How The Left’s Immense Cultural Power Affects Politics By Saritha Prabhu for The Federalist
Much of our current divisiveness and polarization stems from the imbalance between the left’s media power and the right’s political power.
One problem in our politics today is the power imbalance between the left and the right. The left has immense cultural power in America, while the right has more political power (the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court).
This has given rise to our current state of frenzied, over-the-top politics wherein everything the president says or does is blown up to apocalyptic proportions. On any given day, we have sundry media, entertainment, and political figures saying the president of the United States is a criminal, a foreign stooge, or Adolf Hitler. How crazy is this? It has also caught hapless voters unwillingly into this dysfunctional spectacle.
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We’ve also seen the deep flaws of the left’s many institutions, such as legacy media outlets, academia, social media, the entertainment industry, tech giants, and publishing houses. They don’t play fair, are often intolerant and divisive, and will do anything for political power.
The Left Controls the Media Narrative
Let’s examine the ramifications of the left’s cultural power. The left often sets the narrative and the terms of the discourse. This can often profoundly affect voters’ minds and wills, which hasn’t been fully studied. These powerful forces of the left shape the way people think about climate change, immigration, religion, abortion, gender, racism, conservatives, conservative media, the Russia investigation, and everything else.
The left’s powerful platforms also possess a force-multiplying effect. For the politically tuned-in voter, what you hear and read on issues several times a week from multiple outlets — CNN, the New York Times, Time magazine, The Atlantic, late-night comedy, and more — is often repetitive and has the effect of cementing viewpoints in voters’ minds. The net effect on voters, especially younger ones, can be profound. It influences not only their viewpoints on issues, but even more importantly how they think.
The impact of the left’s political conditioning on new immigrants also can’t be overstated enough. Newly arrived immigrants who are trying to learn about the politics of their new country are profoundly influenced. I know because, as an immigrant, several years of watching and reading CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and Time guided me in my early years here to think a certain way about issues.
