Your Humble Blogger went from Carnap’s Livejournal to a convincing visual display of a predictable idea: liberals buy liberal books, and conservatives buy conservative books. If you are interested in the methodology, I suggest you look at last year’s version, under which Valdis Krebs gives some detail, but essentially, he uses Amazon’s ‘people who bought x also bought y’ feature to map connections from one book to another, and applied it to political books. And ... it turns out that hardly anybody buys both O’Reilly’s book and Franken’s.
Now, on the face of it, it’s pretty depressing that there is so little overlap; the preaching-to-the-choir aspect is breeding ground for groupthink. And, of course, we want to think that there are a lot of people who read ‘both sides’ of an issue before thinking; the map appears to indicate that nobody does.
On the other hand, are there really two sides to, for instance, Bushwacked? Should any intelligent person really read The O’Reilly Factor and then say, hmmm, now I’ll read Franken’s attack on it, and then attempt to reason out which of the two is ‘correct’? I mean, seriously, why would that be a sign of intelligence?
As it happens, I do know somebody who purchased both books, and enjoyed reading them both, as goofy entertainment, which is, after all, what they are. Amazon’s listings don’t include everybody, even if you assume they are honest. Furthermore, I think an argument could be made that those people who want to read both liberal and conservative books would be more likely to read them at the library, or to pick up cheap used copies of last year’s books (which could be assumed to have much the same arguments, if one is interested in weighing the arguments) than to pay even discounted new prices. Frankly, I heard plenty of lefties urging people to buy Lie, Lied, Have Led (or whatever) just to push it up the charts, and I’m told Radio Republicans did much the same. I suspect that partisans were susceptible to that, and one would expect them to only buy one side’s works.
After all, it’s certainly not a bad thing for the country to have several million partisans on either side, even if they are no longer making up their minds and have entrenched themselves. And the chart doesn’t tell you much about any books that are not partisan, since presumably if the Frankenbuyers didn’t buy them, they won’t show up. In fact, it does identify a few books that are conspicuously non-partisan (in the chart’s sense), and that therefore should likely appeal to the ‘open-minded’ people whose absence is the depressing part. And, since those books appear on the best-seller list, and are only weakly connected to the partisan networks, it seems likely that there are millions of people who are interested enough in politics to purchase, say, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 or What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response but who aren’t going to buy a book by Ann Coulter or Jim Hightower. And that’s not bad.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.