#1
Gerrymandering has enabled polarization. Previously, some competition in the general election ("left" vs "right") moderated the candidates.
Now the real election is in party primaries ("right" vs "more right"), which are low turnout events of mostly "the base". Result elected officials have become more extreme.
#2
The money game changed. Tom DeLay and others took control of the campaign contributions funnel. At the same time, cost of running campaigns continues to rapidly increase. So any one who wants to hold office has to kiss the ring.
#3
The resulting polarization has made legislating far more difficult. Best explanation I've read so far is Unorthodox Lawmaking, Rulemaking
http://columbialawreview.org/content/unorthodox-lawmaking-un...
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How do we fix this?
Biggest step is independent redistricting commissions, with citizen oversight (approval). Gerrymandering is mostly incumbent protection schemes. Citizens (voters) hate the result. Support for independent commissions is something like 80/20 (no-brainer).
Next biggest step would be to eliminate the two party system by replacing our winner takes all (FPTP) form of elections with Approval Voting. Cite Duverger's Law. Some people advocate other systems, like proportional representation. Great idea; I think Approval Voting is an easier sell.
Reduce the costs of campaigning. So much we can do here. Restore fairness doctrine, time box campaigning, better GOTV/voter education efforts, unify & simplify voter registration (eg automatic, universal), etc.
I think you're understating how much of the American right dislikes Trump. Actual conservatives supported Cruz and Rubio (both of whom have been very consistently critical of Trump's shenanigans). Ben Sasse and Rand Paul are also very vocal.
In print, National Review, The Federalist, Commentary, and similar news organizations have been against Trump since the Republican primary, not in small part to his playing footsie with racists.
It's not a conspiracy. You can have emergent bias as much as planned bias. That's basically the position of various HR departments who offer unconscious bias training.
At any rate, every study I've seen has confirmed that most media orgs at least lean left. Have you seen any that disagree?
For example, I've noticed that a lot of Americans think of Angela Merkel as a leftist. But she's a right-wing conservative from a party called "Christian Democratic Union"!
In a way, the American media has been successfully gerrymandered: the extreme right has been pulling the left/right demarcation line towards them for decades.
So things that seem rather moderate to a European (nationalising some industry) is a brand new thing in the American context.
There are also complexities in that America doesn't really have a clearly defined racial, religious, or ethnic identity. The common identity in America mostly centers around ideas and individual rights, so the American right has much more interest in liberty, relatively, compared to the European right.
When was the last time an entire industry was nationalized in Europe? I can't even think of a post-WWII example off the top of my head. (I'm sure there are examples, considering the success of Communist parties in some West European countries in the decade after 1945.)
It's true that there are more state-owned corporations in Europe... But some of the largest American corporations are so intricately tied to government deals and lobbying that there's no practical difference. I'm thinking of Lockheed, etc.
Compare Airbus and Boeing. One started as a multinational state-owned consortium created by European governments; the other has always been a private company. But they've ended up in basically the same position -- public corporations propped up by deep government subsidies in various disguises.
American and European capitalism isn't very different at all. Individual liberties are essentially the same with some tweaks. We're much closer than many think.
In the healthcare debate, the American right argued that the national government didn't (and shouldn't) have the power to take certain steps. The European right mostly argues from practical or identity-based reasons. So healthcare controversies involve levels of funding, pay for workers, coverage for refugees, and things like that.
So Scalia agreed that you're allowed to burn a flag in America. That's great -- but how did this ever even become a Supreme Court case? If you burn a flag in Sweden or France, nobody would think to sue you. The fact that this freedom had to be weighed at the highest possible level shows that Americans have serious blind points around their perception of freedom. Similarly, European countries have individual historical taboos on speech, such as the ban on Nazi symbols in Germany.
In the US healthcare debate, the right's constitutional argument seems to revolve around Obamacare's individual mandate -- but that's just is a clumsy artifact of how the system was overlaid on existing pseudo-private healthcare systems. With a properly designed tax-funded public healthcare system, the problem would go away.
1) Links to studies?
2) Having a leaning in op-eds doesn't mean a bias in facts reported. I'd assume if you have 0 bias there would be no point in lying about facts, but regardless of left-leaning or right-leaning organisations, the real issue is whether you present truth or not.
http://time.com/money/4533729/hillary-clinton-journalist-cam...
There are plenty more if you Google around. And they go back way before Trump was on the scene.
I'd be interested to see studies that dispute these findings. I haven't seen any.
A fair reporting of Trump comes across in a very bad light. I guess that's unfortunate for him, but it's of his own making.
The real question is whether anything reported on him (or the right at large) are erroneous, as he has claimed hundreds of times ("lies" and "fake" specifically), because the very few times it has happened, it was publicly retracted, and most often people got fired for it. I think that's a marker for healthy news.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/09/media-professionals...
http://dailycaller.com/2010/08/28/obama-democrats-got-88-per...
May I suggest that it's not causation?
Other large outlet headquarters:
Fox News: New York City
Breitbart: Los Angeles
Infowars: Austin
A slight change in your text:
> virtually all large [any type of corporation] are clustered around liberal metropolitan areas
Is that really true? Just off the top of my head, Lindsey Graham has been pretty vocal the last few months. I would paint him as a poster boy of the American moderate right (holding fairly conservative positions but clearly opposed to the more extreme American right).
If you mean the actual leadership, e.g. Paul Ryan, well I think it's obvious why they've stayed silent.
I think those moderate voices are just being drowned out.
I'm not American, but have spent quite a lot of time in the country. From my point of view, most of the media is moderate left -- and they have a very loud voice indeed. The extreme left exists but has very little visibility compared to France, for example. (That is convenient for right-wing press like Breitbart, because it lets them paint boogeymen inside the outlines of shapeless outrage-based movements like Black Lives Matter.)
American moderate right is a strange group. Polls suggest they have a lot of support, but their leaders seem to have decided not to use their voice. It's not like they're being silenced -- more like they're afraid to speak up. A few people like Senator Jeff Flake are a counterexample that shows what the American right could be, if they decided to stop pandering to an incompatible mishmash of base instincts at the fringe of their party.