The Rise of Conservative Talk Radio

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There is talk about this sort of pushing back into the into the 60s like when you started to get those liberal republicans becoming conservative democrats. There wasn't any cross party sort of bipartisanship efforts anymore there's stories about even how just sort of the norms in washington dc changed and so our other kind of identities are starting to fall under the umbrella of our party identity. People of color are migrating to the democratic party and so you have fewer people of color in the republican party uh evangelical christians are all migrating into the republican party. So as sort of these other identities start to go around and rotate around our partisan identities that can feel a lot more threatening right?

The democratic ideal demands that the citizenry think critically about matters of public import. Yet many Democrats and Republicans in the United States have fallen short of that standard because political tribalism motivates them to acquire, perceive and evaluate political information in a biased manner. The result is an electorate that is more extreme, hostile and willing to reject unfavorable democratic outcomes.

Shermer and Redmond discuss: why we have political duopoly (Duverger’s law) • parties vs. policies • Are we living in a post-truth, fake-news, alternative facts world? • How do we know political polarization is worse now than in the past? • acquiring, perceiving, and evaluating political information • evaluating: false political information, political numbers and arguments, claims of rigged election • whataboutism • cognitive responsibilities of citizenship • cognitive biases • political polarization • myside bias • numeracy vs. innumeracy • solutions to the polarization problem.

Timothy J. Redmond received his PhD in political science from the University at Buffalo. He is an award-winning educator and author of over one hundred articles on critical thinking and politics. He is a professor at Daemen University where he teaches a political science and history course for education students.