Why American Politics is Different Now (for Richard Ngo)

Shiva's Right Foot

Many people have the impression that US political discussion was calmer and more rational in the past. They are probably right. What changed?

For much of the twentieth century mass media was policed by The Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was a policy that required media outlets to cover controversial issues in a balanced manner that represented both sides of the argument. This was used against populist broadcasters like Carl McIntire (like a more Catholic version of Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh who also opposed the Civil Rights Movement).

The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints.[1] In 1987, the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine,[2] prompting some to urge its reintroduction through either Commission policy or congressional legislation.[3] The FCC removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

Rush Limbaugh's radio program went national shortly after Reagan abolished the policy in 1987:

The FCC's repeal of the fairness doctrine—which had required that stations provide free air time for responses to any controversial opinions that were broadcast—on August 5, 1987, meant stations could broadcast editorial commentary without having to present opposing views. Daniel Henninger wrote, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, "Ronald Reagan tore down this wall [the fairness doctrine] in 1987 ... and Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination."[32]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh

Media outlets have incentives to sensationalize the news to agree with their audiences' preconceived notions, amplifying political polarization. There was a period in the 20th century when The New York Times brought the rigor of academic science to news reportage by literally hiring an astrophysicist to be the editor (Carr Van Anda was hired by Adolf Ochs soon after Ochs's purchase of the NYT), but that was a lucky aberration and needed to be sustained for much of the twentieth century by The Fairness Doctrine (and funding through advertisers interested in selling products rather than subscriptions from readers that want to have their beliefs confirmed).

While attempts to stifle intellectual discussion on sensitive topics has been present for a long time on the extreme political Left the last approximately fifteen years represent a sudden increase in the prevalence and force of these attempts. This Tablet article by Zach Goldberg documents statistical evidence of a cultural shift at some point near the middle of the previous decade. Usage of terms related to racism in major newspapers increased as much as 1500% in this period. While Goldberg does not mention it in the article, the triggering events for this phenomena in the data seem to definitely be the formation of Black Lives Matter and their first major actions in 2014. In particular, the fact that the Eric Garner incident took place in New York and the New York Times in addition to being highly influential is also one of the papers included in Goldberg's analysis likely means this is the source of the spike in coverage and larger cultural shift.

In July 2013, the movement began with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin 17 months earlier, in February 2012. The movement became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two African Americans: Michael Brown—resulting in protests and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, a city near St. Louis—and Eric Garner in New York City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter

James Douglas Bennett argues persuasively that this shift in news coverage was due to a change in the financial model of the NYT, specifically that the shift to paywalled subscription demanded playing to the audience's political leanings:

It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism. I recall his astonishment, fairly early in the Trump administration, after Times reporters conducted an interview with Trump. Subscribers were angry about the questions the Times had asked. It was as if they’d only be satisfied, Baquet said, if the reporters leaped across the desk and tried to wring the president’s neck. The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.

https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way

There are also evident cultural shifts with regards to free speech in the general population in this same time period which seem to be a result of this elite-led shift. The Tablet article by Goldberg linked above briefly mentions data from the General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS gathers data on a set of questions measuring "Free Speech Values" among the American populace. The phenomenon seems to be limited to race issues; the GSS also collects data on Free Speech tolerance of Communist, Militarist, Homosexual, and Muslim expression and it is exclusively with Free Speech tolerance of Racism that we see a notable decrease of tolerance starting sometime between 2012 and 2014. It is also notable that this decrease in tolerance was especially pronounced among the most educated respondents. In 2012 college educated respondents favored removal of a racist book from libraries at a rate of 26%, the preference for removal peaked in 2022 at 43% although in 2024 (the most recent available data) it slightly ticked back to 41%.

https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends

(The data is under the "free speech" subheading under "Civil Liberties," you must use the drop-down menu to get to these questions. Direct links are unfortunately not possible on the contemporary GSS site. Of course this is also in the raw data.)

I'd also be remiss if I don't mention the association of wealth inequality with political extremism. There seems to be a regular historical coincidence between periods of high economic inequality and political extremism, such as the early part of the twentienth century. Both communism and the KKK had periods of high popularity in early 20th century America (and of course Europe had its own more consequential extremism at that time as well). The mechanisms for this association are more difficult to trace than for direct media regulation or behavior. That said it is very coincidental that the changes in regime at the NYT were precipitated by financial crisises; the 2008 crisis forced the Times off the ad revenue model and the Panic of 1896 allowed Adolf Ochs to purchase the Times. This association with financial crisises may contribute to a mechanistic explanation but I leave it as an open question.

So my argument is that the change in political culture observed recently from the more openly liberal popular discussion of the mid-twentieth century is due to abolishing The Fairness Doctrine which allowed media outlets to pander to their audiences' worst most self-absorbed flaws for profit. This directly leads to a change in wider culture. Furthermore, we should be concerned about economic inequality as this is likely an important contributing factor to political extremism.

The Fairness Doctrine was a policy that required media outlets to cover controversial issues in a balanced manner that represented both sides of the argument.

The Fairness Doctrine was only regulating public broadcasting. Even during the time where it was active, anyone could publish newspapers, that most people would consider to be media outlets, that were not bound by it. It was not directly affecting what the New York Times could print, yet you focus a lot in your post on the changes at the NYT.

When it comes to the changes around views on racism, they didn't just appear out of nowhere. Instead of persecuting corporate official after the financial crisis and putting them in prison, Eric Holder made deals with a lot of companies to have them fund political activism in settlements he negotiated.

Academia shifted from being quite bipartisan in the times of the Fairness doctrine to being more partisan toward the left. It also developed fields that understand themselves as being more about activism than about knowledge production. That kind of activism quite naturally leads to polarization.

It was not directly affecting what the New York Times could print, yet you focus a lot in your post on the changes at the NYT.

Sorry if the thread of my argument wasn't clear.

The NYT established the neutral news reportage norms of the mid-twentieth century that the government encouraged/forced mass-media broadcasters to adopt due to a new wave of regulation opportunity brought on by technological development.

While media on the political right was first to abandon these norms the NYT has remained a more central leader to the norms of the political (center) left. A combination of reaction to the shift in norms on the right as well as the financial motivations I reference above drove the change in norms on the political left starting from the NYT at the top.

Cable television, never subject to the FCC's rules, also started becoming popular around the same time the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. I would attribute the change in the tenor of political discussion more to decentralization (and more recently, democratization) of mass media, of which the FCC's change was a symptom, not the cause.

I'm realizing I missed a golden opportunity to discuss my preferred solution: using Section 230-like legislation to regulate new media.

Specifically I'd ideally like some kind of jury system enacted in a government organization or some legally well defined procedure where for sufficiently popular media some representative sample of the public decides whehter their view was represented competently in the media being judged. You'd need a supermajority to pass, so something like 70% of people saying their view was represented.

Details would be flexible: jury size (I'd think about 100), what is sufficiently popular to be covered (I am thinking 1m Americans see it), the exact supermajority (70%-95% is within what I consider reasonable), the percentage of time devouted to each view (5%-25%, a program should be allowed to have a preference and not required to devout a plurality of time to other views), and ironing out what constitutes a topic (could be thrown to the jury if no reasonable standard can be agreed upon a priori).

If you're willing to abandon any traditional understanding of freedom of speech/press, there are indeed many things you can do. The more standard approach of requiring an imprimatur through a board of censors (independent agency, government-appointed "nonpartisan experts", etc.) would work fine as well. You just have to be clear that your problem isn't the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, it's the First Amendment^[1].

^{^}
The justification for the constitutionality of FCC regulation, in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, relied on the scarcity of public airwaves that the government was granting an exclusive license to. Hard to argue that for the "new media" you want to control.

If you're willing to abandon any traditional understanding of freedom of speech/press, there are indeed many things you can do.

This is pretty hyperbolic considering we are discussing the history of similar regulation as well as the fact that current Section 230 regulation does in some ways limit free speech.

Beyond that there would be nothing forbidden by the regulation. Anyone can express any opinion. They just can't capture a large audience and keep them away from points of disagreement in an echo chamber.

Cable companies in particular were ruled as subject to being forced to carry content. Public access stations were challenged by cable companies specifically on First Amendment grounds and SCOTUS ruled that that forcing the companies to carry this content alongside their other content was not a First Amendment violation so long as it did not interfere with their ability to broadcast their other content. This is a very similar situation.

In Turner II, 520 U.S. 180 (1997), the Supreme Court held that must-carry rules for cable television companies were not restrictions of their free speech rights because the U.S. government had a compelling interest in enabling the distribution of media content from multiple sources and in preserving local television.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Broadcasting_System,_Inc._v._FCC

I view political polarization as a religious schism analogous to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Europe or Sunni and Shia in the Muslim world. As such, I don't see a need to explain Woke vs Maga: it is just an example of a natural sociological phenomenon in human societies (perhaps there is a need to explain why religious schism happens in general).

For much of the twentieth century mass media was policed by The Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was a policy that required media outlets to cover controversial issues in a balanced manner that represented both sides of the argument.

The issue is that arguments often have more than just two views. Like let's say someone goes on TV and argues for a 50% vice tax on alcohol, there's a number of different possible responses here.

Keep the status quo
Vice tax but a lower amount
Vice tax but a higher amount
Prohibition again
Some other type of new limit on alcohol
Some other other type of new limit
Some other other other type of new limit (and so on for as many potential methods as exist)
Subsidies to encourage alcohol instead.

Who gets to demand a response here? And if the "I want more people to drink" guy gets a response, does it use up the opportunity from the prohibition one? Heck even "same side" responses could be difficult cause they still differ too. Does a "I prefer a 40% vice tax" response count the same as a 20% vice tax response? Does "I want drinking alcohol to require a drinking license" count the same as "I want alcohol consumption to be illegal if consumed over X limit?"

Maybe we try to solve some of this by only allowing "mainstream" views a response, but now we have to determine what is mainstream enough and what isn't. And we still have the problem of determining how to separate out different views to begin with. Maybe we collapse the status quo people with the pro alcohol subsidies people because they both reject the tax, and then the guy who gets up on TV and actually gets to talk is the subsidies guy despite not actually being popular.

And I'm sure many can relate to seeing a person argue something on the internet you generally agree with, but then use bad arguments and behavior that you think are terrible. Maybe you believe in a 20% vice tax for X and Y reasons, but the guy who gets on stage to represent the view says "I support 20% because the voices in my head told me to." Would you feel represented by that? I wouldn't, and I would think it bullshit if the government tried to say that man gets to take the place of my well thought response.

The fairness doctrine just doesn't seem very workable as a concept. To even do a somewhat decent job, government will have to get into and sort out the most niche debates on everything said on TV or radio, and there will still likely be tons of mistakes that happen. And I'm not even gonna get started on how much corruption/bribery/dealmaking/etc is going to be encouraged by this level of bureaucracy and decisionmaking.

There seems to be a regular historical coincidence between periods of high economic inequality and political extremism, such as the early part of the twentienth century. Both communism and the KKK had periods of high popularity in early 20th century America (and of course Europe had its own more consequential extremism at that time as well)

Huh? I am looking at a graph of historical US GINI estimates and it overlaps terribly with both Klan membership and Communist Party USA membership stats. What years are you thinking of here, and what metrics we should be using if not GINI and membership in these organizations?

The KKK peaks significantly in the mid 1920s and never returns to this level of popularity, literally millions of members in that decade and never more than a few thousand since. Now we have similar levels of inequality and a wing of the Republicans making holocaust jokes in private chats. It's Nick Fuentes now not the KKK.

Communism had a surge of popularity during WWII when we were allied with Stalin against the Nazis. You could also look at membership in the Socialist party which peaked in the early century as well; the 1910s but there was a crack-down and a red-scare which tanked numbers in the '20s. Socialist party membership peaked at higher numbers than CPUSA during the '40s.

We actually would need public opinion polling that captured some kind of spectrum of political positions to actually answer this question. Unfortunately the ANES only has been running since the '70s (in modern form). We're living through the period that would represent the one instance of rising inequality leading to political polarization but such a large cultural phenomenon has a lot of internal linkages and lags that would make it difficult to build the association from one example. That said, we definitely have seen increased political polarization in ANES data, for example, over the past forty years. Feeling thermometer data for the opposite party has declined during opposite party presidencies pretty consistently from highs in the '80s.

The Klan grew from single digit thousands in 1916 to a peak of millions in 1925 then for the next few years its membership had a half-life of six months. If you are going to argue that Klan activity has something to do with inequality, I would expect to see some kind of decade-long extraordinary boom around 1915 and the Great Depression starting four years earlier than it did.

I would expect to see some kind of decade-long extraordinary boom around 1915 and the Great Depression starting four years earlier than it did.

This is an excessive expectation for precision in a socio-cultural phenomena.

What level of precision must I use to object that Klan activity collapsed while inequality remained high, or that your proposed Socialist party membership metric peaked during a period of historically low inequality?