Sometimes good ideas emerge from the fringe. According to Mark Stein, many “fringe candidates” for the U.S. presidency had the right ideas too early or were the wrong people with the right ideas. Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith could never have been elected when he ran in 1844, yet his platform of religious tolerance, abolishing slavery (with compensation to slave owners) and American expansion to the Pacific coast (“with the consent of the Red Man”) was progressive in its time but widely mocked because of his controversial religious views.
Stein identifies an ongoing habit of the news media to snicker at rather than address serious issues.
In 2016 the Internet carried many messages on the candidacy of someone called Deez Nuts. By the time the press sorted out that the candidate was only 15, he registered six percent favorable in a North Carolina poll. Stein worries over the significance of that number. Such “mythinformation contributes, even if just that bit, to altering perceptions of political reality.” Welcome to 2020.
