Dianne Feinstein, RIP

 President Biden:

Senator Dianne Feinstein was a pioneering American. A true trailblazer. And for Jill and me, a cherished friend.

In San Francisco, she showed enormous poise and courage in the wake of tragedy, and became a powerful voice for American values. Serving in the Senate together for more than 15 years, I had a front row seat to what Dianne was able to accomplish. It’s why I recruited her to serve on the Judiciary Committee when I was Chairman – I knew what she was made of, and I wanted her on our team. There’s no better example of her skillful legislating and sheer force of will than when she turned passion into purpose, and led the fight to ban assault weapons. Dianne made her mark on everything from national security to the environment to protecting civil liberties. She’s made history in so many ways, and our country will benefit from her legacy for generations.

Often the only woman in the room, Dianne was a role model for so many Americans – a job she took seriously by mentoring countless public servants, many of whom now serve in my Administration. She had an immense impact on younger female leaders for whom she generously opened doors. Dianne was tough, sharp, always prepared, and never pulled a punch, but she was also a kind and loyal friend, and that’s what Jill and I will miss the most.

As we mourn with her daughter Katherine and the Feinstein family, her team in the Senate, and the people of California, we take comfort that Dianne is reunited again with her beloved Richard. May God Bless Dianne Feinstein.

Participation, Education, and News Consumption Do Not Ease Polarization

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization and aversive or negative partisanship.

James Davenport at NonDoc:

Our disdain for one another leads us to separate from one another, which, in turn, leads us to misunderstand one another. Worse yet, many of the social sciences’ presumed solutions to reduce this polarization might not actually work. The YouGov/More in Common research discovered that political participation does not help reduce the perception gap. Instead, they found that the more ideological and politically active one may be, the larger their misperceptions about those in the other party may become. Conversely, the politically “disengaged” had the smallest perception gap among those in the survey.

Similarly, news consumption helps reduce polarization much less than the journalism world would hope. Those who followed the news “most of the time” had a much larger misunderstanding of their political opponents than those who did not pay attention to the news, according to the study. In fact, these researchers found that only the traditional and national network television news had a positive impact on how accurately partisans viewed one another. When one considers the ideological segmentation of the news media and its subsequent reinforcement of political polarization of the public, this finding may not be surprising, but it is nonetheless depressing.

Another surprise from the YouGov/More in Common study was that education does not help reduce the perception gap either. These researchers discovered that while increased educational attainment among Republicans did not reveal a difference in how they perceived Democrats, tiers of Democrats with higher education levels showed significantly increased misunderstanding of their Republican counterparts.

“This effect is so strong that Democrats without a high school diploma are three times more accurate than those with a postgraduate degree,” the study’s authors wrote. In examining the data, they speculated that this outcome was due, in part, to highly educated Democrats reporting less ideologically diverse friendship networks than more educated Republicans.