Politics & Power Quote by Kurt Loder

Loder’s point lands with the quiet authority of someone who’s spent a career watching “public opinion” get flattened into a TV-ready binary. The casual phrasing - “or whatever” - is doing real work: it signals contempt for the lazy sorting mechanism, the reflex that treats party identity as the default setting of a human being. Coming from a journalist, it’s less a lofty civics lesson than a newsroom correction: stop writing people as if they’re pre-labeled.

The intent is procedural, almost ethical. “Assume” is the villain here. Assumptions are efficient; they also turn reporting into stereotype management, where every source becomes a stand-in for a tribe rather than a person with motives, contradictions, and private math. When he says it’s “important to adhere to,” he’s talking about discipline - not just being open-minded, but actively resisting the incentives that reward oversimplification. It reads like an internal memo to media and audiences alike: your categories are not reality, they’re shortcuts.

The subtext is also about power. Party labels can be a kind of narrative ownership: once you tag someone “Democrat” or “Republican,” you can predict their beliefs, dismiss their complaints, and pre-write their story. Loder is pushing back against that predictive storytelling, which is especially seductive in an era of cable panels and algorithmic feeds where conflict needs clean teams. His line argues for a more granular public imagination - and for journalism that earns complexity instead of assuming it away.