Liberals vs. Conservatives

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

There's some great research done on like stereotypes of the other party. A lot of people tend to be way off on that sort of thing and even when you know there's one of my favorite studies James Fishkin out of Stanford um I think he just does wonderful work. Even when we are apart on issue positions even in those instances you get people moving closer together. There's this meeting in the middle but sometimes it's the golden mean fallacy right to just say the the correct answer is always in the middlesometimes one side is right and the other side is just wrong.

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.