Monday Miscellany, 1/27/25

Pardons.  The president pardoned some 1,500 participants in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol.  He also pardoned 23 pro-lifers who were convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) for interfering with abortion clinics, some of whom were elderly and have been serving prison sentences of up to 57 months.

Energy.  The president issued orders to help increase oil production.  He also cancelled the Electric Vehicle mandate, stopped federal leases for windfarms, and withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord.

Federal Workforce.  President Trump immediately shut down all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices in federal agencies.  He also required federal office employees to come to the office rather than working from home, made it easier to fire them, froze hiring, and froze the issuance of new regulations.

Health.  The president proclaimed that the United States government will recognize only two genders on passports and other government documents:  male and female.  He also withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization.  He also made the Justice Department drop its case against a Texas doctor who blew the whistle on a hospital for its illegal trans surgeries on minors.

Abortion.  President Trump rejoined the UN coalition of countries that denies that abortion is a human right and works against forcing countries to allow it.   He also re-instated the “Mexico City Policy,” which forbids foreign aid money from going towards  the providing or promotion of abortion. He also rescinded the Biden dictate that government agencies look for ways to expand and protect access to abortion.  And he ordered the enforcement of the Hyde Amendment, forbidding the use of taxpayer money to pay for abortions.

Foreign Affairs.  The president froze all foreign aid for 90 days pending a review of all grants.  (An exception was made for Israel and Egypt, plus emergency food aid.)  He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”  He extended the deadline for TikTok to be divested or banned.

Observers are describing all of this as “shock and awe,” which Wikipedia defines as “a military strategy based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy’s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.”

The Breakdown of Conservative, Liberal, or Moderate

The report from a new Gallup poll of Americans’ political ideologies is entitled U.S. Political Parties Historically Polarized Ideologically.  But although it’s true that Republicans and Democrats are more polarized from each other, I’m seeing more of a consensus among the American people as a whole.

For 2024, here are the statistics:

Very Conservative:  10%

Conservative:   27%

Moderate:  34%

Liberal: 17%

Very Liberal: 9%

So 37% of Americans are conservative, with only 26% being liberal.

Gallup says that these numbers are fairly consistent with their findings from previous years, though the number of moderates has shrunk somewhat from 43% in 1992, the first iteration of the survey, to 34% today.

The major shift, though, is within the political parties.  Among Democrats, 36% describe themselves as “liberal,” while a record 19% describe themselves as “very liberal” with 34% being “moderate.”

Among Republicans, 53% describe themselves as “conservative,” with 24% saying they are “very conservative.”  Only 18% are “moderate.”

Among Independents, 45% consider themselves “moderate,”  30% conservative, and 20% liberal.

I’m pretty sure the scale has been sliding over the years, with the definitions of “liberal,” “conservative,” and “moderate” changing since 1992.  But there is little appetite for either extreme, whether “very conservative” or “very liberal,” among American voters.

I wish the poll told us what the respondents consider to be the difference between “liberal” and “very liberal,” but I suspect it has to do with New Deal style welfare state liberalism, which Biden used to embody when he was in his prime, as opposed to woke progressivism, with its emphasis on critical race theory, feminism, and the LGBTQ agenda.

I suspect the difference between “conservative” and “very conservative” has something to do with small government, free market, frugal spending conservatives as opposed to the big government “illiberal” cultural conservatives.

Democrats need to realize that only just over one-quarter of Americans are liberals.  The “very liberals” number less than one in ten.  Yet the “very liberals,” who constitute about a fifth of the Democratic party, seem to have been calling the shots in the Biden/Harris administration.   That’s a formula for losing elections.

Republicans’ “very conservatives,” who are over-represented in the party, also will have little appeal.  But isn’t Trump “very conservative”?  It depends on the definition.  But Republicans start with an advantage by appealing to the 37% of conservative Americans.  It’s the moderates who determine who wins an election.  This time, enough of them broke for the Republican candidate.

Theoretically, a moderate candidate would have the advantage, but moderates are minorities in both parties, largely choosing to join no party at all, thus keeping them off the ballot.

The Woes of Cable News

CNN is having to lay off some 200 employees, which comes to about 6% of the company’s workforce, as viewership continues to decline.

The news network averaged just 578,000 viewers in prime time in the last three months of 2024, which is down 74% from the same time period in 2020.  But it’s not alone.  MSNBC is down 62%.  And even Fox, which is at least making money, is down 27%.

Part of the problem is surely the disconnect, seen also throughout the news industry, between the media’s overt liberalism and the general public’s moderation or conservatism.  (See the previous entry.)  But another problem is that the “Cable News Network” (a.k.a., CNN)–along with MCNBC and the conservative Fox–rests on an obsolete technology.  Broadcast TV fell to Cable, and now Cable is falling to the digital technologies of computers, cell phones, and streaming.

According to Isabella Simonetti of the Wall Street Journal, CNN is going to respond to its problems by transitioning to digital.  The company is planning to put up a paywall around CNN.com, making it accessible to subscribers for $3.99 per month.  And it will launch a streaming network.  CNN already tried that in 2022, offering CNN+ for $5.99 per month, but it bombed and was shut down after only two months.  Whereas CNN+ offered special programs around its stars, such as “Jake Tapper’s Book Club” and “Parental Guidance With Anderson Cooper,” the new service will focus on straight news.

But streaming isn’t necessarily a way to get a big audience, because the technology, by its nature, is “niche.”  Most people subscribe to  a few channels that they like, a choice that precludes the others.  I have missed quite a few sporting events that I otherwise would have watched, since I don’t subscribe to the channels that they are on.  The leagues, though, are addressing this problem, though, to a certain extent, by making deals with multiple platforms.  Similarly, Fox News has made itself available on several streaming platforms.

It’s hard for a news service of any kind to compete with the internet, which offers news for free.  But the internet platforms are mostly relying on reporters who work for traditional media–newspapers, magazines, network TV, cable TV–and if no companies are around to pay someone to gather and write up the news, the internet won’t have it either.  What’s emerging, though, is online news sites that do pay their writers.  We’ll see if that’s enough.