{"id":61860,"date":"2022-02-12T18:13:43","date_gmt":"2022-02-12T23:13:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61860"},"modified":"2022-02-12T18:13:43","modified_gmt":"2022-02-12T23:13:43","slug":"the-deep-divide-between-the-american-people-and-mainstream-politics-and-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61860","title":{"rendered":"The deep divide between the American people and mainstream politics and media"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The deep divide between the American people and mainstream politics and media<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A dangerous gulf exists between Americans\u2019 concerns about their lives, their country and their future, and the priorities, proclivities and pre-occupations of the country\u2019s mainstream politics and media. Other liberal democracies should heed the lessons.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2013 I collaborated in a\u00a0survey<\/a>\u00a0that investigated the perceived probability of future threats to humanity in four Western nations: the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Across the four countries, over a half (54%) of people rated the risk of \u2018our way of life ending\u2019 within the next 100 years at 50% or greater, and almost three-quarters (73%) rated the risk at 30% or greater. A quarter (24%) rated the risk of \u2018humans being wiped out\u2019 in this time at 50% or greater.<\/p>\n

The US stood out from the other three countries in several respects. It had the highest percentage (30%) who thought humans might be wiped out (19-24% in the other countries). It had a much higher level of agreement with fundamentalist responses to global threats, with 47% agreeing or strongly agreeing that \u2018we are facing a final conflict between good and evil in the world\u2019, and 46% that \u2018we need to return to traditional religious teachings and values to solve global problems and challenges\u2019. (The results presumably reflect the strength of religion in the US, especially \u2018end time\u2019 thinking among Christian fundamentalists.) In the other three countries only 30-33% agreed with these two statements.<\/p>\n

The survey also included questions about how concerned people were about a range of personal and societal\u00a0issues<\/a>. The US stood out here too, with higher levels of concern about many societal issues, especially political and economic. Two thirds (65%) were moderately or seriously concerned about \u2018the state of politics in my country\u2019, compared to 42-53% for the other three countries; 64% were concerned about \u2018corruption of politicians\/officials\u2019, compared to 39-47% in the other countries.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The deep divide between the American people and mainstream politics and media A dangerous gulf exists between Americans\u2019 concerns about their lives, their country and their future, and the priorities, proclivities and pre-occupations of the country\u2019s mainstream politics and media. Other liberal democracies should heed the lessons. In 2013 I collaborated in a\u00a0survey\u00a0that investigated the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[4092,32643,379,512,1310,6665,18517],"class_list":["post-61860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-survival-2","tag-citizens","tag-global-threats","tag-government","tag-media","tag-religion","tag-resilience-org","tag-richard-eckersley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61860"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61861,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61860\/revisions\/61861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}