Thank you!
I also am not a big believer in cutting people off, or avoiding opinions that make you uncomfortable, it leads to a certain kind of intellectual stunting - the inability to try to understand the perspective of the other side - and like, in politics specifically, you must understand what the other side believes and why they believe it to effectively argue against it.
To circle around (and be clearer), the media consistently promotes the idea of the imperial presidency - the idea (mostly on a subconscious level) that the president can solve all problems.
In reality, 80% of the problems (which can be solved) facing America must be fixed legislatively - but because of dysfunction in the legislative branch.
Which, I should explain that - the causes of this are manifold:
* From special interest groups dominating the law writing process (which isn't always bad, but its not transparent)
* Congress being non-majoritarian (i.e. not well reflecting the actual views of the voters) because we've failed to expand the number of congresscritters since the 20's, leading to widely unequal district sizes)
* To issues with primary elections which result in the most extreme views being on the general election ticket, rather than the most moderate ones (which actually reflect the median voter).
* Bicameralism and the Filibuster also makes it harder to pass laws, laws that might have a good agreement of 59% of both houses, but if it cant meet the threshold in the senate it fails.
So instead the administration and the courts have stood in the legislatures place to do the business of the people.... with mixed results.
The media however, doesn't talk about that, they instead gig administrations for issues that are just plain outside of the remit of the presidency and thats just for the solvable problems - some are not (lots of reporting on the pandemic was like this) but by asking "well what are you going to do about X?" and the poor secretary of whatever has no answer, because its not a solvable problem by government, it just makes our government look incompetent.
This is from a larger piece (https://alohawolf.substack.com/p/an-evergreen-america) a friend of mine and I wrote -
"Government cannot be there to solve every problem, cure every illness, and redress every grievance. The progressive left often mistakes things the government can do for the things the government ought to do. The regressive right often demands the clock be turned back to a time where the government did very little--ignoring the changes wrought on American society by advances in science and technology since then."
Put another way - The lefties I know broadly assume government to be more competent that it is and private industry either greedy or incompitent than reality shows, and the conservatives I know broadly assume private industry to be more competent than it is, and government to be more incompetent than reality shows.
The reality I know is America has a nice spread of competency and its not regional, and government is no more, or less competent than private industry, it does move slower however, for a variety of very good reasons (regulated utilities are often the same way, for the same reasons. Our media does a poor job of reflecting that, and does a poor job explaining to Americans why things are broken - and I have little love for either party at this point, both seem (on a spectrum anyhow, republicans seem worse about this, they keep ending up as the dog who catches the fire trunk, then fail to implement their ideas, because of either - how profoundly unpopular they are, or because they dont have any implementable ideas int he first place - dems - at worst - mostly just seem to have trouble organizing a one car motorcade) more interested in political power than doing the peoples business.
I want a media that holds the rich and powerful to account, keeps the people informed enough to make good choices, but also reminds the people of their duty to ensure the system works - and all of us, every citizen has a duty which we are doing a poor job at carrying out - which is staying invested in the system, and keeping enough tabs on what government is doing to make informed choices about who ought to run it, and why.
Anyhow, thanks for reading this wall of text ;-)