The issue is, each side thinks the other side is the only side doing it.
I’m still looking for an example on Quarter To Three where someone posts something leftist and is immediately met with a chorus of people asking whether they’re, “Posting in good faith.”
I don’t think that approach will work while you have extremely smart people with power on the right countering it by intelligently using the media (commercial and social), as well as foreign powers intentionally, all trying to sow seeds of discord and pull divide the people.
Like I said, I don’t have a solution. This is not just a matter of good intentioned discussions going wrong, this is a result of decades of concerted effort by people who understand human behavior and using it intentionally to cause a divide for their own profit. Until you find a way to stop that then I don’t honestly see a way, because it’s always going to be easy to tell people the other side sucks (and let them move onto the next subject) than to tell them that the other side has a point in certain circumstances and here is the common ground.
Less polarized over many things but more over politics. I’d argue in part b/c people are tribal and form groups. Political groups have risen in importance as decay of other social groups. And groups don’t like the non-group members. It’s very easy to self-sort these days which is good but it means you have fewer interactions with other people. Most online communities that go into politics are usually one-sided with the out group functionally excluded.
You also have the big sorting effect of parties being more idealogical which could be a good thing but very disorienting when you have parties dramatically shifting their ideology (like now).
Social media plays a huge role with both sides effectively using nutpicking to highlight the other side. This results in groups having vastly inflated ideas of what the other side is.
The idea of Ezra Klein writing this and feigning concern about polarization is hilarious to me given his track record.
Please elucidate. What is his track record? How has he contributed to polarization? Provide examples. Klein is certainly not a both-siderist, but he’s also an empathetic guy who really makes an effort to understand where people are coming from.
Just to be clear but a worry people in liberals communities have - and with good reason - is that because everything gets so emotional when a contrarian shows up is that the contrarian/conservative poster is just trolling. And often this is the case if they keep going. “Posting in good faith” is addressing the community to defend the poster, not the individual. Otherwise they might get dog piled.
There’s little overlap in what communities want now. Conservatives purport to care about economic policy but really only care about tax rates, and are little put out or indifferent to the culture war stuff. Or they’re all in on the culture war stuff and really see no way to compromise with liberals, unless liberals more or less agree to concede the culture war stuff to them.
It’s not that in group members dislike out group members by default, but that in highly sorted parties out group members now represent an existential threat to them. A pro immigration, pro choice, pro expanded health care conservative would not be unwelcome in progressive circles - but then by definition they wouldn’t be a conservative.
ANd that’s (at least imo) the problem with politics today; there’s hardly any overlap with what different communities want. Would conservatives trade an international, multi-decade climate change policy for a ban on abortion, for ex? Where’s the overlap between the two sides? Where can they meet in the middle? Most online debate today between them is basically just signaling.
Klein is a partisan that is interested in advancing one side. He created journolist as a tool to coordinate and influence progressive talking pts within media outlets. I thought he was more interesting on his eponymous blog but became more zealous over time. Maybe he’s switched back but given Vox I don’t think so. Vox is the classic present 1 side of the argument and call it settled debate with a few exceptions like Coaston.
One other piece on polarization I forgot to mention is that political fights are becoming tougher b/c growth of govt and fights moving more from negative liberty to positive liberty. When govt says you must do X as compared to you can’t Do Y, then the fights are tougher.
As far as I can tell Vox is just a straight up liberal editorial site and makes no bones about being anything else. There are some good writers on there.
Do you genuinely think the reason politics is more difficult today is because conservatives are fighting against the growth of government from telling them what to do?
And if so, what if the thing they want to do is bad, like segregation? Is there effectively no good political response other than a multi-decade pamphleteering campaign to get them to change their minds?
Or, are things like “socialism” so bad that the reverse is true from their perspective? The President’s defense effectively comes down to the idea that defending the country against Democrats from taking power forgives anything he does.
I would find my time here much less stressful if the many good faith people to the left of me politically (the people I am really here to talk to) intervened to discourage the few people who are more interested in point scoring, shutting down heterodox views, and exacerbating division.
I’m having trouble reading this as anything other than:
“People who dissent from the consensus must “post in good faith” lest they be dog piled, but people who do not are free to engage in whatever bad faith tactics they wish?”
Obviously this is skewed by my perception of how the forum actually operates, could you go into a bit more detail as to what you were actually getting at?
Many conservatives love govt telling people want to do. My pt is that threats are bigger with more powerful govt and then are more easily highlighted. If the govt has the power to destroy my business and wreck my life, I’m much more vested in fighting that than compared to if the govt can only regulate the size of my advertising poster.
Your pts on segregation are excellent and way too complex for this message board. There has to be a balancing act where you consider different types of liberties such as religious liberty vs human rights. I tend to think that the best govt rules protect against the tyranny of the majority but my views are waning.
Another book on increasing polarization around class re-alignment. Mike Lind.
LIke To JD Vance review: A Class War for Our Time › American Greatness
Maybe a way to look at it is from “the other” point of view. Let’s assume that we’re instead a Conservative board. It’s obvious to a Conservative board that socialism is bad. I mean really bad. Like Venezuela and 20th Century Bolshevism bad. Now somebody shows up and starts haranguing them that socialism is great and socialism is the future and socialism is the only way to fix the planet and ect. Maybe they actually believe this - from their point of view. But from the board’s point of view, they’re just trolling. They’re not interested - and will never be interested - in debating the merits of socialism. So they question they’re faced with (if they care to ask) is if the person posting about socialism is approaching the subject genuinely or is just trying to rile them up and make them mad.
This is why the “non-overlapping” concern thing is such a big deal and makes communication increasingly fraught with tension. What conservatives “assume” to be true and progressives “assume” to be true increasingly has little overlap. But from a progressive point of view certain things are just obviously, factually not true. If a conservatives shows up and declares that the Wall is Built and that millions of Clinton voters are fake and climate change is a conspiracy by Al Gore, it so far beyond the bounds of common sense that they’re going to be considered a troll. It kind of doesn’t matter if they’re so far down the rabbit hole they don’t understand that they’re trolling. It’s like getting into a debate with a white nationalist who really does believe that whites are superior to blacks, it kinda doesn’t matter if he understands why he’s wrong or not.
So while there are limits to good faith (as in the last example), both sides because they have different concerns have to be reminded that there are “good faith” arguments and “bad faith” arguments, the latter arguments you’re fielding just to make people mad not because they’re true or not, or arguments that are genuinely so beyond the pale that people shouldn’t be expected to have to seriously debate them.
I’m not so sure. There’s good evidence that many, even most people want higher taxes on the wealthy, higher taxes on corporations, better and more affordable access to health care, better ability to afford retirement, more affordable college educations, higher levels of immigration, and end to forever war, and so on. That this is true is the reason one party focuses on inflaming culture war instead.
So, do you have an example of a piece Klein has written that shows partisanship?
Wait, everything Klein writes is partisan, isn’t it? He’s openly liberal and he argues for liberal positions (rather well, I might add). Is this supposed to be controversial, or a secret?
I have not read his book, but from what you are saying, I don’t think he is putting this in particularly sharp focus. At least not the way it looks to me.
Jefferson’s all being “created equal” bit aside, this configuration of society has a ton to do with how politics really work. Through civil war and constitutional amendments and court decisions and amendments, we have generally pushed fuller enfranchisement and power further and further down that pyramid. But equal representation is very much a process, rather than a fact on the grouund. And every time full empowerment gets pushed further down, there is a built in, powerful constituency for stopping right there and going no further: the most recently empowered.
If you are a member of the 5th level down, and recent progress has finally given you full political power, then you are a very large voting group, probably the largest. And although some people think that the 6th level down ought to receive full fairness, this would be a group at least as large as you, probably larger. You know you are more worthy than those below you, and you came up in a world where you held privileges over them, so you know that that is the way it was always meant to be.
Not only that, but you are encouraged to think that way by a surprising ally – the group at the top of the heap. They offer a trade that is in both your interests: You provide them with a whole ton of votes to buff their advantages, and in return they side with you against incursions from the group below you. (This is hardly new; it existed in the heyday of the British monarchy.)
So although it has always been a good thing when true political power (that is, unimpeded by poll taxes and burdensome paperwork and restrictive hours and literacy tests and gerrymandering and voter roll purges and so on) is pushed downward through the layers of our society, this, in and of itself, creates resistance to going further.
And that is particularly true when the most recent group to gain full power is told that the next group down is so large that its sheer size will swamp them, make them powerless forever more… which is what liberal pundits crowed about in the years before Trump’s election. The GOP and its white constituencies were supposedly doomed, due to demographics.
Thus, there is a problem for progressive theorists, but it is not particular to minority enfranchisement. Progress on voting rights always breeds its own resistance, and modern media probably strengthens that resistance, and economic retrenchment motivates every group to guard its historically “entitlements” more jealously.
I don’t think the Republican Party is responsible for the increasing partisanship, nor the party line loyalty that you see in the voting booth. Not directly.
For example the Republican Party doesn’t really represent its voters very well. You see lip service on issues like abortion, for example, while the party has historically pursued economic policies that benefit the richest cadre in the party. Open immigration for example could only result in lower wages for the poor whites voting Republican.
I think poorer and middle class voters support the party, in spite of the clear disdain that many in the leadership have for them. And they do so because they don’t have another option.
The reason we’re seeing increasing conflict and dysfunction goes back to policy and culture. As politics has shifted from economic to cultural issues, it’s become a zero sum battle, where the left is attempting to impose its cultural vision across the country, over the opposition of the right who see their own continued existence at risk. Given those stakes, things will only grow worse.
Well, until the existence of the right’s culture is at an end, at least :)
And of course this is literally not true.
Yeah it must suck for bigots to see other people get rights and not be subjected to a lifetime of servitude. Since it’s still just slightly taboo to be an open bigot, they use words like forced culture to hide the real problem.
Yup. Allowing gay people to get married has fuck all impact on the day to day lives of anyone… not gay. Not discriminating against minorities is not some costly thing, for even the largest bigot. They lose nothing except the ability to openly be bigots. While the discriminated person has a lot more at stake.