everything else will fix itself. This includes also sexism, Islamophobia, transphobia, etc. This view is bolstered by the fact that the white working class, as a discrete, self-aware social group is almost entirely extinct*. I remember watching the new West Side Story, and hearing Lt. Schrank's new line "You [Jets] are the last of the can't-make-it-Caucasians." That line is in there because nobody can imagine why a bunch of white suburban teenagers would be hanging around a poor neighborhood in New York picking fights with the real New Yorkers. If "class" is just an old fashioned dog whistle for race, why not simply call it race?

Older Socialists and pseudo-"Socialists" like Bernie Sanders tend to have the opposite vision: racism is some weird barnacle Capitalism picked up along its journey through the fetid waters of the seventeenth century. It's fine to talk about it a little bit, maybe during the socialist ladies' auxiliary luncheon or in some inconsequential context like art or going on the computer. But when it comes to serious policy, it's a distraction. All we need to do is bring back the labor unions, reanimate Eugene Debb's corpse, rebuild Conrail, give the unions the power to legally kill a guy once per year, refill the union pension funds (this time without company-backed board members), let those air traffic control strikers from 1981 finally get their way, bring back the rule that freight trains along the Erie Lackawanna need a crew of two guys instead of just the one guy, also bring back the Erie Lackawanna, replace all this computer stuff with tacanite barges and Silicon Valley with the Gary Works, and presto! Just as easily as that, everything is solved. It continues to baffle these people why these young "hippity hopsters" don't even know what an escalator clause is, but have enough free time to worry about glass ceilings and police profiling.

* A person's membership in the white working class, as opposed to a white person who doesn't get paid very much, can be determined by asking them what people with college degrees are like. If they can immediately produce a standardized funny accent and ritualized funny body language, they are working class. If they look at you with utter confusion, they are just a white person who doesn't get paid very much.

[Ares Land]

Thanks everyone!

To put in a kind work for Bernie... He calls himself a democratic socialist, and his views feel consistent with that. I mean, if you're a socialist, but want to implement it through democratic means, you've got to start somewhere and Sanders' platform look a good starting point.
(Plus I don't if that's true in the US, but here 'social democracy' has become so utterly meaningless that actual social democrats have no choice but to reclaim the old 'social democrat' label.)

@Moose-tache: I mostly agree with your post. I'd add one thing: I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But I can't help noticing that whenever too many people start to question the wisdom of the current plutocratic arrangement, the media (both traditional and social) helpfully change the subject to terrorism, identity politics, "transgender epidemic" and God knows what else they'll come up with next time.

[Travis B.]

Thanks everyone!

To put in a kind work for Bernie... He calls himself a democratic socialist, and his views feel consistent with that. I mean, if you're a socialist, but want to implement it through democratic means, you've got to start somewhere and Sanders' platform look a good starting point.
(Plus I don't if that's true in the US, but here 'social democracy' has become so utterly meaningless that actual social democrats have no choice but to reclaim the old 'social democrat' label.)

@Moose-tache: I mostly agree with your post. I'd add one thing: I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But I can't help noticing that whenever too many people start to question the wisdom of the current plutocratic arrangement, the media (both traditional and social) helpfully change the subject to terrorism, identity politics, "transgender epidemic" and God knows what else they'll come up with next time.

(Correct me if I'm wrong here.) In Europe, being a "social democrat" today is being weakly left-of-center, whereas being a "socialist" today in many cases is effecively being a left-liberal, what being a "social democrat" once was. Conversely, in the US, the label "social democrat" does not get thrown around nearly as much and so has not been diluted, but the term "socialist" has been split to mean either being an actual social democrat (e.g. Bernie), as used by many on the left today, or being a big-C Communist, as used by many on the right today.

[Raphael]

(Correct me if I'm wrong here.) In Europe, being a "social democrat" today is being weakly left-of-center, whereas being a "socialist" today in many cases is effecively being a left-liberal, what being a "social democrat" once was.

I'd say in Europe, it depends to some extent on the country. In some Western European countries, the main center-left party was historically called the "Socialists", while in some others, it was historically called the "Social Democrats", so that influenced perceptions of those two terms. In Eastern Europe, there's the added complication that back when the Communists were in power, they called the system they were running "socialism" (see one of my earlier posts about the Marxist Theory of History), which influenced people's perception of that term, too. And then there's the special case of Portugal, where apparently the main center-right party is called the "Social Democrats".

[Raphael]

I just noticed that in the above post, at first I wrote "two" as "to". I'm soooo embarrassed.