Driving polarization is a conscious strategy of leaders and the media (especially a particular large corporate media outlet, which is worldview shaping for a large part of the population), isn’t it?
You could argue that the system rewards it in the short term which is all that matters.
There’s also one party with way less scruples when it comes to the methods it uses, which polarizes the other party against them.
There’s no way to make friends with someone who wants to „take care” of you by violent means.
I don't know man, in an article that compares 12 countries, writing a comment about one of them without specifying which one is somewhere on the spectrum between plain lazy and American imperialism. Sure we all know which one they mean but it's still a bad comment.
Interesting in the second graph, the countries which we traditionally consider to be well working societies are those where out-hate has not crossed in-love
> the issues arise when it gets a smidge more nuanced then that
The issues arise when folks get distracted from common prosperity.
I meet so many people in the Rockies and New York who are up in arms about some imaginary problem, or a problem they have no influence over and which cannot affect them, one they solely know about due to social media.
Do we achieve common prosperity through regulation or deregulation? Welfare state or trickle down? Fiscal responsibility or speculation? Strong dollar or weak dollar? Free market or protectionism?
The parties (one in particular) can't even keep a consistent policy from year to year, I am not sure how we can hold hands and find the unified path to common prosperity.
I thought the topic was "if we talked in person we would realize we have a common objective so things would be fine". Violence is definitely a kind of disagreement but my point was that irl discussions don't solve polarization, i.e. "regulation/deregulation cannot lead us to prosperity".
Also plenty of politicians have said regulation is literal communism and literal communism makes a lot of people mad.
Yeah but when you discuss nuances in person rather than online your natural social chemistry in your brain kicks in and we all behave like actual people instead of mindless savages
With the downside that it's harder to reference (and look up) sources, and have wide participation or an easily-accessible record. And ultimately you're not going to convince many people to stop voting based on that one book.
There are a large number of policy issues the average American should be able to agree on, but have been polarized to the point that we don’t solve them.
- Get money out of politics. Everyone complains about corruption, no one tries to do a constitutional amendment to get rid of Citizens United.
- Strong privacy protections for your online data. Does anyone like the fact that your data gets sold and then used against you by car insurance companies?
- Break up big companies that are taking their power too far. Seriously, take your Syscos, Nestles, AB InBevs of the world and break them up. No company deserves to have that much power over consumer markets, and the centralization of that power definitely makes prices higher. My conservative parents definitely don’t like how when Walmart and Rite Aid came to small-town midewest, all the local drug & grocery stores went out of business.
- Every American knows our private health insurance system sucks. I mean every person you meet either doesn’t have good coverage, hasn’t used it much, or has had had a terrible experience with it.
- We need to do away with police overstep like asset forfeiture, where the government can basically just rob you. I’m not talking defund the police, but you could sit the average American down, and probably come to agree that the police state has too much power and not enough accountability in a couple areas.
There are so many stories along these lines which could get republicans and democrats on a similar page, and it comes down to the frustrations we ALL have with the systems we live in. It doesn’t matter who you voted for, when health insurance starts scamming you out of a procedure you need, it’s frustrating on a deeply personal level. And we all feel like we don’t have much control over federal policy — partly because businesses & moneyed interests can protect their interests while everyone else struggles, no matter who’s in charge.
(And btw, this isn’t a elected officials on both sides are the same comment, more of a “we Americans have a lot of shared frustrations regardless of party”
1) Despite the quite liberal lobbying laws the US seems to have, corruption is still rampant and illegal donations continue. Cracking down on lobbying would probably remove some of the money in lobbying but not all of it.
Points 2-5 are all "impactful for the average american" but most people will disagree with how and how far these should be implemented. Why did you signal out asset forfeiture as your example of police overstep but not no knock warrants, stop and search laws or the current ICE street gang situation?
The problem with the view that all members of a nation share common struggle and therefore have the same political wants and needs is naive and these seemingly shared frustrations are often oversimplifications that disguise various political interests
- same sex marriage should be treated equally to heterosexual marriage
- the tradition of gender being strictly tied to genitalia at birth should be abolished, with individuals able to change gender (and genitals) at their whim
Oops Americans don’t agree on queer rights and equality oops
- everyone should be treated equally and afford equal protection under the law, regardless of where they were born or what the colour of the skin is or what their genitals look like
And what happens when political actors capitalize on the things that divide you? What makes people vote against their own economical interest for the sake of preventing transgender care being passed or abortions becoming illegal?
Most people even on the left don’t agree with the gender aspect of your points. It’s a pretty minority view.
Other than that we’re still at the point where most people will at least verbally agree with you that everyone should be treated equally (whether they believe it or not internally is another matter).
> the tradition of gender being strictly tied to genitalia at birth should be abolished, with individuals able to change gender (and genitals) at their whim
This is absurd. You can't just wish away your sex. It's a material fact.
You’re not paying attention. the biology of sex is an arbitrary generalization - it’s useful, but it’s not sacred. Gender is a tradition of play-acting we’ve been doing for so long that we’ve forgot that it’s just a game.
What’s absurd is looking at the world the way it is now, and thinking to yourself, “yes, this is the way it always has been, and must always be.” What a mire to live your life in. Such a pity.
Specifically, it feels like the lack of discernment goes off the rails and falls into the chasm of derangement where people assume that their opponents do not have that common goal. Anti-natalists and population control advocates excluded, most of us do share that goal. The differences are in the proposed approaches.
There are legitimate discussions which can be had about those approaches to achieving that common goal. The discussion is no longer in good faith where partisans deny that common goal or assume evil intent.
That is a good example of a bad faith presupposition. It assumes intent. You may passionately believe this and it may even be a popular view here at HN. However, it isn't a starting point for a dialogue.
You're stepping into a distinct issue where you specify politicians or the political classes. Thus far I took the discussion to be about individuals engaging in informal political discussions. The poll itself wasn't limited to politicians.
There are well known malign incentives for politicians and the political classes. Generally speaking these involve the expansion of the purview of the state and the time preferences dictated by electoral cycles. These are realist views around the incentives political actors find themselves subjected to. The extent of how much these incentives are perceived to dictate outcomes might correlate with the observer's cynicism. However, presuming that these incentives would only apply to one political party would be naive at best. At worst it would be divisive partisan tilting. The suggestion that it is specific to Republicans and the devolution of this thread is illustrative of the polling data.
You're making the suggestion that the major contributor to the current issues are those incentives, yet the incentives haven't changed much the last couple of decades, and the last year is wholly unprecedented.
Yes, many partisans are asserting that it is unprecedented. The selective omissions advance their narrative. They are acting in self-interest. The out-party hate is downstream and symptomatic.
A less partisan view might find that it the actions of the political classes are not unprecedented. It is a progression of the form. Both poles represent false alternatives in this regard. The malign incentives are systemic.
Yes. The politically engaged have become extremely polarized and out forth terrible policies that the normal people then have to make binary decisions on. Both Harris and Trump were symptoms of this. Both were kinda nuts. And the fact that normal people had to choose is ... Wild.
It’s crazy to me that the Democrats can run the most do-nothing centrist candidate twice in a row and people like you will still find a reason to complain.
The do-nothing centrist is the problem. “The politics of joy” doesn’t connect with people who haven’t gotten raises to match increasing productivity for 40 years.
My dude, the intent is frequently stated plainly on Temu Twitter by the party leader. Do you need hyperlinks? The GOP is loudly unambiguously trying to hurt its adversaries.
I (embarrassingly) used to believe that it was just people with different ideas of what’s best. But they’re So So open about wanting to hurt people. I came to it reluctantly but it’s really the only explanation
Oh please. Democrats opened the field to Republicans with their anti police rhetoric (and Republicans are now in the process of self destruction by being anti everyone but their preferred democratic). Polls show most people are pro police. I live in a liberal neighborhood of Portland and if you actually talked to Democrat voters, you'd know they actually want police.
Again, get offline. These extreme positions that have taken over both parties are the result of listening to twitter. Seriously that website is toxic. It causes fear and anxiety and governance by fear is terrible. Online democrats / left leaners seem to fear law enforcement. Meanwhile online Republicans / right leaners seem to fear everyone not exactly like them.
What ends up happening is that the political class ends up fielding candidates that are extreme since the online political class has disproportionate influence over that, and then normal people have to choose the best of two awful candidates.
No one can seriously say last election was a competition between America's best.
There is something particular to the twitter style of website that is toxic. I tried twitter for a month or two and my mental health fell apart. Back to reddit and hn and my life feels better. They are also less addicting. The segregation into interest specific communities helps you context switch.
No, the issue is wider. Everyone has something that can be considered a "fundamentalist value" by someone else who doesn't share it. It just doesn't feel that way when the value is yours.
I suspect you misunderstand the meaning of the word fundamentalism; it's not just about absolutism, but also the authoritarian aspect, i.e. this issue is "back and white" and "i'm going to force you to to adhere to this black and white framework" (for some mechanism of "force"). My point is that it is the combination of "lack and white" and "forced compliance" that is the issue.
So your point "considered a "fundamentalist value" by someone else who doesn't share it" either a) directly contradicts the "No, the issue is wider", or b) you didn't understand what I was saying.
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes"; your statement is both a) lacking any nuance (any cost vs any benefit), and b) so lacking in nuance (a tautology even) to border on irrelevance and nihilism (a throw away statement that has the intellectual depth of "everything happens for a reason", a true but largely useless comment that, at least on the surface, is used to shut down any debate).
Every country has sociopaths and narcissists too, but this doesn't really further the conversation about authoritarianism vs democracy, unless of course the legislative has a plurality of such or in thrall to such.
your statements are true and obvious but lack any reasoning as to why it is the way it is; and hence are largely useless. just about anyone can tell you that the sky is blue, what is more important is why.
Unfortunately it's not that simple any more. There are already very fundamental issues on which we are already very polarized, online or not. One of these is safety for example – far too many people are ready to give up any freedoms in the name of security. Ideas for EU chatcontrol, camera networks etc don't come from some bureaucrats, there is a very broad social demand for this.
Voters in democracies are usually not people who deeply understand issues. We outsource that to politicians, but politicians have a second agenda, serving the people who paid their campaign.
The very concept of manufactured consent seems very much projection on Chomsky's part. Very much, 'they don't agree with me but I know what their real interests are so I can speak for them better than they can for themselves' crap to turn the masses into sock puppets to win arguments.
> The very concept of manufactured consent seems very much projection on Chomsky's part
Per Chomsky, the co-authored work is more Herman's than his, and anyhow the phrase and concept is from Walter Lipmann, 66 years before Herman and Chomsky's work with the title inspired by it (and 51 years before their first book on the topic.)
But, no, neither the idea that deliberate propaganda is a major source of political beliefs or the particular manner and mechanisms by which the US media is involved in delivering that propaganda is "projection".
> Very much, 'they don't agree with me but I know what their real interests are so I can speak for them better than they can for themselves' crap
Manufacturing Consent doesn't pretend to be an exploration of what the “real interests” of the public are; it can't be misleading "projection" at doing that, because it doesn't do it at all.
It's possible you've missed the entire 20th Century and 21st Century thus far, so an exhaustive list of examples would be impractical, but perhaps take a moment to ponder just a couple:
- "yellow cake uranium"
- "a land without people for a people without a land"
The demand comes from people who value their children’s perceived safety over the ability of some internet perv to get at porn or for terrorists to plan atrocities.
And no, they don’t want to hear about the importance of freedom to communicate being more important boy. I’m just gonna move this road we go do you wanna go out that way okay, because they believe that their communication will never cross these lines, so it’s irrelevant.
“But what if the government turns bad and uses this against you” carries far less weight, in a large part due to its theoretical nature, than “we need to stop this bad thing now”.
Heck, a lot of the governments likely aren’t thinking beyond “we need to stop this bad thing now so people vote for us” either. The immediate leap from governments wanting any form of oversight to “this is all part of the wider plan to subjugate humanity” that often comes up on this site is amusing but ultimately unhelpful and comes across as conspiratorial. Not because it’s wrong exactly, but because it posits a plan where it’s not very clear there is one. It’s just well intentioned people making well intentioned but poor choices as we stumble our way into mediocrity.
They define in-party and out-party very weirdly for multiparty systems like the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. In NL, if I'm a leftie, I have 3-4 reasonable parties to choose from. Most people voting for any of these parties won't deeply hate any of the other. Similar stuff on the right, or along a conservative/progressive axis. But the authors do this:
> Thus, we follow these studies and define the in-party as the party receiving the highest score among all parties rated by the respondent on the party feeling thermometers.4 The out-party measure is drawn from the average of all other parties’ feeling thermometer scores, weighted by their respective vote shares.
By mixing all the other parties that aren't the in-party, they mix parties the voter is quite OK with, with parties that the voter deeply and passionately detests. I can't imagine this not skewing the graphs enormously.
For example, if you're right wing in NL you get to choose between the anti-Muslim party, the conspiracy theory anti-Muslim party, the farmers-against-immigrants party, the God-wants-the-death-penalty party, and the regular oldschool conservative right wing party (who call themselves "liberals", by the way). Most right-wing voters will have a strong preference among this lot, but at the same time they won't mind deeply if one of the other options wins elections instead.
But they hate hate hate the progressives! A few weeks ago right wing protesters attacked and trashed the HQ of one of the more progressive parties (D66). The hatred is very deep (and mutual), totally unlike what the graphs in this article show you.
But according to the article its much less hated in Sweden than for example USA or Greece, and we can see how the out party used to not be as hated in USA but is very hated now, while the levels in Sweden were always kind of modest while Greece the out party was always hated.
This is my entire point. It’s because Sweden has many parties and their math groups politically close parties with politically distant parties as “the outparty”.
It might be correct, but if the Swedes weren’t modest at all but deeply hated parties on the other side of the spectrum (but not the ones nearby), you’d see roughly the same graph.
Maybe you're in a bubble in terms of knowing how people feel about out-parties, as your descriptions of right-wing parties are too caricatural for you to not be biased. I'm in the same bubble and don't think most people view things that way.
Your point about skewed results is right though: reading through the paper's annex on dataset construction, no distinction is made between out-parties. An analysis based on political spectrum-based clusters of parties would have been more telling, though the current methodology is probably on point for the more echo-chambered people.
> your descriptions of right-wing parties are too caricatural for you to not be biased
Fair, obviously I'm a leftie. But I don't believe that PVV voters are going to be equally angry when FvD wins the elections than when D66 does. I can make caricatures and still understand that about right-wing voters.
Plus we have the exact same on the left, you can choose between the closeted maoists, the educated-elites-pretending-to-care-about-workers party, the educated-elites-not-even-pretending-to-care-about-workers party, the God-loves-workers-but-hates-gays party and the party against the humans (but for the animals).
Seriously the only party I can't come up with an obvious caricature of is CDA but then again they don't really stand for anything so it fits.
Cruelty is your perceived behaviour of people on the other side sticking up for their values.
I can both argue that it’s cruel to not have housing for everyone,
while also arguing it’s cruel to tax away 40-50% of an entire country’s productivity (people’s actual work) to pay for houses for people who have never worked or paid taxes in their life.
Who’s right? Who’s cruel? Both sides and both. This is why I find this cruelty argument so bad.
Those values all come from straight up your ass. Both the numbers and the idea that the other side has any values to stick up for other than cruelty. They operate in bad faith consistently and are more than happy to pay for far things more expensive than just housing if it leads to more suffering. ICE isn't cheap you goddamned evil hypocrites.
You could argue that the system rewards it in the short term which is all that matters.
There’s also one party with way less scruples when it comes to the methods it uses, which polarizes the other party against them.
There’s no way to make friends with someone who wants to „take care” of you by violent means.