Thursday, September 4, 2025

Part I

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Are the American People Really Divided Politically? They Range All Over the Place on Some Issues, Big Elections Are Binary

When we think about the great clash of worldviews of our age, it really is interesting that we now have a map for it. Now, that map is often identified as a political map. It’s an electoral map. And of course we know the colors, red and blue. There’s red America and blue America. Now, we understand there’s more to the story than that, but we also understand there’s not less to the story than that. And it is really interesting to see how when you try to understand the American people, and let’s just say as a whole, you look at the American political equation and we’re going to think of this as a worldview clash, and that’s a worldview equation. How do we understand what’s really going on?

Kristen Soltis Anderson, who’s a contributing opinion writer and a Republican pollster at the New York Times, she also moderates focus groups there, for the New York Times. She wrote a guest essay just in recent days entitled, “Politicians Are Polarized. American Voters, Not So Much.” Now, I want to tell you, this same kind of argument appears over and over again. It appears before an election cycle, during an election cycle, after an election cycle, people want to say, “Oh, you see those maps? They’re red and blue.” And you look at the electoral count in a presidential election, the Electoral College, yes, there’s red and there’s blue. The big battle is red versus blue. And we’re living in politically polarized times. The red is increasingly red and the blue is increasingly blue. We take this so much for granted that we don’t really understand how new this is.

In American politics, there have been lines of division, there have been lines of separation, but there hasn’t been the same kind of map we have right now where you have the coastal areas, particularly in the Northeast and on the West Coast so deep blue, and you have other parts of the country where you have states that are red and states that are blue that can be fairly even close to each other. But the big story is blue on the edges and red in the center. And you have also there, of course, in the north central states, you have some more blue. And when you look across what’s been called, of course, the Sun Belt, you see even more red. But you do have that blue edge on either side and the red in the middle. And of course we also have to remember that the blue in those edges is far more densely populated than the red, which is why the Electoral College vote often surprises people in red states. They look at the map and they go, “Wow, we won huge. It’s a landslide.” Only i n the population-based Electoral College vote, not so much.

But what I want to look at is this argument made by Kristen Soltis Anderson. It’s not a stupid argument. And she’s arguing that the vast majority of the American people aren’t as polarized as the maps would show. Is she right or is she wrong? Well, she’s right, but it doesn’t matter. So what I mean, she’s right, I’m going to say that if you ask the American people what they think about any number of policy or urgent issues, you raise the issue of abortion, you raise the issue of same-sex marriage, you raise the issue of the president, President Trump, you raise the issue of his tariffs, just go down the list, raise the issue, you’re going to have a range of opinion among Americans. It is true that only a small number of Americans on either side are true absolute blue or absolute deep red. And that’s because most voters aren’t quite so consistent in their worldviews.

It’s also true that voters lie to pollsters and survey-takers. They just do. And I’m not saying they lie as in they really hold a position they’re hiding. No, they lie as in, “No, I’m really not that.” But the truth is they vote for that all the time. I want us to know why that’s so. And so it comes down to an issue of math. It comes down to a binary. And so when people talk about the election, they’re generally talking about the final electoral setup, the ballot, and you have a D with a name and an R with a name. And so if you vote blue, guess what? There’s blue. If you vote red, guess what? There’s red. And so that ballot means that those two individuals, red and blue, Democrat and Republican, they won, say, at the presidential election level, they won a primary system in order to win the party nomination. So that means not only that they’re red, they’re red-red. And not only that they’re blue, but they’re very blue.

So to put it this way, it’s virtually inconceivable that anyone even slightly liberal could gain the Republican presidential nomination. That’s simply not going to happen. The primary system is going to ensure that doesn’t happen. There’s more to it than that there. There’s money, there are campaign contributions, there’s political apparatus and all the rest. But the bottom line is Republicans aren’t going to nominate a liberal candidate, certainly by whatever that spectrum defines at the time. Similarly, and perhaps even more so, the Democratic Party is really under the control and at the direction of the far-Left of the Democratic Party, which is to say blue, blue, blue. And so it’s really impossible to imagine, just to give you one example, what would be the possibility that someone with even mild pro-life sentiments or convictions could get even close to let’s say double digits in the Democratic primary race? It’s virtually impossible to imagine that. No one has even spoken, had a speaking role at the Democratic National Convention in decades who had some kind of pro-life position. It’s an absolute pro-abortion party when it comes to the platform and to the logic.

You could take any number of other issues. What’s the chance a Democrat that doesn’t hold the orthodoxy could get close to gaining the nomination? It’s virtually impossible. So you say, “Well, okay, that’s presidential elections and the red and blue have to do with the two parties that the Electoral College. But what about Congress?” Well, here’s a reality that most Americans don’t think about as much. We think about presidents because we just naturally do. We often don’t think about how congressional elections have run in a similar fashion. And if anything right now, as you look at the House of Representatives, which is supposed to be the people’s House, it’s supposed to be the most representative body in the entire American government, the most classically representative body, the House of Representatives. Two-year terms, 435 districts.

But of those 435 districts less than 30 are honestly competitive. And if anything, 30’s probably a big number. The reality is that most of those districts are red or blue even before you have candidates show up on the scene. And that’s another factor. You’re looking there at inside a congressional district, so you’re looking at a defined territory. But of course that gets to the whole issue of the front lines right now about gerrymandering and the redistricting of these congressional districts in some states. Texas has undertaken it to what will be a Republican advantage. California is now threatening to undertake it to a Democratic advantage. As I have already pointed out, many Democratic states have been doing this for decades, absolute decades. And that’s why you have so many states where you have a sizable Republican voting bloc, but they don’t have much representation at all in Congress. And there are some other states where it’s exactly the opposite, where Republicans have done that to their advantage. The bottom line is that you have Republican seats and democratic seats, and they’re really not very competitive.

The only competition is for the primaries for those races, and that means that, in all likelihood, the most Republican perceived of the Republican candidates wins the Republican nomination. If it’s a Republican’s seat, guess what? You got a member of Congress. The same opposite process takes place among the Democrats. But that has helped to produce a system in which our most representative body, at least supposedly in our constitutional system, the House of Representatives, is just as much tied to a red and blue map as is the Electoral College when it comes to the election of presidents. Similarly at the state level, because senators, all 100 of them, are elected on a statewide vote. It’s a little larger, of course, in some cases considerably larger than a congressional district. But you have pretty much the same dynamic. You do have more volatility, however, in the Senate. There are more and more crucial swing seats, a greater percentage of swing seats, genuinely unpredictable when it comes to statewide races. And that’s because you can’t gerrymander a state, a state’s a state. You can’t politically engineer a state. It is what it is.

Now, this is increasingly to the advantage of Republicans in certain states, but Democrats in others. And you have, for instance, more Republicans moving into some states, but right now one of the big dynamics is you’ve got more people leaving some states like New York, California and others. That will have a more immediate effect in the House of Representatives because of the fact that those seats are allotted state by state on the basis of population and the census. Anyway, it’s going to be really, really interesting.

But I want to come back to this argument. “Politicians are Polarized. American Voters, Not so Much.” Well, the not so much really doesn’t matter much here. That’s the point I want to make. You can ask Americans on the street what they think about any number of issues, but when they get to the electoral question, it’s a binary question, and the red’s going to be red and the blue’s going to be blue, and voters may be purple, but guess what? They’re going to have to vote one way or the other. And so I look at this and I want to say this is an attempt to say we don’t have to be so polarized, and I want to come back and say our constitutional system, the way it is currently operating, is a partisan system that comes down to a binary, and so you can try to claim that voters aren’t all that polarized, but when it comes to the vote, they vote in a polarized system.

And I just want to underline for Christians again what’s at stake in those votes. Oh, I did see something interesting, by the way, when it comes to political parties. As I said in the United States, primarily a binary. It’s a Democrat and Republican frame, and it has been for a very long time, and it’s likely it will remain that way for a very long time. You ask the question, why? Why do third parties not gain a lot of traction in the United States? They sometimes make history, but they generally don’t make a big difference. In a really close election, they might a spoiler, and some people argue that’s what happened in the 2000 presidential election, but in a really close election, presidential election, they might be a spoiler, but they don’t play that way in congressional elections.

So contrast that with the parliamentary system in Great Britain where you have multiple parties. You generally have two major parties, but the minor parties can make a big difference. Think of Israel and the Knesset. In the legislature there in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister because he assembled a coalition not only of his own party, but of other parties in order to gain a majority in the Knesset. That’s often the way it works. Usually in British politics, you have one of the two major parties, either Labour or the Conservative Party, that wins enough of a majority to establish a government. But even in recent decades, we have had conservatives had to join with the party known as the Liberal Democrats in order to have that kind of majority.

Part II

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A New Third Party in Britain? It Might Be Influential Or It Might Crash Before It Ever Figures Out What to Call Itself

Why are we talking about it today? Well, it’s because we can look often at Britain and see America’s politics of the future, and that’s been true. You had third-way politics with Tony Blair. Next thing you know, you’ve got Bill Clinton. You’ve got even before that, a turn to a conservative leadership with Margaret Thatcher in the United States. Shortly thereafter, Ronald Reagan. So sometimes you do see a parallelism here in terms of political dynamic and movement. 

The big article has to do with the former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. Now Corbyn is a socialist, and you may remember that he was the head of the Labour Party. He led the Labour Party in a national election. It was an absolute disaster. So Jeremy Corbyn’s been on the left of the Left in terms of mainstream British politics, and the Labour Party went down to defeat. He lost the leadership of the party. He eventually was cast out of the party because of remarks widely interpreted to be anti-Semitic. Well, he’s decided to start a new party. This is funny and revealing at the same time. He’s going to start a new party. He’s not going to start it alone. He’s going to start it with a partnership with another former member of the Labour Party, former member of the Parliament, Labourite named Zarah Sultana also of the Left.

So you have Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn now establishing a new party left of the leftward Labour Party. So this is going to be a new third party, and this is the way it works. You have multi-party systems where you have generally parliaments. And the British Parliament’s the greatest example of that because the prime minister, who’s the head of the government, is produced by whatever majority coalition you could put together. So a smaller party can have a lot of influence. So Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are establishing this new party. What’s its name? They don’t know because they can’t name it. They’re having a hard time naming their party. And let me just say, you can’t be much of a political party if you can’t even come up with a name. The rules of British politics say that it has to be a distinctive name. It can’t sound like another party. They don’t want confusion. And so the leaders of this new party are trying to come up with a name and, well, it is not working too well. 

They’ve come up with some name proposals that don’t seem to work. One of the concerns is that you have to be careful because the British have had this happen before where you put together a party and the first letters that become the initials of the party add up to a word you don’t want. Some suggested the party should be registered as “Arise,” evidently a reference to a poem that Jeremy Corbyn likes. But political consultants have said it’s got to be something that sounds like a political party.

Okay, so that’s interesting, but not all that interesting. Let me tell you what’s more interesting. The party already has a problem. It’s a new party. A new party is started almost every week in Britain. Most of them are started, they register, they make a statement, they disappear. That might happen to this new party as well. But you know what their problem is? It’s not only their name, it’s “T,” as in transgender, because when it comes to transgender policy, you know where the Left is on this, but in Britain, this might be a harbinger of the future. This might be a sign of what’s coming. In Britain, even the left is growing increasingly skeptical of the transgender claims. And certainly I mentioned the fact that Britain is ahead of the United States in full retreat on transgender treatments for children and teenagers. And when it comes to such things as biological males on female teams, honestly, a political party that’s all for that is not going to attract much of the vote. So it may be that this party blows up before it ever exists, and even, oddly, not before it even has a name.

But it also tells us something else about politics these days, and that is this, and this is as true in the United States as anywhere else. When you look at the moral revolution, the sexual revolution, the LGBTQ revolution, everybody is going to have to take a stand on every one of those letters, and all that put together, and on the left you got to sign on to the plus sign. Otherwise, you don’t have a future. And when it comes to this party, they don’t have a name and they’re probably not going to have a workable policy.

Part III

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How the Public Health Game is Played: How Terms Like ‘Science,’ ‘Bias,’ and Others Have Been Weaponized by the CDC

All right, something else that I want us to pay attention to that’s happened in recent days. It showed up when you had several staffers at the Centers for Disease Control resign in protest when Dr. Susan Monarez was basically removed by the Trump administration just months after taking the job because her position was obviously in conflict with that of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Now, I am not going to get into a debate on that issue. I’m going to point to a larger problem as is revealed in an interview, it was a panel discussion on CNN, Kaitlan Collins’s program. She was hosting the conversation with three former CDC leaders. They resigned in protest over the removal of the CDC head. They clearly are involved in an ongoing clash with HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. The key issue in some of these cases is vaccine policy. Again, lot to debate there.

I just want us to look at this conversation on CNN because of what it tells us about how society works, how the political game is played. We need to do some worldview analysis, particularly on vocabulary. So one of the most interesting things is that the debate that comes up is over public health. Kaitlan Collins sets it up, and, of course, it’s set up as this very hot controversy with the removal of the CDC director, and accusations that this was done for politics, and that it’s all about vaccine policy, et cetera.

Well, you have these three leaders who resigned. She has all three of these major leaders on the program simultaneously, Dr. Deb Houry, who was the CDC’s deputy director and chief medical officer. She was there for more than a decade. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, an infectious disease physician and director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, we’re told top flu specialist who was the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. CNN says that means he was in charge of the team that is tasked with preventing you from contracting diseases like rabies and smallpox. That includes diseases from animals, spread from animals to humans. 

Okay. So these are three major leaders, no one questions that, who have resigned in protest at the CDC. And the issue of public health comes up. Dr. Daskalakis opens the comments by saying, “I love public health and I love CDC, and I was really interested in having a long career there, and that wasn’t in the cards, but what was in the cards was that I got to meet amazing scientists and amazing leaders in public health.”

Okay, now, I mentioned this before, your ears need to prick up. Think of two different terms: medicine on the one hand and public health on the other. Just be very much aware they’re not the same thing. Now, Dr. Daskalakis is a medical doctor who is also involved in public health. So you can have medical doctors in public health, but medicine as a practice and, frankly, as a way of conducting research and knowledge, it’s different than public health. Public health has been politicized from the beginning. Public health is a social discipline, and that’s why at a place like Harvard, for instance, you have a separate graduate School of Public Health from the School of Medicine. They’re very different things. And public health has been politicized from the beginning because public health is inherently tied to politics. But I want us to note something, and that is the fact, first of all, Americans generally don’t make that distinction, don’t know the difference.

But I just want to look at this transcript. I’m not going to read to you extensively from it. I just want to point to words that just show up again and again and again. Dr. Daskalakis again, he began by talking about amazing scientists. They talk about science and public health, and they make constant reference to “the science.” Dr. Jernigan said, “We were always focused on the science.” Dr. Jernigan said later, “I think you want a director who has the power to make decisions, to use science to make sure those decisions are leading to appropriate policies.” Dr. Daskalakis comes back to make the accusation that what the administration showed was a disregard for experts. The clear statement that experts should not be trusted. So experts, that’s one word. Public health’s another word. The science here, a bastion of scientific enterprise, just goes on and on and on. Public health, again and again.

Dr. Daskalakis later in the interview, “I think there’s public evidence of the intent to interfere with the science at CDC.” It goes on. “The CDC’s science.” And then he makes the amazing statement, “The CDC does not have bias.” He says it doesn’t have bias. On the contrary, he says, “The people that have been installed by Secretary Kennedy are full of ideology and bias that will actually contaminate the science. So I think we have evidence that this is coming, and I think the other part we’re seeing is that decisions are being made and data is being retrofitted to be able to address the decision.” He said, “I think that that is really a clear sign that the direction that the country’s public health is going is not one that is evidence-based or science-based, which is why our resignations are really together.” He says they’re trying to raise a red flag for everyone.

I’m not going to go further. The science, the science, science-based, the science. You see how the game is being played here. Now, I want to be very clear about something. I believe there is such a way of knowledge as science. I believe science, in other words, is a thing. I believe it is an operational way of knowing and there are some things that can certainly be known and discovered by science, demonstrated by science. I think it’s also true that when you just refer to the science, the science, the science, the science, you’re often referring to things that actually aren’t based in science, classically defined, at all. But this certainly was demonstrated to the American people, painfully, and obviously enough when you had experts, experts, experts saying, “It’s this, it’s that. Do this, do that. Don’t wear masks. No, wear masks. No, don’t just wear that mask, wear two masks or wear this particular mask. No, don’t do that. The disease is spread this way. No, it’s spread another way.” Who’s saying this? The experts, the scientists. Following what? The science.

I just want to make clear that when you put science or anything else in a political environment, it becomes something else. I am not denying the science. I am thankful for scientists, and quite frankly, I’m thankful that over time medical science tends to level out in a rather responsible way, at least on many issues. But I just want to look at this and say this is a political hot potato. The removal of the CDC director, the resignation of so many public health people there on the staff in protest, but the arguments that are being made, let’s just remember, we have heard this before, and I want to say this is true in areas far beyond medicine. There are people sitting in pews of churches where you have liberal preachers get up and say, “This is what scholarship now says about the Bible. This is what we can believe. This is what we don’t believe. We used to believe this, but now because of a theological version of the science, we now believe something else.”

I want you to be able to smell that and see that as soon as it arrives on the scene. It’s tough sometimes. It can be a challenge to keep these issues straight. I want to be honest. If I’m going to take a medication prescribed to me by a doctor, I want to know that it’s been thoroughly tested and I want to have trust in that system. 

But I also understand that when it comes to the direct intersection of science and politics, well, politics really sets the stage and all of a sudden you see words like this that are bandied about, not so much in an honest way, but as weapons of ideological and political warfare. I’m alarmed enough by it that these days when I see someone just refer to experts or the science, I begin to doubt what they’re about to say before I even see what it is. If you’re going to say, “The science,” I want to know what science, and if you’re going to call someone an expert, I want to know, well, what’s truly their expertise.