Monthly Archives: February 2022

For most of the last 70 years in the United States, ever since the Red Scare of the 1950s, the Republican Party has been the party of repression -- more intolerant of political dissent, more inclined to censor, and more eager to use government to ruin livelihoods.

Of course the Democratic Party hasn't always been faithful to civil liberties. Southern Democratic administrations enforced racial segregation. Two Democratic national administrations put Martin Luther King under FBI surveillance and one also spied on Vietnam war protesters. But on the whole the Democrats moved past those things.

Not anymore. Amid the virus epidemic and the growth of political correctness and the "cancel culture," coercion of individuals now is almost entirely a phenomenon of the Democratic national administration, Democratic state administrations, and Democratic polemicists. Never before has the old joke been more accurate: that Democrats don't care what you do as long as it's mandatory.

The polling company Rasmussen Reports may not be the best in the country but it is generally taken seriously by leaders in both parties, and a poll it did last month on government policy toward the epidemic may be hard to dispute on the basis of published and broadcast news and commentary.

According to the Rasmussen poll:

-- 55% of Democrats favor authorizing the government to fine people who do not accept COVID-19 vaccination, while only 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliated voters do.

-- 59% of Democrats favor authorizing the government to confine to their homes people who refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccination. Republicans oppose that idea by 79% and unaffiliated voters by 71%.

-- Worse, 48% of Democrats favor letting government fine or even imprison people who publicly question the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. Only 27% of all voters -- just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliateds -- favor making such criticism a crime.

-- 45% of Democrats favor authorizing government to force people to live in "designated facilities or locations" if they refuse vaccination. This concentration camp idea is opposed by 71% of all voters, including 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliateds.

-- 47% of Democrats favor having the government electronically track unvaccinated people. This is opposed by 66% of all poll respondents.

-- 29% of Democrats favor taking children away from parents who refuse to be vaccinated, more than twice the level of support found in the rest of the population.

Of course especially when Donald Trump is around polls show that many Republicans also express belief in nutty things. But as reckless and repugnant as Trump could be as president, he was never a serious threat to civil liberty.

Despite the huge support among Democrats for more coercive policies amid the epidemic, Democratic governors, including Connecticut's Ned Lamont, lately have been retreating from coercion, either because those policies seem to cause more damage than they prevent or because the governors realize that people are getting tired of coercion on the eve of election campaigns.

Nevertheless, with repression and coercion finding such support among Democrats -- not just in regard to the epidemic but in regard to dissent generally -- people who want to preserve civil liberty may want to test all Democratic candidates, up and down the party's ticket, about the potential policies itemized in the Rasmussen poll, just as people might want to question Republican candidates about the return of Trump.

Meanwhile complaints from parents about public school curriculums and books stocked by school libraries are being called censorship. They're not.

While the "cancel culture" seeks to drive dissenters out of all forums, complaints about school curriculums and libraries involve only what government chooses to teach or recommend to students. Even if the material being challenged in schools is removed, it will remain available elsewhere.

If a school is to be public, it must answer to the public for what it teaches and recommends, and school boards, superintendents, teachers, and librarians can't be the last word about that. What is taught and recommended by public schools is ultimately for the public to decide.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.

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Democrats replace Republicans as the party of repression - Journal Inquirer

Home Entertainment Jordan Peterson denounces the ravages of political correctness and leaves the University of Toronto January 29, 2022

David AlandeteFOLLOW, CONTINUE

Washington correspondent

Updated:01/29/2022 14:27h

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Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology, has announced that he has resigned from his permanent position at the University of Toronto, denouncing the discrimination suffered today by highly able, white, heterosexual male students. Peterson had stopped teaching in 2017 but kept the position.

In a well-known article published by the Canadian newspaper The National Post, Peterson said on January 19 that the policies of racial and gender inclusion are annihilating meritocracy, and that this led him to drop out of the university. The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing education and business, the professor wrote.

Peterson is an influential conservative intellectual who went on to do research at Harvard and in 1998 moved to Toronto to teach at its university.

In 1999, he published his first book, Maps of Senses: The Architecture of Belief, which analyzes, using psychology, mythology, religion, literature, philosophy and neuroscience, why people from different cultures and times have been endowed with of very similar fables and myths.

The volume was a bestseller and in academia. In recent years, Peterson has become a great critic of identity politics which according to him have subdued the students and professors in the faculties.

In his gallery, the resigned professor admits that he had always imagined that he would end his days teaching or doing research at the University of Toronto, until they had to get my skeleton out of my office. In the end, he has resigned for what he denounces as his inability to adapt to the new norms of political correctness.

Petersons main reason is that his white, straight, highly-skilled graduate students have negligible chances of being offered university research positions, despite having stellar scientific records. This is due in part to the universally imposed obligations of diversity, inclusion and equity in academia.

He also assures in his tribune that we are at the point where race, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference are first accepted as the fundamental characteristic that defines each person (as expected by the radical leftists) and second, they are the most important qualification for study, research and employment.

Following this forum, Peterson, given to polemics, appeared on a successful US podcast, presented by commentator Joe Rogan on Spotify, in which he denounced that scientists exaggerate global warming and that climate change does not exist.

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Jordan Peterson denounces the ravages of political correctness and leaves the University of Toronto - The Times Hub

Most quotations about cynicism reek with scorn. Oscar Wilde called a cynic a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. The comedian George Carlin reportedly claimed that if you scratch a cynic, youll find a disappointed idealist.

Synonyms of cynicismdistrustful, disparaging, contemptuous, suspicious, sarcasticare uniformly negative.

In fact, however, cynics are rarely disappointed. If you believe that higher education, like most other institutions, is motivated by narrow self-interest and that its claims to higher values are often shams, the facts, more often than not, will prove you right.

Take one recent higher ed conversion experience: the abrupt turn against standardized admission tests. There are certainly reasonable arguments against such tests: that the tests replicate income distribution, measure test-taking ability rather than content knowledge and skills mastery, stigmatize less privileged students, and are of limited value in predicting college success.

But theres also no doubt that the eliminating the tests increases an institutions applicant pool and therefore makes that school seem more selective. It also reduces transparency in admissions, making the process even more of a black box and giving admissions officers greater leeway in shaping an entering class however they wish.

I certainly lean in favor of the cynics.

Or take another examplethe proposed University of Austin and its claim that we need a new, fiercely independent institution that will resist the illiberal culture of political correctness and intellectual uniformity that supposedly prevails at most colleges.

Perhaps this initiative is better understood as the cynical pursuit of a particular market niche: a small, selective liberal arts institution, located in an attractive, rapidly growing city, that can tap into funding from conservative foundations.

From my perspective, another win for the cynics.

The problem with cynicism is not that its incorrect but that it leads, almost inevitably, to passivity and resignation. Homer Simpson gave vivid expression to this attitude when he told Lisa and Bart, Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try.

The alternative to cynicism is not credence or trust but, rather, taking active steps to address the genuine academic challenges that higher education facescurricular incoherence, narrow overspecialized courses and academic unintelligibility, among others. We need to do much more, especially in the humanities, to introduce students to the life of the mind and the culture of ideas and arguments that lies at the heart of the academy.

Thirty years ago, Gerald Graff called on professors to teach the conflicts: to integrate major debates inside and outside the academy into the curriculum. Graffs point, more true today than when he published Beyond the Culture Wars in 1992, is that as society grows more heterogeneous, the possibilities for achieving consensus diminish. This reality makes it more imperative that students learn how to weigh evidence, think critically, formulate arguments and take part in serious intellectual conversations and debates that will not necessarily result in agreement.

Yet what are the arguments that undergraduates should enter? Even in 1992, some of Graffs suggestions didnt seem especially compelling. Should we teach the great books? King Lear or King Kong? Plato or Puzo?

Still, Graffs insistence that students engage in fundamental intellectual debates strikes me as right on target. More than at any other time in my academic career, big questions are squarely on the table both in the academy and in the popular press, and our challenge is to get students to grapple with conflicting ideas and assumptions.

So what are some of the issues worthy of serious intellectual engagement? Several strike me as obvious.

We live in cynical times. Snark, irreverence and spitefulness pervade public discourse. Grumblers, faultfinders, contrarians, sourpusses and cantankerous, petulant, surly grouches are omnipresent. Scoffers, skeptics and scowlers prevail.

Higher education has been a particular target for cynics, who argue that academic rigor and diversity of opinion are in retreat and that our colleges and universities have become bastions of political posturing and indoctrination.

Humanists, in particular, have a special obligation to resist this kind of cynicism, which has contributed to the view that our disciplines range from the antiquarian to the arcane and the irrelevant, and that we are little more than pompous, pretentious pedants, posturers and poseurs.

Even if we cant defeat the culture of cynicism, we can, we must, make our classes cynicisms antidote. And the way to do that strikes me as self-evident: lets engage our students in tackling the biggest humanistic questions of our time. Isnt the humanities mission to produce graduates who value and take part in the life of the mind?

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

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An Education With Impact | Higher Ed Gamma - Inside Higher Ed

Issued on: 04/02/2022 - 02:26Modified: 04/02/2022 - 02:25

Rio de Janeiro (AFP) In 1966, the late bossa nova singer Nara Leao asked Brazilian music icon Chico Buarque to write her a song about a long-suffering woman waiting on her man.

Fifty-six years later, the widely loved song, "Com Acucar, Com Afeto" (With Sugar and Affection), is at the center of a firestorm in Brazil after Buarque said he had decided to stop singing it over criticism of machismo in its lyrics.

"The feminists are right," Buarque said in a documentary series on Leao's life that debuted on January 7 on Brazilian streaming platform Globoplay.

"I'm always going to agree with the feminists," added the singer, now a 77-year-old living legend of Brazilian popular music.

That triggered a tempest over "cancel culture," political correctness and feminism in a Brazil that is deeply divided heading into elections in October that will decide whether polemical far-right President Jair Bolsonaro gets a new term.

"This has reached the height of craziness! All because of the Feminists. CRAZINESS!" read one typical reaction on Twitter.

"That took a long time, didn't it?" went a typical reaction from the opposite camp.

"I always hated that shitty machismo-filled song. I think people who romanticize it are bizarre."

The song is written from the perspective of a woman who has prepared her man's "favorite sweet, with sugar and affection," but is stuck waiting for him to come home while he is out carousing at bars and ogling other women.

Despite it all, when he finally gets home, she sings, "I'll warm up your favorite dish... and open my arms for you."

"You have to understand that in those days, it never crossed our minds that that was a form of oppression, that women shouldn't be treated like that," said Buarque, an adored singer-songwriter known for his satin voice, blue-green eyes, heartthrob smile and a storied career spanning six decades.

"I'm not going to sing 'With Sugar and Affection' anymore, and if Nara were here, I'm sure she wouldn't sing it either," added Buarque, whose repertoire includes numerous songs written from a woman's perspective.

Leao, who died in 1989 at age 47, is considered one of the founders of bossa nova, the silky smooth musical genre that evolved from the Brazilian samba in 1950s Rio de Janeiro.

Buarque said she had asked him for a "suffering woman's song." He complied, and went on to sing it himself, as well.

But some commentators pointed out Buarque had not sung the song live since at least the 1980s, dismissing the row that erupted in the media, on social networks and in cultural circles as a trumped-up controversy.

"We need to pay attention to the fact that this episode was used to rail against feminism and social movements, supposedly responsible for censoring artistic creations and impose political correctness," columnist Amara Moira wrote on website BuzzFeed.

"None of that actually happened. But in these times of fake news and hair-trigger reactions, it hardly matters."

Whether the song and surrounding controversy are ancient history or not, they gave rise to a new musical creation this week.

On Wednesday, singer Viviane Davoglio and songwriter Iavora Cappa posted a revised version of the song to YouTube, called "Com Ternura e Com Afeto" (With Tenderness and Affection).

In their version, it is the female protagonist who goes out for a night on the town, then comes home to her crying man -- who warms up her favorite dish.

2022 AFP

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Row over 'machismo' in song by Brazil icon Chico Buarque - FRANCE 24

Those of us worried about the corrosive effects of cancel culture and critical race theory are often accused of obsessing over the culture wars at the expense of "real" issues. But new data suggests that the culture war is only going to rise in importance in future electionsto the benefit of Republicans. This is the gist of survey results contained in my new Manhattan Institute report, The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America.

Already, cancel culture and applied critical race theory (CRT) are leading priorities for Republican voters and a mid-ranking issue overallin large part because they unite conservatives while dividing the Left; on one side you have cultural liberals, those who espouse classical liberal views about free speech, due process, equal treatment before the law and elsewhere and the scientific method. On the other is a rising cohort of cultural socialists, who prioritize protecting disadvantaged groups from offense while redistributing self-esteem and power. These aims are used to justify restricting people's freedom of speech and conscience.

Cultural socialism grows out of wokeness, the idea that historically marginalized race and gender minorities are sacred: more spiritual, moral, fragile and helpless than members of advantaged groups. And unlike causes advanced by the Left in the past, which pushed for equal rights for Black and gay Americans under the auspices of classical liberalism, cultural socialism is likely to provoke a sustained backlash from cultural liberals. But while the cultural socialists are in the decided minoritythere are two cultural liberals for every cultural socialist in Americacultural socialists have a slight advantage among Millennials and Gen-Z. And as these relatively woke generations enter the electorate, they will start to edge out their more moderate elders.

And as this divide on the Left increases, it will continue to give an advantage to the Right, which is united by the very issues dividing their opponents.

That's what my data shows. In my survey, people were asked whether students should be taught that America was stolen from native peoples, and that the school they attend and houses they live in are built on stolen land. 90 percent of Republicans were "strongly against" teaching this, while Democrats were just about evenly split across the four response categoriesstrongly for teaching this, weakly for it, weakly against it, and strongly against it.

In other words, Republicans are more motivated to oppose CRT than Democrats are to support it.

With cancel culture, the dynamics are somewhat different from CRT, but produce a similar result. I asked people if they endorsed the firing of four people who lost their jobs over giving offense to woke sensibilities. And what I found was that half of people who identified as Strong Democrats supported cancellation in these cases. But they were the outliers: Moderate Democrats were more similar to Republicans and Independents in strongly opposing the cancelling of these four individuals.

In other words, cancel culture and CRT split the Left and rally the Right, making these issues are a clear vote winner for the GOP.

Skeptics often argue that the average voter doesn't care about the culture wars because they don't know what CRT or cancel culture are, and are focused on bread-and-butter issues. So I decided to test this theory. To gauge the importance of culture war issues, I asked people to name their top three priorities from a list of nine issue baskets. For one of those baskets I used a broad definition of cancel culture that covers a range of terms through which people understand cancel culture: "Political Correctness, Free Speech, Cancel Culture, Wokeness, People Falsely Accused of Racism and Sexism." Even without including critical race theory in that list, 10 percent of respondents ranked this suite of issues as the most important facing the country, behind only COVID/Economy and Health Care. Other surveys show a similar mid-range ranking for "cancel culture/political correctness" among a list of 24 issues.

Cancel culture issues ranked in the top three for 31 percent of voters, including a third of Independents and 17 percent of Democrats. Among Republicans, nearly half (48 percent) placed this issue in their top three, above religion and moral values, with only immigration and COVID/Economy scoring higher.

It's just no longer tenable to claim that these questions aren't on voters' radar and can't swing elections.

Had CRT been added to the political correctness basket, culture wars issues might have scored even higher. While most parents don't know if applied CRT is being taught to their children, a rising number have encountered it: Around half of those I surveyed had taken diversity training, and a quarter said they took training in which instructors used one or more of the terms "white privilege," "patriarchy" or "white supremacy."

And the more voters learn about what CRT means in practice, the less they like it. For example, when a sample of mainly Democratic-leaning Independents read the following passage, they were much cooler toward CRT and warmer toward CRT bans than people who didn't read it: "A middle school in Springfield, Missouri, forced teachers to locate themselves on an 'oppression matrix,' claiming that white heterosexual Protestant males are inherently oppressors and must atone for their 'covert white supremacy.' This kind of approach has been labeled Critical Race Theory."

Republican politicians are beginning to realize that campaigning on cancel culture and CRT is a winning posture with voters. Glenn Youngkin's stunning upset in Virginia owed a great deal to centrist parents' fury at the woke educational establishment and its implementation of CRT dogma in schools.

These issues matter. They will increasingly decide elections unless the Democrats are able to distance their brand from cultural socialism.

Eric Kaufmann is a professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and is affiliated with the Manhattan Institute and the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

The views in this article are the writer's own.

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Critical Race Theory Is Dividing Democratsand Rallying Republicans | Opinion - Newsweek

Joe Biden has been president for a little over a year and took office in the midst of several historic crises, including the immediate aftermath of a coup attempt by his predecessor and a pandemic that will surely kill more than a million Americans. Yet many among the pundit and political classes are already writing the Biden administration's political epitaph.

Such people have concluded that Biden's bold and transformative domestic policy agenda is a failure, and that the American people are now turning on him. Many are citing inflation as a massive political liability, in an attempt to cast Biden is a 21st-century version of Jimmy Carter afflicted with national malaise and "stagflation." What they conveniently ignore is that Biden's economic growth numbers more closely resemble the "good old days" of Ronald Reagan, circa 1984.

Biden is accused of being aloof, disengaged, overly distant, somehow boring and not compelling, and overly reluctant to be available to the news media (and by implication the American people) because he does not give daily or weekly press conferences.

RELATED:The whisper campaign against Joe Biden won't stop unless he can change the narrative

Historic trends are also highlighted: It is probable that Republicans will take control of the House in this year's midterms, and perhaps the Senate as well. So Biden's failed presidency is seen as preordained. Some prediction markets now indicate that Donald Trump is likely to defeat Biden if they face one another again in 2024.

The narrative of Biden's "failed presidency" is based on public opinion polls showing that his levels of support have fallen to the level of Donald Trump's, or lower, on several occasions. This is taken as proof that the American people have turned against Biden and his policy agenda.

There is awidely-discussed new pollfrom the Gallup organization that shows a 14-point swing from Democrats to the Republicans, in terms of party identification since January of 2021. By that measure,Republicans enjoy a 5-point advantage over Democratsin the upcoming midterms.

Ignoring considerable evidence to the contrary, many pundits are declaring that Biden is overly "progressive" and has surrendered to "wokeness" and "political correctness." Their proposed solution, of course, is that Biden must pivot back to some imagined middle that will allow him to lure back "independent" and "suburban" voters and members of the "working class."

Reality is more complex. The mainstream media is creating and embracing the narrative of Biden's failure because it fits their predilection for horserace journalism, "both-sides-ism" and a desire for dramatic partisan conflict. Many things are impacting the public assessment of Biden's presidency: the aftermath of the Trump regime, years of mass death, economic insecurity and widespread uncertainty about the future.

Ultimately, it may not matter what the Biden administration actually does. A feeling of doom has taken hold. Hope is running out in this interregnum period. For many Americans, perception becomes reality. Biden's presidency may indeed be in trouble, but not for the reasons that America's pundits and others who police the boundaries of approved public discourse would like to acknowledge.

The real problem is that American democracy and the future of the country are in peril because of the Republican-fascist movement's escalating assaults, and the deep structural problems and other cultural problems that made such a disaster possible.

In an effort to better understand the meaning of Gallup's recent poll, I recently spoke to Gallup senior editor Jeffrey Jones, who oversees research and analyzes Gallup's U.S. polling surveys. In this conversation, Jones offered his interpretation of what these poll results actually tell us about how Americans people feel about Biden, and their relative support for Democrats or Republicans.

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He also discussed what public opinion polls can and cannot tell us, and highlighted the growing power of independent voters in American politics. More than anything else, Jones stressed that negative partisanship and other forms of extreme political polarization are damaging democracy. Toward the end of this conversation, he suggested that we should read this new Gallup poll and other public opinion polls with an open mind, rather than to validate our preconceived conclusions.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What it is like being a professional who conducts public opinion polls in a moment of such change and crisis?

So many aspects of politics and American society are polarized. We know how Republicans and Democrats are going to rate presidents, for example. So much is dependent now on independents and which way they trend.

Respondents were less influenced by partisanship back in the late 1990s, when I began at Gallup. If the economy was good and the country was at peace, then people had no problem saying they were satisfied with how things were going in the country. Now, because of polarization, people won't really say that if the other political party is in control. They are pretty negative across issues.

Polarization works in the other direction as well, where the party of the president in office, to a large degree, determines whether everything is great or whether obvious problemsin the country are minimized when evaluating national conditions.

How is partisan polarization impacting public opinion, specifically, and the country more generally?

The United States as a whole is a centrist, moderate, maybe slightly right-leaning nation. And theoretically, if you want to win elections, that's where you should govern from or appeal to in campaigns. But it seems increasingly that the people who are elected to office emerge from primaries where, to win, a candidate must appeal to the people who are less toward the middle than the country as a whole. Increasingly, it also seems as if voters choose more on candidate party affiliation rather than candidate qualifications, issue positions or experience.

RELATED:The center cannot hold: Manchin and Sinema are wrecking America here's how to beat them

As we have seen in recent congressional elections that have produced turnover in party control, many candidates are elected to national and other high-profile offices as a type of protest vote against the party in power. This is not a mandate even though many people elected in the last few decades have governed as though they were given one. They were elected largely because people were unhappy with how the other side was governing. The other party is voted into office in response, and then they go off too far in one direction: Bill Clinton in 1994 with health care, George W. Bush with Iraq in 2006, Barack Obama in 2010 with government spending and health care, Donald Trump in 2018 with immigration and other issues and quite possibly Joe Biden in 2020 with government spending programs.

That doesn't mean voters want to go too far in the other direction once the other party gains power. Maybe just stop going too far in the direction the government was going under the old party.

What is it like doing this type of a work in a moment when the United States is experiencing a democracy crisis?

We at Gallup are committed to the independent, neutral, scientific measurement of where the public stands. It is an important input in the democratic process. Elected leaders may take it into account in deciding how to vote on issues, although maybe less so than in the past, with the party loyalty in Congress as strong as it is. Public opinion may also establish certain guardrails that politicians might take into account in determining how far they can go on certain policies, either to represent the views of their constituents, their party or the country more broadly.

How does negative partisanship impact public opinion?

It has really changed how people evaluate the president. The pattern is clear. It is getting more extreme.

We have seen increased polarization in how the public evaluates presidents. But it is not so much among people who support the president's political party those ratings have always been very high. The change is among those people who are opposed to the president's party.

Indecades past, maybe 50% of Republicans would approve of a Democratic president or vice versa. Then it went down to no higher than 30% by the Clinton administration, but now is mainly inthe single digits. There is no honeymoon period at all from the opposition party, although as we have seen with Biden and other presidents, independents may give a new president a honeymoon.We are seeing single-digit levels of support for presidents on Day One of their administrations from the opposition party.

There is definitely a ceiling on presidential approval now, where there was not one in the past. That's because the other side is unwilling to approve of a president from the other party.

What can the new Gallup Poll on partisan identification tell us? And what can it not tell us?

This new poll tells us that the American people are responsive to what is going on in the country, and that influences their identification with the two major parties. They give credit and assign blame when things are going well or not going well. For example, at the start of 2021, when Trump was still in office, the COVID situation wasn't going well and Trump was disputing the outcome of the presidential election.

Jan. 6 certainly did not help his standing. Trump's approval rating dropped 12 points from the time of the election. Thatis the most we've ever seen a presidential approval rating decline after losing an election.

RELATED:What's protecting Trump and the coup plotters: American exceptionalism

Joe Biden takes office. During the first few months COVID cases began to decline. Biden was getting credit for that, and it was shown through pretty decent approval ratings from independents. In the first quarter, Democrats had their largest advantage on party affiliation since 2012.

Biden's poll numbers started to declinein the summer, as COVID cases rose and the administration struggled to control the pandemic. Democratic affiliation started to erode a little. Then cameAfghanistan and now inflation, which caused people to question the competence of Biden and the Democratic Party.The American people were responsive to those issues. Certainly in the polling we saw Biden's approval rating go down. By the fourth quarter, the Democratic advantage in party affiliation had been wiped out and the Republican Party now held a five-point advantage, its largest since 1995.

Public opinion polling cannot go too deeply into people's decision-making processes and why people believe the things they do. Often we are just measuring positive or negative attitudes. That information is still useful. The average person does not have a great deal of information about political matters, and they are not ideologically consistent in their opinions for the most part.

But even what polls reveal about basic favorable or unfavorable, positive or negative, favor or oppose on certain policies gives leaders important information. Even if the average American is not spending four hours a day reading newspapers or watching the news, they do have meaningful opinions that leaders can respond to.

How do we locate this new poll in the larger context of American politics?

One of the big conclusions of the polling results is that the fortunes of political parties both in terms of whether people identify as supporters of a party or vote for them in elections are tied to perceptions of how the president is doing. Partly because of party polarization and also widespread dissatisfaction with the way things are going in the country, which has been consistently below 50% since 2004, it seems harder for presidents to get passing grades from the American public. A passing grade would be majority approval.

Presidents with less than majority approval see great losses for their party in Congress in midterm elections, as we have seen in 1994, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and likely 2022. They are also vulnerable to defeat when seeking re-election, as with George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Donald Trump in 2020. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were re-elected, but in relatively close contests. Both had job approval right around 50% when re-elected.

What do we see in the polling regarding divergent perceptions about Jan. 6 and Trump's coup attempt and the attack on the Capitol?

We see a widening party gap in trust in the news media, in particular, and in other U.S. institutions generally. Republicans have very little trust in the news media, so they are unlikely to believe news reports that cast doubt on allegations of a fraudulent or stolen election. If Republicans don't trust the media in general, who do they trust? Republican elected officials, especially Donald Trump, and conservative media that in many cases disputes what the mainstream media is reporting.

People's political realities thus differ based on the type of information they get, and it is hard to forge consensus on the key issues of the day be it the COVID threat, the health of the economy and the legitimacy of the 2020 election or how elections need to be reformed. That is very concerning for a democracy, where some consensus is important for leaders to agree on which direction to go with policy. Both parties want election reform but their ideas of what is needed are very different.

RELATED:Democrats and the dark road ahead: There's hope if we look past 2022 (and maybe 2024 too)

We take the data at face value: We seemingly live in two different countries. There is a Republican country and a Democratic country. Democrats believe one thing and Republicans believe the other on many issues.

Now, is that because they have different opinions? Or is it because they do not want to agree with the other side?

Many pundits and other members of the commentariat are obsessed with "independent" voters. What do we actually know about them?

Independents are now the largest political group, whereas in the past it might have been that Democrats, Republicans and independents were roughly even at 30%. We are now at 40% independents. To me that suggests that many Americans are turned off by both parties. We know that many independents lean one way or the other, in terms of Democrat or Republican, and they probably vote that way. Their issue positions are generally consistent with partisan people who identify with the two main parties. If independents vote like partisans and have issue positions that are like partisans, the fact that they won't identify with a party tells us something about how they fell about the parties.

We know that the public's views of both parties are pretty negative. A belief that government is gridlocked is one of the things driving these numbers. We see these numbers primarily from people who are not particularly attached to either party. They are not really upset about who's in office as much as about how the government is working, or not working.

Gallup's new poll showed a 14-point swing in party identification and support from Democrats to Republicans, one of the largest such movements in American political history. What does this actually tell us about the country's political terrain?

Again, that move tells us that the American people are responsive to what is going on in the country. With independents being the largest group, public opinion is not as fixed as it once was. They're the ones who are moving the most. Hardcore Republicans and hardcore Democrats are not going to move that much. This larger group of independents can. On a good day for the Democrats, these leaners might say they're a Democrat. On a bad day, they might say they're an independent. The same is true for Republicans.

Much of the movement in partisanship is in and out of the independent category, as opposed to flipping from one side to the other. It is generally true that people do not flip from Republican to Democrat. But people can move in and out of the independent category to the partisan category. That is what I believe we are seeing.

So many inferences and other conclusions are being made from the new Gallup poll, many of which, to my eyes, are incorrect and the result of partisan blinders and other biases.

If people are claiming that we are a Republican country or a Democratic country, they are wrong. Why? Because only about 60%, combined, identify with either party. Independents are the largest group,over 40%,and you can't win elections without them.

Neither party can claim to have the majority of Americans behind them generally. In order to build a majority, you're going to have to appeal to independents and maybe even some from the other party to get elected and have support for your governing policies. I would agree that the United States is probably center-right on some issues. On others, however, the country might be center-left.

It can be hard to figure where the country stands, looking at all the data. When people are asked if they are conservative, moderate or liberal on social issues, they are about equally split. But on a lot of specific moral issues same-sex marriage, having a baby out of wedlock they are becoming increasingly liberal. On economic issues the country is more likely to identify as conservative than liberal, but they also support left-leaning specific policies.

What advice would you give about how to understand public opinion data in general, or this poll in particular?

It's to their advantage to read the analysis in an honest and fair way, and to be open to the evidence and findings that do not support their preferred narrative.

It is certainly better to look at multiple polls than a single poll. More data is better. With a single poll, a person might find a question and answer that supports their point of view. But that question may be poorly worded, or there may be other forms of bias in the results. Moreover, if you look at other questions on the topic and they come to different results, that may be where in fact the preponderance of the evidence is. Ultimately, be open to accepting that other people have opinions that might differ from yours. That is fine.

As for the current survey, it is important to remember that party preferences are not fixed for many. As conditions in the country change, things can move pretty quickly, from a large Democratic advantage early in the year to a nearly complete flip by the end of the year. I would add that our most recent polls show the parties at near-parity in terms of party identification, so things may be starting to stabilize, with the two parties about equally strong.

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Are the Democrats in trouble? Gallup editor on what those bad-news polls really mean - Salon