As far as I can tell — though I haven’t seen enough to know for sure — Medium is largely liberal writers and conservative trolls. There is conservative content, but what I’ve encountered is almost uniformly junk. For more on that, you can read Is There a Rational Conservative I Can Talk To? Please? — In an intellectual vacuum, no one can hear you scream.
In any event, never forget Rule #1: THE INTERNET IS NOT REAL LIFE. Cyberspace and meatspace bear little resemblance to one another.
But:
Polls indicate that independents are very rarely independent. Most talk a good game but reliably vote for one party or another.
Anyone who was independent in this election is a radical right-winger — Tr*mp is manifestly the worst candidate ever to run for the office. His own chief of staff called him a fascist in a recorded interview. The various intelligence agencies are reluctant to brief him on classified information. He’s threatened to close down media outlets that oppose him and speaks openly of using the government to persecute his enemies. He’s encouraged police to rough up suspects. He clearly has some form of dementia. He lies almost nonstop.
To top it off, he’s a truly awful human being and always has been — the difference is he used to be proud of it.
Did you know Tr*mp dissolved his charitable foundation and paid a two million dollar fine for shifting money that was supposed to go to help kids with cancer to the Tr*mp Organization? What a sweetheart.
I also heard him pose as his own publicity agent on radio shows to tell everyone about all the sex he was having. Weirdo.
Even if you disliked Harris’ position, from patriotic, honesty, and good-government perspectives, she was the only choice. Not voting was a vote of confidence in the other candidate.
As to extremism:
People get confused by the Internet. Social media writers are mostly extremists of some sort, be it left, right, or something else. Algorithms favor the radical positions.
But THE INTERNET IS NOT REAL LIFE.
The question is, what does that say about the parties?
On the question of who’s extreme, I think I illustrated that clearly. Regarding the issues of the day, the Democratic Party is centrist, and the GOP has gone off the deep end. It’s not opinion, just facts you can check.
Why the difference? Because GOP leadership is broadly in line with their extremists. The Dem leadership is from the middle-to-rightward edge of the party. The actual liberal liberals are few in number and mostly relegated to the back bench.
You’re making a common and fundamental error: the center isn’t the point directly between the parties. Party identification has nothing to do with it — if a party moves left or right, that doesn’t change the center because, in a democratic republic, the middle is the middle. And as I illustrated, that’s mainly where the Democrats are.
You can’t even judge it on election results — those often fluctuate for reasons unrelated to partisanship or even reality. For example, this election largely hinged on the open border, an immigrant crime wave, inflation, and Communists in the Democratic Party.
But the border is not open. Undocumented immigrants appear to commit less crime on average than citizens. Inflation was a global phenomenon that Biden had no control over. It is back under control, but people absurdly think prices will come down. That’s not how capitalism works, folks.
On the last point, people love to yell “Communist!” at the Democrats. This can be disproved in several ways. For one, you can do research and note that on the global left-right scale, the Dems are center to center-right on most issues. Seriously, go look it up.
Or if you don’t have that kind of time, get a bleeping dictionary and read the definition of Communist.
As for disputing anecdotal evidence, as a scientist, I assure you that disputing is the only way to handle it. A few individual stories are meaningless as far as determining trends. Even if you gave me 14,000 examples, that’s only 1% of Medium’s 1.4 million monthly posts, and 1% is not a trend.
If you’d like more discussion on this, see my story Social Media Is Bullshit: Everybody Loves a Crazy Anecdote, but They Don’t Mean a Damn Thing — the Internet is a bullhorn for the ignorant, the angry, and the ill-intentioned.
To summarize, THE INTERNET IS NOT REAL LIFE.
