Megan McArdle on the NRA, and cultural divides

Last updated on: March 3, 2018 at 4:55 pm by Jane the Actuary

Megan McArdle on the NRA, and cultural divides 2018-03-03T16:55:48-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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In her first Washington Post column:

Referencing Delta’s elimination of a group discount for the NRA,

Delta is wanly protesting that it wasn’t trying to make a political statement but to keep out of politics altogether. But it ended the discount in response to a political pressure campaign. And the company made a point of announcing its decision on Twitter, rather than quietly informing the NRA. If anyone at Delta thought that this wouldn’t be taken as a swipe at the NRA, that person really needs to make some time to meet a few human beings while visiting our planet.

Referencing multiple further instances of people “shopping their politics” (Chik-Fil-A vs. Panera, Michael’s vs. Hobby Lobby), she writes:

For what happens to an increasingly demographically sorted America when we no longer share even our basic commercial culture? If we can’t even fly on the same airlines or drive the same rental cars, why should New York bankers and Silicon Valley engineers pay taxes that disproportionately flow to rural red states? Why should the sons and daughters of those rural areas disproportionately staff the military that defends them? And how are these two completely separate peoples to jointly decide on the running of one vast country?

I don’t, of course, mean to suggest that a single boycott will lead to the dissolution of the Republic. The danger lies in the totalizing impulse it signifies, in which every activity, no matter how small, takes on some greater political implication. If we decide to make every single thing in our lives political, we risk becoming so estranged that we can no longer resolve our disputes through politics.

The comments at her article are a mess, pouncing on the NRA vs. addressing the larger question of to what degree we are at risk of this sort of wide-scale estrangement. So, readers, what do you think?

Image:

V0050236 A fist-fight between Lord Brougham and Lord Melbourne as Pea
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
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A fist-fight between Lord Brougham and Lord Melbourne as Peachum and Lockit. Coloured lithograph by H.B. (John Doyle), 1837.
1837 By: John DoylePublished: 22 October 1836
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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