{"id":8696,"date":"2018-03-03T16:55:48","date_gmt":"2018-03-03T22:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=8696"},"modified":"2018-03-03T16:55:48","modified_gmt":"2018-03-03T22:55:48","slug":"megan-mcardle-nra-cultural-divides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/03\/megan-mcardle-nra-cultural-divides.html","title":{"rendered":"Megan McArdle on the NRA, and cultural divides"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-3884\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2016\/02\/A_fist-fight_between_Lord_Brougham_and_Lord_Melbourne_as_Pea_Wellcome_V0050236-1024x776.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"776\"><\/p>\n<p>In her first <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/publicly-slighting-millions-of-nra-members-isnt-good-for-business--or-america\/2018\/03\/02\/d1b03e28-1e46-11e8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html?utm_term=.810810cc8212\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Washington Post column<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>Referencing Delta\u2019s elimination of a group discount for the NRA,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Delta is wanly protesting that it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Referencing multiple further instances of people \u201cshopping their politics\u201d (Chik-Fil-A\u00a0vs. Panera, Michael\u2019s vs. Hobby Lobby), she writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For what happens to an increasingly demographically sorted America when we no longer share even our basic commercial culture? If we can\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t, 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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.\u00a0 So, readers, what do you think?<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Image:<\/p>\n<p>V0050236 A fist-fight between Lord Brougham and Lord Melbourne as Pea<br>\nCredit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images<br>\nimages@wellcome.ac.uk<br>\nhttp:\/\/wellcomeimages.org<br>\nA fist-fight between Lord Brougham and Lord Melbourne as Peachum and Lockit. Coloured lithograph by H.B. (John Doyle), 1837.<br>\n1837 By: John DoylePublished: 22 October 1836<br>\nCopyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In her first Washington Post column: Referencing Delta\u2019s elimination of a group discount for the NRA, Delta is wanly protesting that it wasn\u2019t 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[920,640,902,323],"class_list":["post-8696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cultural-divides","tag-megan-mcardle","tag-nra","tag-partisanship"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Megan McArdle on the NRA, and cultural divides<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In her first Washington Post column: Referencing Delta&#039;s elimination of a group discount for the NRA, Delta is wanly protesting that it wasn\u2019t trying to\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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