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July 18, 2004
Partisans and Moderates
Several days ago, this guy left some skeptical comments on my Fahrenheit 9/11 entry from a couple of weeks back. A quick skimming of this commenter's own blog made it pretty obvious to me that his political leanings were pretty much diametrically opposed to mine. Which is fine, I recognize that there is a lot of diversity of opinion out there and that it's a very healthy thing to be exposed to alternate viewpoints and different beliefs. But the mere thought of directly responding to the comments in question and possibly getting into an extended (and ultimately unwinnable?) debate made me realize how much I dislike trying to talk politics with anyone whose fundamental beliefs seem so far apart from mine. For me, it's an unpleasant exercise that has probably become that much more unpleasant because of partisan fervor and deeply-held opinions about certain politicians, events, political parties, etc. So while I'm really glad that Fahrenheit 9/11 is closing in on $100 million and that it will be helping to "rally the base" and increase voter turnout this fall, I also admit to having some concerns about the increasingly divisive and self-segregating nature of American political discourse in the long-term.
With those sort of thoughts already in mind, I was excited to learn that former UNC student and onetime WXYC dj Thad Anderson has started a website called outragedmoderates.org. In his explanation for the site, Anderson talks about a moderate as "someone who weighs each issue on its own, rather than following a strict party line or ideology". One of the main goals of the site seems to be to fight the idea that America is completely polarized into two separate "red" and "blue" populations with completely irreconcilable viewpoints. Anderson takes a consensus-building approach by starting with "four things America agrees upon" and then describing how the Bush administration has violated even these basic principles. I admit to being more of an outraged partisan than an outraged moderate, but I admire this approach and imagine it could be effective where more partisan-type shouting has failed. One other cool thing about outragedmoderates.org is that Anderson has decided to take a bunch of government documents and make them more easily available by not only aggregating the links on his own web site but also making the documents available via various P2P file-sharing networks such as Kazaa, Soulseek, and Gnutella. Lots of official documents about the Halliburton contracts, the energy task force, the 9-11 commission, etc. A real no-spin zone, if you will.
I keep stumbling upon former Chapel Hillians writing about politics on the Internet....while skimming through the comments on a DailyKos story about recent NC polls, I found a link to this great overview of NC politics, voting trends, historical information, and other factors that will influence the way the 2004 presidential race plays out in NC. The author is Russ Barnes, another WXYC alum. Barnes is pretty optimistic about the chances that NC will go for Kerry/Edwards and I sure hope he's right.
Posted by Tim at July 18, 2004 04:08 PM