Lou Dobbs: The Man in the Middle

Via Micah Sifry, the interactive version of this graphic is really more interesting than the static one represented above. Either way, though, you see the relationship between readers of different books, and you can see that the major political titles cluster into essentially non-communicating "liberal" and "conservative" clusters. In the middle, you see three books two of which are by Lou Dobbs.

That's about as good an illustration as you could like that insofar as there's some kind of excluded middle in our current political situation it's not the brand of Bloomberg-style "centrism" that the bemoaners of partisanship tend to favor. Instead, it's something akin to Dobbs-style populist nationalism. It's not a point of view I favor, but unlike Bloombergism it is a point of view that has a lot of support and only a little representation.