Republicans tend to live in different kinds of communities and consume different kinds of media than Democrats, so it isn’t all that surprising that they’d have different perceptions about what issues are the most important ones facing the country. Still, it’s interesting to see the disparity in the polling data:
When asked in the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll which issue should be the top priority for the federal government to address, Republican primary voters’ leading response was national security and terrorism (27 percent said it was their first choice).
That’s followed by the deficit and government spending (24 percent), job creation and economic growth (21 percent) and religious and moral values (12 percent).
By comparison, the top priority for Democrats in the poll was job creation and economic growth (37 percent) — followed by health care (17 percent), climate change (15 percent) and national security and terrorism (13 percent).
When you think about terrorism, you probably imagine it taking place in large population centers like New York City or Boston or Washington DC. These are overwhelmingly Democratic areas. To find similarly strong Republican areas you need to go into rural Kentucky, the Deep South or the ranch counties of the Plains states and Mountain West. In other words, where the threat of terrorism is real and pressing, voters tend to place a low priority on terrorism, and where the threat of terrorism is remote and basically theoretical, voters consider it the most important issue facing the country. Could this have something to do with how right-wing media conditions their audiences?
Of course, over in England, the people who are most concerned about immigration are the people who live in constituencies with the fewest immigrants. And, here at home, the states that have the best ratios of taxes paid to/money received from the federal government are Republican strongholds like Mississippi and Alaska. Meanwhile, affluent states like New Jersey and Connecticut that get the worst tax deals with the federal government are among the most reliably Democratic in federal elections.
You can look at this both ways, of course, as neither side seems to hold opinions that reflect their real circumstances. The difference is that Democrats are unconcerned about realities like heavy immigrant populations, a lousy deal with the government, and a persistent threat of mass casualty terrorism. The Republicans don’t even need to worry about these things, yet they are obsessed with them.
I think that if you leave people alone and don’t saturate them with outside messages, their concerns are going to pretty much align with their realities. A rancher in Idaho will probably be concerned about drought, pestilence, coyotes, the price of commodities, the quality of the schools, and whatever crime crops up. It’s possible that they might run into some federal regulations that irritate them or cut into their bottom line, but they certainly should not be more concerned about terrorism than a Manhattanite. And they’re probably more naturally interested in being able to find enough farm hands than with gang violence in the immigrant community.
To distort things the way they are distorted, you need someone to introduce fear and misinformation into the equation. And that is what right-wing media do extremely effectively.
Now, it’s true that a homogenized community is comfortable with the broad consensus they have in the worldview, and they aren’t comfortable with the idea that there are parts of the country where people are less religious or practice different religions. They aren’t used to dealing with people who come from different backgrounds and they like their communities they way they are and don’t want them to change. But, without media prompting, they aren’t going to worry about a war on Christmas unless they see some actual manifestation of that in their community.
What’s threatening these communities is not a bloated federal budget or terrorism or immigration. The threat is mainly from economic stagnation and the methamphetamine and opioid epidemics that fill in the financial and spiritual holes left by deindustrialization and the loss of family farming.
Some of this Tea Party angst is basically a natural response of “traditional” communities facing demographic and economic change, but most of it is manufactured anxiety that is produced in right-wing studios and board meetings. It’s ginned up. Fake.
And it’s very, very wrong.
It’s just wrong to terrify rural people through media to the point that they think terrorism is the biggest threat facing their communities.