The following words jumped out at me from this outstanding piece by Peter Whoriskey for The Washington Post:
The growth of income inequality has tracked very closely with measures of political polarization, which has been gauged using the average difference between the liberal/conservative scores for Republican and Democratic members of the House.
“The proximity of these trends is uncanny,” according to a 2003 paper by researchers Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. “Remarkably, the trends of economic inequality and elite political polarization have moved almost in tandem for the past half-century.”
The disastrous fiscal policies of the past 30 years — which have lavished America’s ruling class with unprecedented riches while hammering our middle class to a degree not seen since the days leading up to the Great Depression — simply would not have been possible without massive doses of political entertainment that have distracted and divided us into either failing to notice or failing to respond.
I've chosen the term "1% Media" for this indescribably vast body of news/entertainment content because it tends to reflect the perspective and, arguably, the agenda of the fortunate few who possess the immense wealth required to produce and disseminate it. During the past three decades, as constant streams of increasingly incendiary soap opera disguised as political commentary, or, worse, "news," have flooded the minds of 1% Media consumers, we have seen our culture, and perhaps the American electorate, transform. Consumers of 1% Media have become reliable voters, and, the most vocal and most malleable advocates for the policies and candidates presented to them on TV and radio. And, we have seen seen Members of Congress openly pander to this audience, not only in their rhetoric but also in their policy positions. They do this, despite their abysmal poll numbers, either because they actually believe in the political soap operas in which they star, or because they fear the entrenched apparatus that writes the script.
Annabel Park uses the terms "divide and conquer" and "bread and circus" in the video below, recorded in Madison, Wisconsin this past September:
