The View From Roanoke

The View From Roanoke

The Guardian’s Gary Younge is following the presidential campaign from Roanoke, Virginia, in a series called “The View From Roanoke”. So far the series is superbly well written. Something about Younge’s outsider perspective gives things a refreshing neutrality and clarity.

An evening with the Garsts lays bare the depths of America’s political polarisation. A night out with many liberals could well produce the same confusion about what motivates the other side. The problem is not just that people do not agree with each other. It is that at times they don’t even seem to know each other politically beyond caricature. A sizeable section of both the Democratic and Republican base believes that the only reason the other exists is because they are either deluded, bigoted, misinformed, misanthropic, greedy, gullible or godless. Both believe that their information pool is contaminated - one by the liberal media, the other by the mainstream corporate media. The issue is not that there’s no middle ground, it’s that there’s little in the way of common ground.