A lot of these definitions and groupings are highly artificial and more-often-than-not, mostly manufactured by media interests - who certainly understand that c

A lot of these definitions and groupings are highly artificial and more-often-than-not, mostly manufactured by media interests - who certainly understand that controversy drives engagement, as well as the economic necessity to have a loyal partisan base of subscribers and followers in the internet media age, and that one way to do that is to cultivate anger and distrust of social out-groups. One conclusion of this view is that Americans get served at least as much manuipulative propaganda as Soviet citizens did, and possibly a good deal more effectively as it goes through many different channels, instead of coming purely from the state organs of information. Getting an alternative view is rather difficult, but there are some tactics that are used by researchers in fields like economics and ecology to get a good sample of their populations. For example, one approach is the 'straight line transect' - i.e. draw a straight line from, say, San Francisco to Boston and sample people's views and opinions from every community/individual who lives within 100 miles perpendicular to that transect. Then compare that to a Seattle-Los Angeles transect and a New York-Miami transect. This woould, I think, reveal that most people have many common concerns: job satisfaction, housing/energy/food costs, crime and safety, good educational systems, clean air/water/food issues, etc. These topics are often ignored by the media and politicians because they don't drive the kind of divisiveness and negative engagement that they find beneficial. One interesting question is just how much of the button-pushing emotional-response-driving controversial material is the product of deliberately engineered mass manipulations strategies run by a shady cabal of some sort, and how much just arises naturally and is then exploited by media and political figures?