March 13, 2017

A Note on the Perils of Caricature

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Here’s a snippet from “Bernie Sanders in Trump Country,” airing tonight on the Chris Hayes show:

Bernie may not believe that, but an awful lot of people probably do. This is, obviously, one of the big problems with American politics right now: both sides over-respond to extreme caricatures of the other side. So at the risk of insulting you all with a really simplistic diagram, here’s the real world:

In every country, probably since the beginning of time, populations have lived on a continuum like this. Some people enjoy cultural change and look forward to it. Some are apprehensive of cultural change and resist it. At one extreme end you have stone racists and xenophobes, and at the other you have the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

But they’re actually a pretty small part of the population. Standard issue Republicans and Democrats are closer to the middle, and it’s just human nature that there’s a limit to how much change they can accept. If you push past that limit you’re going to run into political blowback.

I’d add that I suspect some of us are less open to change than we think. For example, I’d probably put myself at about an 8 on this scale intellectually. But emotionally I’m more like a 5 or 6. I’m a creature of habit, and not especially thrilled about exploring new and different places, but I’m not especially afraid of cultural change either.

In any case, my fairly obvious point here is twofold. First, both sides should try to respond to the standard issue folks on the other side, rather than pretending that they’re all represented by the loudest, most extreme voices. It’s easy to mount arguments against the extremists, but those arguments never actually persuade anyone. Second, we liberals should keep pushing for more tolerance of cultural change, but we should also recognize that lots of perfectly nice, perfectly ordinary people get nervous about it a lot faster than we do. That doesn’t make them bad people, it just means they’re a few notches away from us on the bell curve.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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