The latest thing that made me think about polarization is this post from the Economist’s culture blog about TV viewership in America. The phenomenon that they are commenting on is that the shows with the highest ratings (NCIS, The Big Bang Theory) are barely ever written about in major publications and receive no critical acclaim or awards nominations, all of which now go to familiar cable dramas like Game of Thrones. As the unnamed writer puts it, these network shows "illustrate a growing divergence in the television-viewing habits of coastal urbanites and the rest of the country.” Indeed, “combining the elements of a police procedural with an extra splash of ooh-rah patriotism, [NCIS] appeals to America’s heartland but repels big-city liberals." Translation: liberals watch HBO and Netflix; conservatives watch CBS and Fox. Even television now places you in a partisan bucket.
The Economist’s analysis echoes the subheadline of Chis Cillizza’s post today on how people in each party identify religiously: “The two parties are getting further and further away from one another. On everything.” The urban/rural political divide and the fracturing of media along party lines are old news. But I don’t think we’ve considered how much polarization exists in places we don’t think of being associated with politics. Cillizza isn’t exaggerating: almost all cultural preferences are becoming associated with one ideological preference or the other.
The exception is the NFL, which is to American culture what church used to be. It’s the basis of a Sunday ritual around which the week revolves, and it belongs equally to liberals and conservatives. People go crazy for their local team whether they are in Dallas or San Francisco or Phoenix or Houston or Queens. A halftime show could have a rapper and a country singer and neither would seem out of place. Other than members of my extended family, NFL refs are the only white people with southern accents I hear talking that I don’t immediately associate with Republican politics. If I’m at an airport bar and the dude next to me is wearing a camo hat and drinking a Bud Light, I’m talking to him about the NFL only. The liberal writing class and the people who think liberal writers are all snobs are equally likely to care about the outcome of a Giants-Cowboys game. Football unites us in the way that protestantism and Seinfeld no longer can.