All: before reading further, make sure you're up on the site guidelines and don't post political or ideological flames to this thread. If you're hot under the collar, please cool down and wait for your curiosity to come back before commenting (and maybe even reading) further. This is a good test case to see if HN can stick to its intended spirit: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: There are now multiple pages of comments in this thread. If you want to see the later pages, click 'More' at the bottom of the earlier pages. Or get there like this:
As many have pointed out, a dozen or so submissions on this topic were flagged by users. That's actually the immune system working as intended, but another component of the system is that moderators rescue the very most historic stories so HN can have a single big thread about them. We did that 4 years ago, also for Brexit, etc.
Since this was the first submission on the topic, it seems fairest to be the one to restore. (It's still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and/or lottery.)
I changed the URL from https://www.cnn.com/ since that is not the most useful link and the AP seems as close as one can get to a neutral source.
There's a famous optical illusion with a spinning silhouette of a dancer. When you look at it, you'll swear it's spinning in one direction -- say, counter-clockwise. In fact, you'll be so sure it's spinning counter-clockwise, that the idea it could be spinning in the opposite direction will seem impossible to you. But if you stare at it long enough, and intently enough, you can make it spin the other way.
I've noticed the same phenomenon with political views.
People on the left think that anyone on the right is a lunatic, and everyone on the right thinks the same thing about the left. I, as most people do, lean in one direction politically, so naturally any comment I see coming from my side seems reasonable to me. In fact, it seems impossible that a reasonable person could think any other way. But since I grew up in a family that leaned in the opposite direction, and I shared their same mindset in my younger days, I can now draw on that experience, and I can take a political tweet that everyone on my side thinks is insane, and I can stare at it, and just as with the spinning dancer, I can flip it in my head so it seems reasonable.
To me, it's a testament to the power of the tribal instincts within us. We think it's the other side that's crazy, but we're all under the same spell.
Growing up in a country where I was in the ethnic majority, I went through a period of right-wing political bent as a teenager. Then I came to the US, where I found myself in the minority and leaning left.
So I feel that I have some personal insight into the mindset that pushes people right. But... maybe it’s that my past right-leaning self was a teenager with half-baked ideas about the world, when I reflect on what drove me that way, I cannot point to any coherent, constructive thought, mostly feelings of entitlement and an unwillingness to put myself in the other’s shoes. And that’s what I see in the right-wing of today in the US. I guess I empathize with their fear and anger better because of my experience, but I don’t buy that their arguments are just a “different” way of looking at the world; a narrower, myopic way, maybe.
As a minority considered “disadvantaged” in the US I’d like to counter that there’s a lot more to the right than lack of empathy for minorities or fear. I’m very appreciative of the opportunities provided to me here and don’t appreciate the recent cultural tendency to privilege shame people or to look back on the history here as only cruel or exploitative.
Trump saw the highest turnout among minorities for republicans in 60 years and it’s for a reason. I look back at Ben Franklin or Jefferson or Washington and feel inspired, I don’t think “oh, I’m not privileged I could never do what he did.” I can see people as products of their time and separate the good from the bad. As someone who grew up in an apartment shared between 2 families and worked my way up into college and the tech field I’m just shocked at how many people today have grown into learned helplessness and think that the system is so bad and irreparable that they need to vandalize and protest in cities for months.
The left has done so much more to insult me and my appreciation for this country than the right, and it’s just tragic that they think they’re the only good guys. I really do believe that foreign interference to agitate our society is real, as discussed by Tristan Harris in his interview by Joe Rogan, and it’s convinced millions of young Americans that they’re somehow resisting literal Nazis.
I think you speak as if you don't currently have a bias. yet something I've noticed and even had to correct amongst coworkers who came to the United States via a student visa and then eventually obtained a green card is that they have a huge bias towards large parts of the United States. This bias has been created in their minds by university professors who have never been to these parts of the country themselves. The bias manifest in things like a coworker being afraid to accompany me on a business trip to Walmart headquarters in Northwest Arkansas thinking it was dangerously racist. I had to explain to him that there are multiple cricket leagues in the area in that racism is not nearly as prevalent in the south as Hollywood would have him believe. He ended up enjoying it so much there that he later relocated there from Fremont.
Living near Boulder I routinely encounter the exact same ideological brainwashing amongst people who came to the US as students.
I say this is someone that is done extensive volunteer consulting work for the Democratic party including my last gig in 2014 for the midterm elections. I agree with the vast majority of the Democratic party platform but have become very dismayed at them overemphasizing race as a motivating factor for their opposition. I can promise you that for most southern Americans that vote Republican abortion is a much bigger factor in their vote than race. and economics is much bigger than either those categories.
>I cannot point to any coherent, constructive thought, mostly feelings of entitlement and an unwillingness to put myself in the other’s shoes.
You point this out as if it is some moral failing on the right. In fact, this is a personal failing. It should be simple enough to recognize that for any ideology that is large enough there almost certainly exists coherent and constructive thoughts within it. If you have yet to discover them, this is not because they do not exist, it is because you're not actually looking for them. I think this is done by people on both the left and the right all the time. They fail to deeply investigate the ideas of the other side, and then criticize the other side for having no good ideas.
Note: I'm not conservative and I don't necessarily agree with the quote. The point is not that the quote is correct, the point is someone (not me) thought it was the unthinking young person that thought alone liberal lines and the experienced wise person that thought along conservative lines.
Again, not agreeing, just pointing out some feel the opposite, that more experience and exposure to the world leads to more conservative thinking for some people.
I don't think "I didn't have a good reason for being conservative, therefore conservatives in general don't have good reasons" is a very strong argument...
" maybe it’s that my past right-leaning self was a teenager with half-baked ideas about the world, when I reflect on what drove me that way, I cannot point to any coherent, constructive thought, mostly feelings of entitlement and an unwillingness to put myself in the other’s shoes. And that’s what I see in the right-wing of today in the US. "
It seems you had a bad experience with what you felt were 'right wing' ideals but probably had little to do with that, as it would be a pretty intellectually shallow description of any kind of Conservatism (although understandable if one were to equate 'Trump' with 'Conservative' and I don't think many people would in the intellectual sense) and also oddly experientially 'upside down'.
Most 'young people' are progressive, people tend to get more conservative as they get older.
Cynically, one could say it's due to age and myopia, but more likely it has to do with responsibility, perspective, maturity and frankly living through decades and seeing how the world adapts.
Believing in the institutions of family (and monogamy as a commitment to that institution), the objective rule of law, moral obligation through duty of various kinds of community service, prudence, faith as an integral part of worldview, a sense of community that can possibly be expressed through nationalism, the notion that people must act responsibly to the extent they are able and assume responsibility for their actions - these are not ideals of 'entitlement' frankly.
Barack Obama, for example, is a 'Progressive Conservative', and he is in many ways in his own personal life a model 'cultural conservative': religious, church going, mild mannered, straight forward marriage, traditional formal education. He speaks formally and graciously, and is literally a living embodiment of many cultural historical artefacts. He didn't serve in the military but he very well could have, it's totally within his character.
He's not at all that far away from Mitt Romney for example.
Donald Trump is not a 'Conservative' or even 'right wing' really, he's just a jerk who found a 'following' in appealing to the worst qualities of 'bad right wing tropes'.
"In 1999, Trump described himself as "very pro-choice" and said "I believe in choice." (Wikipedia)
Donald Trump was a tough-guy New York 'kind of Democrat' most of his life. He always supported gay marriage. The Clintons were literally at his wedding to Melania.
He's a serial scammer, effectively a polygamist who marries woman purely on the basis of their attractiveness and then dumps them later, cavorts with prostitutes, lies, cheats, steals.
He changes his political views to suit the day, because they don't matter to him - he's just about being rich and popular.
He's managed to convince a lot of people that he is something that he is not, and that's sad, and it's brought out the worst in so many people, and that's what we are seeing today.
Have a look at this Charlie Rose interview with Senator Jeff Flake who's a much more traditional conservative, and FYI detests Donald Trump and 'fell on his sword' rather than go along with the toxicity. [1]
That's really strange because I agree with exactly everything that you said except swap Democrat for Republican I was a Democrat when I was young didn't care about anybody else now I'm a Republican and I have morals
I would say you’re definitely misunderstanding the right in the US. It has nothing to do with that here. It’s largely the left showing fear and anger, although many seem oblivious to it.
> maybe it’s that my past right-leaning self was a teenager with half-baked ideas about the world, when I reflect on what drove me that way, I cannot point to any coherent, constructive thought, mostly feelings of entitlement and an unwillingness to put myself in the other’s shoes.
Thank you for saying this. It's hard to admit an error.
The difference is that with the spinning dancer optical illusion, there's never a "wrong" way to view it.
This isn't always the case with politics, or any kind of view for that matter. It's important to empathize with people you disagree with, but it's just as important that we start with a foundation of agreed upon facts.
> it's just as important that we start with a foundation of agreed upon facts. In other words, reality isn't a point of view.
I don't think these two things are as strongly related as you suggest. Two reasonable people can look at the same problem with the same facts, make reasonable guesses on what the best course is, and yet reach two completely different, reasonable approaches to the problem. Otherwise, we would have already decided which programming language is the best one.
Some situations are more clear cut than others, and I agree that we need to separate facts from opinion better. But for situations as complex as the present and future of a country there might very well not be a "right" way.
"Reality" is not a point of view, but we only experience it through the lens of our personal experiences. No one experiences "true" reality.
Apologies in advance if this sounds snappy, this hits an issue I feel strongly about.
My local supermarket has precisely no empathy for me and the only thing I expect to agree on with the local store manager is price. Yet it is by far the most effective conduit for getting me cheap food. Effective systems simply are not very good at empathy and agreement on non-core issues is unimportant. Empathy in particular recommended at a personal level but not especially useful in politics. The critical tool is the ability to comprehend, negotiate, compromise and articulate why things are necessary.
Having "empathy" for "the left"/"the right" isn't possible. The groups are too large and diverse. Ditto for major components of the left or right like "the black vote", "the evangelicals", "people in cities", "people from Detroit", "the wealthy", etc, etc. Entities that you can have empathy for or agree on facts with are too small to be politically important like individuals or families. Politics is done by large groups who's beliefs are too nebulous to align.
An ironic stance, given that it is the left in the US that are pushing ideas like Critical Theory, which is based on post-modernism, which in turn maintains that reality ("knowledge claims") is effectively a point of view ("socially conditioned").
Various factions within the US left have been trying to convince everyone for decades that subjective truth is more important than objective facts; that "lived experience" is what really matters.
Then those same people pull a surprised Pikachu face when Orange Man comes swinging out of right field with the same argument, just in the opposite direction with "fake news" etc.
I completely disagree. I think reality IS a point of view. You are suggesting that there is only one way to think about reality. And that is complete lunacy.
There is an alternative to such polarized views. In many countries, politics is just politics, it happens in the background and is about as heart felt as the weather report.
It can be controversial and felt by all sure, but it shouldn't be a lifestyle or ideological platform that the general public use to divide themselves.
It's backoffice stuff, for the most part, and I am too busy being friends to really mind what someone's political views are, if they even think about it much at all themselves.
Now more than ever the US needs democracy, and the government needs to work harder than ever on protecting it.
But I argue that the people of America, the general public, need to give it a bloody rest with the politics. Be humans again and meet your neighbors as you are, part of the same cohort as citizens. Your vote is just as powerful, no matter how many flags, banners, or yard signs you have. Your vote is what decides the direction of your country, not the chest thumping and rallies and flag brigades.
Issues like basic rights for transgender people, protection of voting rights for minorities, health care for unavoidable illnesses, and the major economic retooling needed to mitigate the effects of climate change are 'just politics' only for people privileged enough not to suffer because of them.
I was a "Trumper" 20 years ago. Your comment initially made sense to me. Then I remembered the many wrong and harmful ideas that I recognized and rejected since that time. These ideas lead to real harm for many people.
For example, during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial for sexual harassment of his woman intern, I thought that his behavior was no big deal, that we accept that powerful men like to play around with women, and that the intern knew what she was getting into when she got the job working for him. Later, I realized that I was wrong. Those beliefs enable sexual harassment of women across society. We must reject those beliefs so women can have equal opportunity and good quality of life.
Other wrong ideas that I had:
- Poor people are poor because they are lazy.
- Violent criminals are violent because they don't want to control themselves.
- Unlucky people failed to prepare properly or were careless.
- Gay people are bad for society.
- Men should be breadwinners. Women should be housewives.
- USA is powerful because God is rewarding its Christian citizens for following His rules.
All of these ideas are wrong. These ideas harm people and make our society poorer.
Yes, I can remember my previous thought processes and see the dancer spin the other way, but the dancer is carrying a single-edged sword and spinning the other way way hurts people.
Isn't this an oversimplification of politics, though--that our political opinions are nothing more than preferences around which we form tribes, and that there is not one single tribe that is objectively correct when it comes to matter of policy when, in fact, there are correct ways of deciding on policy.
Take vaccines, for example, or the matter of wearing masks. If I am for vaccines and for wearing masks during the pandemic, am I simply in some kind of "spell" and am I not, objectively speaking, correct, because my opinion on those matters are backed by science?
There are conclusions that are more true than others, but it gets messy when people start talking policy. Ground level facts have regularly led to horrible policy decisions despite being 'correct' according to the science.
> am I not, objectively speaking, correct, because my opinion on those matters are backed by science?
It is true that shutdowns, distancing, masking are all evidence based methods to contain the pandemic. However, politics is not only about selecting what methods work, but where they are applied, and who bears the cost. There is rarely an objective 'backed by the science' answer across the board.
lol i no longer have energy for gotta hear both sides argument, whether its naive because of a myopic and narrow world view or just bad faith. like you said - how tf is mask wearing a political issue jfc
>there is not one single tribe that is objectively correct when it comes to matter of policy when, in fact, there are correct ways of deciding on policy.
There are objectively correct matters of policy when your goals, values, and assumptions have been specified. But it is these goals, values, and assumptions that separate the population into different factions. It is not simply a matter of we're right and they're wrong when it comes to settling these foundational issues.
> I simply in some kind of "spell" and am I not, objectively speaking, correct, because my opinion on those matters are backed by science?
You are under a spell that maximizing lives saved from the virus is the obviously correct goal, which is why its never even stated out loud. But your policy choices given that goal are objectively correct. The issue is whether maximizing lives saved from the virus is the correct goal. Lockdowns have a cost which is mostly borne by those who do not have the means to go for weeks or months without work or cannot work from home. There's also the mental health costs of extended social distancing. These questions are not answered by simply referencing the science behind controlling pandemics. There are very contentious foundational issues that that must be settled before we can make factual determinations about policy.
Totally agree, and I've also voted both ways before. But I also would caution against going too far on the "both sides" thinking. There are some obvious examples of regimes in the past in certain countries where one side was just bad and it was not just a matter of different opinions: Germany, Serbia, Rwanda, etc.
I think Trump and his administration lie somewhere between just being misunderstood by "the other side" and 100% depraved. I tend to think they're actually quite far to the depraved side of that spectrum, but that doesn't mean we can't still pay attention to making sure we see things from other perspectives (within reason).
Quite relevant to that, there's this one SMBC comic from almost a decade ago that I've referred back to on a monthly basis, and it just keeps getting more and more relevant every year.
This is what often happens in politics. There are a small subset of extremist on either side, and when people argue, they're pointing out the worst things the other side's extremists did. Calling each other KKK and Antifa and racist and SJW. Realistically, between those two extremes, the majority of people are good well meaning people who just don't know what the truth is anymore due to all the lies and disinformation on the web. All the clickbait shoving the most rage inducing stories about the other side all day long.
Makes me think of San Francisco Bay Area politics, where progressives have become so progressive that they in one breath say that all minorities should be accepted and that the environment is precious, but in the next espouse policies and weaponize environmental legislation to prevent immigrants from entering while simultaneously destroying the environment, as though there's no internal contradiction in those actions.
It's like people don't recognize what they truly think and do, but instead imagine themselves as a reflection of some ideological group they associate with and apply that image to their ultimately selfish motivations.
>People on the left think that anyone on the right is a lunatic, and everyone on the right thinks the same thing about the left.
I firmly disagree. Not all political climates and discourses are as poisoned as they are in the US.
That said, not all political disagreements are created equally. We can have a rousing polite disagreement about immigration levels, national financial priorities, cultural values and so on, but if the discussion is premised in a fundamental disagreement about whether or not certain people deserve dignity as human beings then there's very little common ground to build off of.
I’m fairly lefty, and used to have quite a a bit of respect for the right, since I am at heart a bit of a libertarian. I’ve lost quite a bit of it though after seeing how so many of them lined up to support sometime so obviously amoral as the current President.
Honestly, right and left is pretty nonsensical, at least the current beliefs that qualify as right or left. The average person likely has beliefs that would fall on both sides and this incessant need to categorize someone as either left or right just leads to more polarization and more extreme views. When people are told they must be one thing because they have certain views about one issue, meanwhile their views on other issues lean more to the other side. But because of this strange all or nothing paradigm going on, there's no room for common ground or compromise, it's all or nothing one side or the other, you believe one thing, so you must believe all the things or you're on this side or the other.
That's utter nonsense, political spectrums aren't all or nothing, take it or leave it, all inclusive things. A person is capable of having a range of views on different issues that may fall on either side and it's perfectly acceptable for this to be the case.
Politics like everything in life isn't black and white all or nothing, take it or leave it, it'a a bunch of shades of grey like everything else and as with most things the average person, when asked about issues without the context of left or right involved, will likely express views that fall across both sides of the political spectrum.
I think this is a really valuable way of thinking. Something similar I wish everyone would ask themselves is "why do I have this opinion/belief/etc?" for any topic.
Just like most religious people are the religion that their parents were, most people don't really choose their political beliefs. It's not to say we don't learn justifications for what we believe, but it means that the fact that we believe in one thing over another is somewhat random imo.
Somewhere out there in the US is someone who's pretty similar to me in most ways, they were just born in a part of the country where their default beliefs are different.
And for consistency, I do put more stake in someone's beliefs when they change from their "defaults".
I really, truly, would like to believe both of the major political parties in the US have reasonably good intentions. It makes logical sense—how can half of the entire population be mostly wrong, and the rest mostly right?
But then I always remember that in the United States, there is only one major political party that believes Climate Change is real. The other party believes the phenomenon is some sort of gigantic ruse.
I consider Climate Change the most pressing issue of our time, and myself a single-issue voter. Not because everything else is unimportant, but because Climate Change is even more important. We have to get this right, and we have to start immediately!
If the two parties disagreed on how to address Climate Change—say, with a carbon tax versus renewable energy subsidies—that would be one thing. But that's not the world we live in. As long as one of the parties insists that Climate Change is a complete fabrication, I don't see how I can possibly take anything they say seriously.
Political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind"
This feels a lot like GP/OP — Orwell’s politics and the English language, let’s metaphor away values and principles to the relativity of sounds from our meat flaps and we will all be free of this human condition
While this might sound reasonable and balanced in most democracies, it's just not applicable to what is/was happening in the US. Regardless of moderate views of individuals, this election was not about economic policies or other debatable differences, this election was about if we can get back to this described discourse level of coexistence, not where one side's chief strategist says it's required to behead scientists for deterrence, any adherence to truth, decency and the general right to exist for minorities was on the table.
You seem to be affected by the exact thing the post you replied to is alleging. As an outsider who reads both sides' arguments all the time, I am convinced that Republicans currently lean towards supporting freedom of speech and personal liberties, civil discourse, equal rights while the Democrats are the exact opposite. They are supporting and defending violent protests, looting, segregation(!), vowed to make lists of Trump supporters to deal with after the election etc. etc. ... Perhaps this is "truth and decency" for some people, but to many it's not.
That’s a very long winded way of saying supporting a man who went on stage and openly opined that ingesting disinfectant could be a solution for covid is very sane
Is this not a function of how rationality actually works? We all begin with premises which are fundamentally unproven and unprovable. Our conclusions follow from those premises. Change the premises and the result changes, though both sets of deductions may be perfectly rational. In other words, rationality is a process, not a set of conclusions.
One word for this is "tradition". If I've piqued your interest, please read Alasdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue," and also it's sequel with a more provocative title, "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?"
>We think it's the other side that's crazy, but we're all under the same spell.
In this case, one side is provably crazy, and the evidence from our intelligence agencies shows they are dangerous lunatics. The other side wants empathy, equality, science, and truth to rule the day.
I'm not sure how you can just hand-wave that away. Your comment is the same old "both sides" fallacy.
No surprise you've been upvoted so much. Yours is a truly remarkable comment, and observation.
I'd humbly add that at least to my eyes, most of the time the discussions on disagreements between two political parties are simply ineffective at trying to solve the disagreement, and rather irrational or badly arranged. In other words: most political discourse you hear these days seems useless.
I personally find it hard to look at the right as anything but poison.
I can disagree with you on economic ideologies, I can disagree with you on military spending, how to treat the drug epidemic, how to solve the incarceration problem, etc. However when one side literally empowers those that executed my family in WW2, it is no longer a disagreement, but a fight for my life.
I don't know of any legislation introduced by any right wing government anywhere in the world, that literally empowers Nazis. I'm sorry that you feel like you're fighting for your life, but I'd be interested to know which country you live in that you fear for your safety. Surely, unlike during WW2, we have enough freedom of movement that you can leave a place where genocide could occur at any moment?
Though the obvious answer is your family is Jewish and the right empowered Nazis, the ambiguity of your statement means your family could have been Nazis and the right empowered Americans. There are like thirty correct choices in this macabre madlib.
Neither side empowers anyone who executed your family WW2. Where on earth did you get such a delusion? Are you trying to turn the “alternative facts” thing around? What a completely insane thing to suggest.
"when one side literally empowers those that executed my family in WW2, it is no longer a disagreement, but a fight for my life."
Oddly, Trump is the most staunchly Zionist / Pro-Jewish President in American history (of course, all for his own benefit, I don't think he actually cares about any of it.)
Literally his daughter, and most trusted advisor converted to Judaism.
Paradoxically, it's now the 'global left', particularly in Europe who have faced real and serious problems of anti-semitism. In the UK, the Labour Party has had to eject several members for anti-semitic views (not just anti-Israel) and had to embark on programs to remedy the situation.
"In October 2020, the UK's human rights watchdog found Labour to be "responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination"." [1] From the BBC no less!
Most of my childhood friends grew up behind the Iron Curtain (Ukraine, Poland, Czech) or in Communist nations like Vietnam, Cambodia, China. Many family members murdered, starved. My Uncle fled with his mother through a forest across the border, chased by soldiers to escape. Many Serbian/Croatian friends who's parents lived through a very special kind of hell.
Perhaps you can ask one of your workmates from Hong Kong what he thinks about 'Socialism With Chinese Characteristics'? [2]
Please don't let us assume that one person's history or clan's mortal enemies represent the 'big picture' of anything.
Trump is a 'thuggish businessman with authoritarian tendencies' - not actually an ideologue. The extreme views on either side are toxic and have quit a history of mass murder. If we want to compare 'Deaths Caused by Stalin/Mao vs. Hitler' that would be a futile effort I think.
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are both fairly good representations of either side and they're both fine men, if you're having trouble grasping why most people would be ok with that statement, maybe spend some time in another part of the country (Utah?) and make some friends there.
[1] In October 2020, the UK's human rights watchdog found Labour to be "responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination".
The two parties provide the opposing agendas which dominate, and the particular characteristics of each candidate are secondary.
Especially when neither party has much to offer the average citizen any more, they have built their strength traditionally on low voter turnout where extreme factions loudly broadcasting gradually become over-represented in the most polarizing way.
As cycles continue only the most polarizing issues drive the turnout, and for turnout to grow beyond a certain point the majority of the potential voters must perceive the other party as a more serious threat, when compared to any security offered by their own party which they (might) have chosen because they found it less offensive (maybe only in past cycles too).
The parties no longer need to have as much to offer the average citizen as cycles go on, when they can get contending turnout from their own extremists combined with orders of magnitude more sympathizers who can be convinced to strongly fear what the _other side_ could take away.
Seems like after a party has been around for longer than any living person, they will not get support by having more to offer average citizens than in previous cycles, only by taking less away from them.
So the average citizen hasn't had a positive outcome within reach for a while.
Now it's too late, these top candidates are realistically as youthful as you can get compared to the grand old parties themselves, and regardless of personal integrity or leadership style can not offer anything above that from the parties alone.
Even in the case of Trump's extreme personality, which the Democrats did not even try to nominate a candidate having that feature, so this element was as one-sided as you can get.
I saw agreement from both sides that a wet dishrag could defeat Trump if only 270 electors represent voters who just plain dislike or hate him. Conversely it was recognized Trump would win if he had merely 270 electors of voters who dislike or hate one or more of the current items on the Democratic party platform.
Neither strategy can offer anything to the majority of the citizens in the political middle, the true average citizen, since turnout has been driven by fear not opportunity.
Building a coalition from a carefully-crafted extreme attention-getting position, and pushing hard from there so the other side ends up below the 50 percent needed to be in power, has turned out to prevail over representing even the middle 50 percent of voters which is how it was supposed to be at a minimum.
So once the issues and/or personalities representing them have reached full polarity, 50 becomes more of a constant to be converged upon from afar rather than a starting point to build a majority from in both directions.
Resulting in half the voters who turn out, and half the politically centrist citizens (which is a much larger group by a variable multiple of active voters) who will always be dissatisfied and these are two different groups (but having significant overlap), the latter of which is the core of the majority that all parties are supposed to be treating as constituents.
But the core of the majority in the middle doesn't have a voice because they don't have any party which represents them any more, the parties are doing other things with the money and the concerns of centrist citizens are given lowest priority.
The party gets more votes over the long run by fear-mongering against the other side regardless of who the candidates are at the time, and only declining resources can be justified which might actually benefit the majority of citizens.
Problem is, the majority are voting against their own best interest because their own best interest has not been available for a number of cycles. Rather each side votes against what's perveived as the other's best interest instead, since that's the only thing at stake anyway.
So the majority of voters end up speaking for the entire population as designed, but all votes are cast against someone's best interest because the minority party is voting exactly the same as the majority in this regard.
So it's unanimous by both parties that as few of the average citizens as possible should have their best interest be served, and to redefine democracy in that direction can not be accomplished during a single cycle or maybe not even a single generation.
Ending up with the choice between a trustworthy Joe and a dishonest Don the thing that doesn't really matter to half the voters as much as it should.
It would probably help if there were parties which were younger than the candidates.
In my country where there isn't a two party only system, but a plethora of positions ranging from the most extreme to the most moderate, for decades the left Vs right battle created a gradient of opinions
There are lunatics on the left and on the right, sometimes they have been violent, sometimes they put our democracy at risk, but in the end both left and right rejected them
We had our momentary lapse of reason when we (not me, but still...) elected Berlusconi, it seemed we lost our mind (we probably did) and nothing worse could ever happen to any other country politically speaking
Trump is on a new level of tribalism, divide and polarization though
How a real lunatic, with evident sever mental health issues ended up at the white house is gonna be a big black spot on American history (the greatest democracy in the World, the greatest country in the world, etc. etc.)
I'm not American but my non-political echo chambers have gotten quite political. Chess, Infosec, Atheism, philosophy, reddit, etc HATE trump for example. Then I have other echo chambers that tend to love Trump. Personally I'm neither side as I'm not American. I also enjoy looking at both sides and it's remarkable how different the viewpoints really are. The echo chambers worked exactly as expected, those places that hated trump only hear about things that are terrible about trump. Nothing negative about Biden at any point. Every single Gaffe by Biden was portrayed as completely fake as deepfakes or old footage dubbed over etc.
Generally speaking my echo chambers leaned anti-trump. The one thing I failed to find in the last 2 months is any actual discourse. There is absolutely no neutral viewpoints. There is absolutely no discussions between the 2 camps. The political divide in the USA is worse than I have ever seen it.
The perception I have, that wasn't a free and fair election. What's even more curious is that nobody seems to care. Ends justify the means. Which hey, I personally very much prefer Trump to lose. However, if healing the political divide is a goal, that's basically impossible now.
OK, so the transition from Make America Great Again slogan to Make America Decent Again (and Better) reality is inevitable and welcome. It is easy to get overjoyed by results of the U.S. Presidential Election (and some celebration certainly is in order).
Uniting the country is definitely a commendable goal, though it is easier said than done. The election results across all levels clearly illustrate just how divided and polarized this land is. Thus, it will take quite a lot of time and effort to see a reasonable progress on this front. We all can play our part in it by a polite and constructive dialog with opponents and first finding common ground on such pressing and all-encompassing issues as coronavirus pandemic, environmental protection, social justice and health care reform.
In the meantime, let us not forget that, in order to restore the heavily damaged moral fabric of this country, relevant measures should pass through the Congress. And while Democrats retain control of the House, the opposing party might retain control of the Senate. Which most certainly will lead to a significant gridlock in moving forward with the democratic and, in some cases, progressive agenda unless Democrats retake control in the Senate. Remember, winning a battle is not a guarantee for winning a war. That is why the U.S. Senate run-off elections in Georgia to be held on January 5 (https://georgia.gov/vote-2020-runoff-elections) are crucial.
My experience talking to the other side during this administration is that they are completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views. How do you debate with people who don't care about facts or reason?
In addition their leadership appears to be completely unwilling to act and good faith and the rank in file appear unwilling to hold them accountable for that fact.
I would love to be able to see some way to find common ground, but It seems to me that doing so would just be playing the sucker.
Some policies, when detached from political partisanship, could be appreciated by voters on both sides.
For instance, for those who believe in human rights and social justice (a supposedly 'left' concern), there's good cause for opposition to China. In terms of jobs and national security, wresting some of China's high-tech manufacturing capability back within US borders would be a boon for employment across 'middle-America' (a supposedly 'right' concern). More importantly, I think both the concerns of human rights, and the employment of your fellow citizens, should not be a partisan issue.
I think most people want the world to be a better place to live, with better human rights, and a wage. Allowing China to gain leverage on the world, despite a track record of human rights abuses, and building a trade deficit with them, isn't really in the general voters interest.
And this is just one example. I'm sure there's more common ground if you look just at policy.
Yes, there is a ton of common ground with 99% of the people on the "other" side, whichever side that is from you.
If one big problem facing U.S. politics right now is that everything is distilled down to a binary either-or with no room for nuance, its sibling problem is assuming that everyone on the "other side" from you is the same, i.e. that the crazy extremist you see on TV is a prototypical example of everyone in that group. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
> My experience talking to the other side during this administration is that they are completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views.
This absolutely goes both ways; that is the biggest problem.
Wait what?! Doesn't one side want to take the guns away? Doesn't the other side want teachers with guns in schools?
Well, it turns out the majority of Americans not only agree on the need for better gun controls, they actually agree overwhelmingly on certain specific controls as well.
It's a classic wedge issue though, and FUD is deployed to drive that wedge between both sides which prevents most major cooperation on the matter. Unless there is a crisis, and then both sides will make an easy sacrifice to look like they are doing something. Like bump stocks. Nobody really gives AF about bump stocks, so they banned them.
I sincerely believe that there is definitely some common ground. Otherwise I would not have posted that thought.
Is it easy to find that common ground? Of course, not. Will it take a lot of time and effort (from all sides)? Absolutely. But, in the end, it is certainly worth trying, at the very least. That is why I have listed the areas, which I think represent some aspects that I hope we all could easier agree on than some other aspects.
Finally, I think that it is important not to generalize people, based on our own (limited) experience. Some people on other side(s) are more flexible than others. Moreover, I believe that people can change, including their point of view on various issues. If we will dismiss the idea that others are or can become open minded, we will shut the door to a potential dialog, which could bring us even more trouble.
The USA seems bound for "illiberal democracy", a la Orbán in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdogan in Turkey, Kaczyński in Poland, and Modi in India.
(If you are a Republican, assume a Democratic autocrat, and if you are a Democrat assume a Republican autocrat.)
Democracy in general has the weakness that the party in power can constrain the ability of the opposition to compete. We don't yet know how to stop the slide into illiberal democracy from happening.
In most cases you're likely just engaging in rhetorical volleys with the other person.
Until someone trusts you to handle their concerns and vulnerabilities with care, you aren't going to get anywhere.
The relationship is paramount in communication, and it's the one thing that social media (and the pandemic) has most effectively eliminated from our daily lives. In this particular case I think we all need to 'act local and think global'...stop sparring on the Internet and try to make inroads to mutual understanding with those that you can see and hear.
That's right, on the same ballot where Florida solidly selected a republican president, republican legislature and republican house delegation, they went >60% on a $15 minimum wage.
Progressive legislation is popular. Progressives are not, because of branding and demagoguery (and no small amount of bald-faced lying).
That's common ground. It may not look like it, but it's there.
Politics is all about uncommon ground. People hardly ever can have one, as the word suggests the tragedy of commons follows quickly upon reaching it. Mutually beneficial status qua don't last as somebody always want to get more of the benefit than others, and exploit the situation.
People are not born equal, tribes are not equal, nations are not made equal. There are always the weaker, and stronger.
Politics is how you get along, and live another day with all above concerned. How somebody weak can live along somebody strong, without having the later kill him simply because he can. Same way, how a strong one can live with peace of mind knowing that if he lets the weak leave, they may well live to grow big, and surpass him in the future.
> Is there really any common ground?
There can be. On an individual level, where there's mutual trust. At the right time, better not in the heat of this moment.
I remember having a very fruitful discussion with a Trump/Pence supporting friend, somewhere in the middle of Trump's presidential term.
My friend's background as a conservative evangelical is _very_ different from mine. He is a decent and caring man, and I am 100% sure he'd describe me in the same way.
It started with hearing the news together. A few discussion points were Trump's pussy grabbing video, his anti-intellectualism, and the environment. The discussion also meandered through science and religion, religion as a fertile ground for symbolic language and ended up with virtue signaling.
We were able to come to the conclusion that this Trump-evangelicals alliance would damage them for years to come. How it would be better for them to ally with decent people instead, whatever their view on religion.
Try to assume their views, and then work from there. What would you believe if you start out with the opposite's viewpoint? What is the easiest acceptable modification of their believe system? Move them step by step.
No. “Common ground” is a false peace flag... a friendly sounding phrase meant to play on liberal preoccupation with “a fair system”
If you’re unfamiliar with how conservatives do business, it’s worth investigating. Start here: https://youtu.be/MAbab8aP4_A
Regarding common ground, I believe so. Just as several people were shy to admit voting for [candidate name redacted] those are the same willing to seek common ground.
I worry more about those for whom politics is a team sport, and who ignore whom they marginalize in their quest for ideals.
harimau777 asks:>Is there really any common ground?<
First one must ask whether there is "common ground" within the factions of the Democratic party itself.
Once victory has been declared and legislators and executives ensconced in their offices, a feeding frenzy will ensue within the Democratic Party. Each faction will demand that their agenda be pursued first with the most money, time and effort. Unfortunately resources are limited (in particular time is limited to 4 and, in some cases, 2 years). Political infighting amongst these factions will increase to a level so intense that people may long for the return of Donald Trump.
My experience talking to the other side during this administration is that they are completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views. How do you debate with people who don't care about facts or reason?
Your comment about "facts or reason" is sort of odd given your post gives no details concerning what you consider these to be. I mean, I could fill in some but it seems like without you giving a clue as to what you're referring to, people can only shout for you or against you.
There’s a slate star codex post that describes research demonstrating that conservative Americans can predict the responses of progressive Americans to political questions, but the converse is not true. It’s not that conservatives are “unwilling to consider” conflicting ideas; in fact, they do a much better job of modeling conflicting ideas than progressives do!
Most of the difference is, I think, not based on factual disagreement, but based on principal disagreements on issues like the personhood of fetuses.
Correct and it appears that even though Trump lost, Trumpism allowed most Republican Senators to keep their seats and they even won more seats in the House, and didn’t lose a single Statehouse.
This election has been a repudiation of Trump but not Trumpism.
I can get along with people from a different political camp, no problem. My gf is liberal, I'm conservative. We have lively debates about it, but we respect each other and never let politics get in the way of the relationship. It's as simple as that.
But over the last few years friends called me a nazi and a racist, coworkers ostracized me for having unfashionable political views, many people cut contact entirely under the premise that I "support" white supremacy. This isn't some shit you easily forgive, and it isn't something you ever forget.
This wasn't just about politics, or teams, or policy preferences, or red vs blue or whatever. This is people denying your humanity on no grounds whatsoever, and when you point it out they say "well, minorities have always felt this way, so shut up and take it." That's fair enough, but it isn't about groups of people oppressing other groups of people. It's about Bill and John and Sally-- people who used to be friends and colleagues-- treating me like I'm a monster for no reason whatsoever other than a mass psychosis. That's not something you can ever come back from.
> This is people denying your humanity on no grounds whatsoever, and when you point it out they say "well, minorities have always felt this way, so shut up and take it."
Here's where they are coming from: Donald Trump was denying people's humanity on the grounds that they came from south of the border. He was literally separating children from their parents to scare others away.
When I have explained that to Trump supporters, they immediately gaslight me; telling me it wasn't that bad, or Trump's fault.
> It's about Bill and John and Sally-- people who used to be friends and colleagues-- treating me like I'm a monster for no reason whatsoever other than a mass psychosis.
They don't mean to. Really, they don't. The trouble is, they just can't find a reason.
The only reason I can think of is that Trump supporters really don't know what's happening. That they don't believe it. It looks a lot like mass psychosis.
It looks even more like a cult. I would know: I grew up in one. If I can come back from that, you can come back from this. The first step is empathy.
Are you certain that you aren't in the "group of people oppressing other groups of people"?
I know it can be hard to confront that question. I did it about a year ago. When I did, I found out the answer was "no".
I dug a little deeper, and realized it wasn't a soft "no", either. I was an instrumental part of an institution that tears families apart and drives children to suicidal ideation. I always knew there were issues, but I had plenty of excuses for those issues and the institution's part in them.
If you really aren't a Nazi or a racist, then will you reconsider your support for the GOP? Bill, John, and Sally didn't just pull that out of their asses. What they said to you was disrespectful and dehumanizing, but it didn't come from nothing.
Anyone read a practical 20 year plan to decrease divisiveness in the US (say, to 1990s levels)?
Or: Ignoring funding, what would you do?
An example year 1 goal: "Get X million people to watch 10 hours/year of strangers who they would normally not encounter or agree with, and to see them as real people."
To do that, produce and televise + stream a long-form TV show, like a version of Braver Angels' Red/Blue Workshops[1] that's actually fun to watch. Imagine a well-produced show with deep participant profiles - a cross between a reality TV show and a HBO/Netflix long-form movie.
It would humanize the participants first, then after viewers care about them, their lives, and their families, the actors gradually explain their backgrounds and opinions - some of which a viewer will disagree with. Viewers would "meet" people they may not interact with regularly. (Sarah Silverman's "I Love You, America"[2] is the closest I've seen to this, and it's not all that close.)
This would need to be a multi-decade plan, probably with philanthropic and public funding.
I think any plan that neglects ratcheting down high-stakes issues to more local levels is fighting against strong headwinds.
In other words, we can avoid winner-take-all dysfunction by allowing more diversity in governance. If we make every issue national, it makes it too important who runs the national government.
Within reason, we should find ways to let California be California and Alabama be Alabama. Alabama and California shouldn't have to struggle against one another as much as they do.
Compulsory national service to prevent people from living their entire lives within the bubbles into which they were born. Compulsory service erases geographic distance along with racial and class divides.
1. Separate opinion journalism from reporting journalism.
Opinion journalism can be w/e. Reporting journalism has to be fact checked. Masquerading as reporting journalism should be a big bad. You gotta disclose opinion journalism up front, like you gotta put a Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes.
2. Mandate non-partisan districting boards and do away with "safe" districts.
This would lose majority-minority districts, which are responsible for a big proportion of our Reps of color. But safe districts skyrocket partisanship; politicians in safe districts can wander super far from the mainstream--think Steve King for example. And actually they oftentimes have to become radical in order to survive primaries. There's only so much you can do here with the current system but, a little would help a lot.
3. Empower state and local governments by repealing balanced budget amendments and term limits.
State governments have really hamstrung themselves with these policies, and as a result the federal government has to do a lot. This creates a perception--right or wrong--that a far away government is telling you how to live your life. If the federal government has secured rights for all and managed federal concerns, it should be reasonable for say, Oregon to have one set of gun regulations and Illinois to have another.
4. Make voting compulsory, make Election Day a holiday, expand early voting, establish same day registration everywhere.
The majority of Senators (and in midterms, the majority of Reps) are elected by a minority of people who are much more partisan than the mean. This pushes politicians out of the mainstream.
5. Federally finance elections, shorten the length, and amend the Constitution to obviate Citizens United.
Campaigns and their ads are super polarizing. Special interests run messaging campaigns on wedge issues (abortion, immigration, gun rights) in order to pass bills like SOPA or subsidies for fossil fuel energy companies in the night. Campaign finance reform disarms all this.
6. Limit the terms of Supreme Court Justices to 18 years and enact jurisdiction stripping.
The stakes of Supreme Court nominations are so high that it drives us all crazy. We should limit their terms so that 2-term presidents get to nominate 2 Justices, and we should limit the power of the Supreme Court on the basis that it's a deeply undemocratic and unaccountable institution. Pro-lifers feel this every day, as do progressives. We all agree it's bad; let's change it.
7. Enact affirmative action for mortgage companies, fund housing assistance, and reform public schools.
The US has a huge de facto segregation issue due to generations of discriminatory practices by mortgage companies, and the sky high cost of housing in neighborhoods with good schools. This creates fertile ground for bubbles and othering, not just in adults but also in children.
8. Re-establish affirmative action for colleges, and make it free.
The partisanship gap in the US now largely traces the education and income gap.
9. Establish clear boundaries on religious freedom.
Religious freedom is a fundamental part of the fabric of the United States, but so are personal liberty and individual rights. We need to give people the ability to live out their beliefs, but also establish a pluralistic society free of discrimination towards _and from_ the religious. Fighting a culture via religious freedom debases us all.
I don’t think this can be done without altering social media algorithms to revert back from the “engagement-maximizing” firehose of vituperative extremist polarizing political sludge they pump into everyone’s feed these days.
The thing is, any reasonable, evidence based discussion is going to end up concluding that the 90% of GOP talking points are lies, so right leaning people would claim the show is left biased.
It seems to me that the left is the side supporting freedom right now. I don't think someone is free if they don't have the material resources to make their own decisions. That's to say nothing of minority rights and ending the war on drugs.
While it’s certainly true that America is not the most free country in the world, it’s still inside the top 50. What freedoms are you trying to exercise but are being stifled?
> Uniting the country is definitely a commendable goal
This is hard and may backfire in a deeply divided country. To me, instead of trying to achieve a common ground (which, in the current situation often means forcing 49% to the position of the 51%; with the chance of a swap in 2-4 years) we should learn to live, share space and collaborate with folks who hold different political views.
We can disagree on politics, but it should not prevent us from working as a team on software or sharing a beer after work. We are not at war with the other half of the country. We should respect their opinions and avoid unnecessary confrontations. My 2c.
The problem here is that treating politics as 'just politics' is the realm of people privileged enough that they have never directly suffered because of those politics.
Transgender rights, for example, are never 'just politics' for me: they are a basic moral issue that deeply affects the life of one of my close friends.
I was agreeing with you until your next to last sentence. Sometimes you cannot respect someone else's opinions.
I believe the fundamental dichotomy is that, for some of us, our opinions are not who we are. We can change our opinions and remain the same people.
For others, their opinions ARE who they are. They cannot separate out their beliefs from themselves, so when you question their opinions, they feel you are attacking them personally.
Please don't assume that 'one side' has the unilateral moral authority to 'make things better and less divided'.
This implication directly contradicts the part about 'unity'.
'One side' having the run of the system will absolutely lead to greater divisions.
Trump is gone, I think most reasonable people will take solace in that. Now that he is gone, having regular checks and balances is a 'good thing'. Having the 'other side' with a narrow, 1 vote majority in the Senate is probably a really reasonable check on power, as Senators often break ranks with the party so there's plenty of room for a 'really good bit of legislation' to get through if the Dems want to push for it.
I don't make any assumptions about any unilateral moral authority on issues. That is why I call for a constructive dialog at all levels and across all groups of our society.
As for your argument on checks and balances - yes, generally, it is definitely a very good thing. However, when one side uses their position of chamber majority not to collaborate and compromise, but to throw a wrench into "wheels of democracy" and gridlock the Congress (especially, considering the voting record of the current majority in the Senate and essentially zero breaking ranks history), which might be extremely unproductive and even damaging to the lives of the American people, that IMO does not represent the "checks and balances" that you're talking about.
How often do senators break ranks? The Hastert rule and Senate majority leader rules have effectively neutered both chambers to rubber stamps for deals and bills negotiated out of public eye.
The playing field need to be leveled here so that party leadership doesn't have a stranglehold on what comes to a vote via backroom deals. Legislators need to have skin in the game, with real debate and actual votes to show where they stand.
Don't we first need to undo the damage that Trump has done? I can see getting to a point where neither side acts unilaterally, but only after things have been balanced to actually be in the center between the sides.
It was not inevitable that Biden would win. The electoral college is a major hurdle to overcome — he still came pretty close to losing a few key states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which would have made it much much less likely for him to win. It took hard work, lots of money, and historically high turnout to get here. Incumbents rarely lose. This was pushing a boulder uphill. But it happened. Biden 2020.
It will help to have an Executive administration that doesn't have its heel on the wedge for the next four years gleefully driving it deeper for adulation and ratings.
The election of the Senate is as representative of the country as election of the president. The idea they have to vote in accordance with your opinion on issues in order to 'restore the moral fabric of the country', whatever that means, is condescending and self-righteous.
I am not alone in arguing that the Senate is not representative of the country, just as the electoral college is not. And it will increasingly become less and less representative as more and more people move to a few cities in a few states.
I don't think that my post promotes an idea senators have to vote in accordance with my opinion on issues. The point I was trying to make is that there is a very real threat of gridlock in the Congress (especially, considering the voting record of the current majority in the Senate), which might be extremely unproductive and even damaging to the lives of the American people.
The following definition that was shared by someone on Quora is quite good, though a bit academic. Moral fabric is "a metaphor for the flexible but still assured structure of virtue that forms the basis of integrity and holds society together".
To put it simpler, I would define moral fabric as a set of foundational moral principles (common moral ground) that most people in a particular society agree on and recognize as guidelines throughout their daily lives. These principles form a cohesive environment of values, which is referred to a moral fabric.
Generally I agree with your statement here. But realize you said “we need to find common ground” then went on to say the dems need total control to progress their agenda. These conflict. This attitude is a reason for the division, and are just plain one sided. If you wanted common grounds you’d want the two parties to work together, not one have total control of the entire gov.
Well, let me literally reproduce my other comment in this thread, which was a reply to another person. It is not that easy to find, so, for your convenience, I'm reposting it below. While it talks about "checks and balances" point, I think that exactly the same argument can be made about "common ground". I hope that it makes sense to you.
As for your argument on checks and balances - yes, generally, it is definitely a very good thing. However, when one side uses their position of chamber majority not to collaborate and compromise, but to throw a wrench into "wheels of democracy" and gridlock the Congress (especially, considering the voting record of the current majority in the Senate and essentially zero breaking ranks history), which might be extremely unproductive and even damaging to the lives of the American people, that IMO does not represent the "checks and balances" that you're talking about.
What is really keeping me up at night is the existential problem the US faces for the next 50 years: the ever increasingly large divide that is the polarizing of the electorate. We have to come together as Americans or someone will divide and conquer us.
IMO the saddest part of it all is that many people seem to be choosing paths of division. I have different family members who are firmly inside bubbles on both sides of the political spectrum. And all of them are way too comfortable in parroting the divisive language they hear on their favorite network news channels. The terms right/left, red/blue, republican/democrat, conservative/liberal are commonly used with insulting tones towards opposing sides. And when they use these broad terms they seem totally content that they have made a strong argument on some issue that actually boils down to making huge over-generalizations of people, and over-simplifications of complex issues.
I don't accept the demonization of fellow Americans based on bad faith arguments, but I sometimes I feel like this is a minority opinion. We should absolutely fight against specific events, behaviors, political rhetoric, and policies we disagree with. And sometimes individuals or small groups deserve to have their actions demonized as completely against our values. But looking for simple labels to place on literally millions of complex humans in order to point at simple answers to issues where simple answers don't exist is a fool's game.
I am not aboard with this type of "both sides are problematic" thinking.
Only one side denies climate change. Only one side denies medical consensus on vaccines and pandemic prevention techniques. Only one side is okay with mocking a disabled reporter (to pick one egregious example among countless).
Yes, if you're red/republican/conservative/right, you're voting for those things, you're signing off on them.
We don't need to "come together and find common ground" on those issues. We need to figure out how truth and decency lost their footing and slipped off the center stage.
What really saddens me is that both sides recognize this problem in their opposition but never in their side. Or if they do recognize it, it's quickly hand-waved away because when their side does it, it's for the "greater good". The political double standards keep reaching new heights.
When people focus on the details of strategies for success in facing our shared problems it is relatively easy to test ideas and get people from all political views on board with effective solutions. When people focus on identifying and criticizing enemies it turns people off, builds barriers, and prevents the generation and spread of effective strategies for facing shared challenges.
I feel like a big reason for the divide is the filter bubbles[1] the public has trapped themselves in. I wanted to force myself to read news from both sides of the divide rather than simply NPR, which was my go-to source for several years. In spite of RSS readers being essentially dead, there are still RSS feeds available. So I mashed up feeds from 10 left and right leaning sources each and created Smash the Bubble[2], mostly for personal consumption.
I have tried to do the same, signing up for the Flip Side newsletter, among other things. I think it’s still hard for me, an over-educated progressive, to understand the American right. Here are the problems:
1. Reality is often only reported in “liberal” news sources. A lot of information is censored on right wing sources.
2. Both types of news sources editorialize in the headline. Sometimes it’s hard to know they even refer to the same story.
3. People trying to achieve balance in reporting often relocate players onto the wrong team. For example, the Mueller report is not a “left wing” document and balance is not achieved by putting Mueller against a Trump surrogate.
4. “Liberal” sources already include plenty of right wing opinions. For example, David Brooks and Ross Douthat write for the New York Times. There’s no equivalent among the Wall St Journal columnists or Fox News hosts.
5. News stories found only in right wing sources are usually mendacious. For example, reporting about the Michigan ballot glitch without mentioning that it was human error and corrected before reporting the results.
Fundamentally, it’s not that we have differing information, it’s that we only accept information that confirms our world view. I can read dozens of articles written from the point of view that universal health care will destroy the country and not one will ever resonate with me. It’s just too silly to me.
I am liberal who do read conservative newspapers regularly. The amount of lies in conservative papers is astonishing. Not bias, not choosing topics, but flat out lies.
I think that they see their role to push for their side and have zero ideological commitment to any semblance of anything else. Do you get sleepy Biden in clear stage of dementia, again and again.
Note that I an not claiming journals should be objective. They can't. Just that there are more lines to cross. And frankly, liberal journals do go out of their way to extend empathy to "other side" more often.
I do this over in the UK, I read a selection of newspapers with different agenda's and if a story catches my interest I go look at wikipedia if it has an article, if it's a "Science says"/"Study says" I go look at the abstract of the study.
It's really hard to get a balance look at the news when everything has it's own slant but it's worth the effort I think to understand the nuance.
Yes. Probably the worst thing about this election for me is that it seems to demonstrate conclusively that 2016 was no aberration, no temporary mass hysteria, no failed experiment in electing a political outsider to “drain the swamp”. This distorted world view of us-vs-them tribalism seems to have totally consumed our political system. Objective reality is dismissed by the majority of the population—most blatantly on the right, but also, increasingly, on the left. Even more shocking to me, highly regarded election data scientists have twice now somehow been blinded to this, releasing poll after poll that fail to capture what is actually happening in the minds of the electorate.
Carl Sagan, in his 1995 book ‘The Demon-Haunted World’, wrote:
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The moment he prophesied now appears to be upon us. I don’t know how we can restore this country to one where people mostly act in good faith and try to base decisions in science and fact. I see so many incredibly compassionate people supporting the most despicable politicians. Right-wingers on Twitter repeating false talking points that the left are trying to destroy the country while tweeting about how proud they are of local youth offering free lawn care to disabled and senior citizens. Left-wingers openly insulting rural and conservative people as the scum of the earth while relentlessly supporting policies intended to improve those same peoples’ lives. How does this happen? What do we have to do—as individuals, as nations, as humans—to get it to stop?
There was this really good take on this divide by Andrew Yang a few days ago on CNN [clip from Twitter - 0]. Yang is the only candidate I saw who seemed to understand people from all parts of the US. Also, it would have been nice to have a president who understood technology.
I prefer candidates that don't think they understand technology.
Thinking you understand technology seems to reliably lead to overconfidence. That's better left to advisers, who then have their advice filter by people who are sceptical of things that aren't tried and true and well understood on the holistic basis of actual use in practice.
I was talking to a US expat this afternoon. Besides the congratulations and commenting the expectations for the new administration we reflected on the damage the last 30-40 years of propaganda for individualism have made.
Individuals, their inner world and potential are very important, but you have systematically mortified the importance - and the “evolutionary advantage” - of the human societal organization.
Over optimization for the hedonistic “self bootstrapped” man turned most of you - that don’t have the strength, but most likely the luck, to be Randian heroes - into the exact opposite: submissive corporate drones.
It’s time to lay the groundwork for long term change, isn’t it?
Yes, the basic human societal unit is the tribe, as evidenced by Dunbar’s number. Within tribes, interconnected extended families used to facilitate the social cohesion. In the US, both the small-scale society and the extended family have been harmed by atomizing and dispersing people for mostly economic reasons.
It seems like the divide comes from an escalating fixation on having your side win, rather than doing the best for the country. As each side focuses more on winning even at the expense of public good, the other side has to ratchet up to match it to get any input at all.
I sort of feel like we're in that old tale where king Solomon says they should cut the baby in two, and both sides are like "ok, I'll take my half of the baby, then."
Ultimately, though, I personally blame the extreme right wing, mostly. I think they're dying, and they're not going down without a fight, like, you know, disinformation, bullying, holding the country hostage metaphorically, whatever. If they're going down, the whole system's going down with them.
I personally subscribe to the idea that week need to kill the self serving two party duopoly[0]
Part of the problem is the candidates the parties are fielding. I know lots of people who view trump, clinton and biden as corrupt. None of them are good candidates.
However, the key point is that such a system would mainly benefit a potential third party, but any changes to the system need to be agreed upon by the current representatives whose interests and reelection would be hurt by such a change.
From the perspective of a European outsider, I very much agree. A lot of problems seem to stem from the two party system.
I'm just wondering if there is a good way for a strong third (and fourth and fifth...) party to form under the current system? Are there any good examples from other countries making that transition, and can they be applied in the US as well?
Duverger's law has a lot of redundancy in our current system. If you implement something like IRV on the state level for presidential elections without handling the Electoral College, then you've just further increased the odds of Republican presidencies.
I honestly believe this is just a return to normal for both sides. Conservatism, before being injected with neoliberalism by Thatcher and Reagan, has been about leaving other countries alone while focusing on protecting American interests. Speak softly and carry a big stick. Conservatives have never wanted US hegemony traditionally. Preservation of Bretton Woods has had to be a focus post-WWII in order to combat the spread of anti-American communism. Now that the Cold War has ended, conservatives have tried to find a way back to focusing on American interests. It’s a delicate balance that has to be struck though. I think this is also the reason for the split in the Democratic Party. “Establishment” members are focused on preserving the neoliberal Bretton Woods status quo. The progressives are focused on doing away with the oligarchy that system has created and moving towards a more socialistic global society.
I believe this is really just a return to the way things used to be, before the US decided to intervene in WWII and had to find a way to pay for the massive cost of that. Conservative and liberal are not opposites like everybody thinks these days. Conservative and progressive are opposites. Liberal and authoritarian are opposites. Both parties are (or should be) focused on the American ideal of liberalism and representative government chosen by the people while either preserving traditional values or advocating for enlightenment values.
However, real life is not that cut and dry, politics are messy, parties don’t fall exactly along these lines and the media plays a part in dictating who should believe what. But in general I think Trump is an indicator that we’re headed for a more traditional alignment of values. Who knows, perhaps a viable third party will emerge from this. A Conservative party, a progressive party, and a Bretton Woods establishment party.
> I honestly believe this is just a return to normal for both sides. Conservatism, before being injected with neoliberalism by Thatcher and Reagan, has been about leaving other countries alone while focusing on protecting American interests. Speak softly and carry a big stick. Conservatives have never wanted US hegemony traditionally. Preservation of Bretton Woods has had to be a focus post-WWII in order to combat the spread of anti-American communism. Now that the Cold War has ended, conservatives have tried to find a way back to focusing on American interests. It’s a delicate balance that has to be struck though. I think this is also the reason for the split in the Democratic Party. “Establishment” members are focused on preserving the neoliberal Bretton Woods status quo. The progressives are focused on doing away with the oligarchy that system has created and moving towards a more socialistic global society.
I would agree, to some extent, if Trump wasn't the Conservative candidate. Trump has flouted the law to the extent that very, very few American Presidents have. Where I was afraid that Obama was passing too many Executive Orders, Trump outright tried to rule by Executive Order fiat. Conservative parties pre-Bretton Woods were certainly isolationist and domestic-first, but also had a deep affection for the rule of law. I would oppose a traditionally conservative party politically, but would not be nearly as negative about it as I am about a President that seems to want to actively subvert rule of law.
I believe your second sentence should end as, "has been about focusing on protecting American interests while leaving other [more powerful] countries alone."
What surprises me is how politicised American teenagers have become nowadays. I'm a (European) Millenial, and when I was 14 neither I nor my peers had any faith or interest in politics. Have a look on Reddit, where most of the population is US-based teenagers: in that place politics has infected every single discussion. /r/The_Donald was a bunch of angry teenagers.
Meh, I must have become a cynical grumpy old person: to me politics has always been a game for rich, old people.
I mean, at least on the surface, things seemed pretty optimistic in the late 1980s through the 1990s, from what I remember. It wasn’t a utopia, but it’s easy to see how there would be less pressure for young people to be involved in politics.
The Cold War ended and the USSR peacefully dissolved, democracy was ascendant, the Good Friday Agreement ended The Troubles, East and West Germany reunified, the Schengen Area and the Eurozone were established, the International Space Station opened an era of international cooperation in peaceful space exploration, life expectancy was up, disposable income was up, new and amazing technologies were developed at record pace, substantially improved treatments for fatal conditions like HIV and cancer were entering the market, we’d nearly cracked the human genome, we’d made great progress in eradicating infectious diseases, people around the world were being lifted out of poverty, crime was down, the Western economy was strong. The world seemed less divided and closer together than ever.
Today, tensions between superpowers are up. Russia and North Korea have renewed the threat of nuclear armed conflict. The UK exited the EU. There’s an obesity crisis. Many of our amazing technologies have turned out to be terribly unhealthy and destabilising. Authoritarianism is on the rise, along with domestic and sectarian terrorism. The Western economy was shattered in 2008 and now there’s a global pandemic. Immigrants fleeing instability in other countries have led to political upheaval and conflict. The US became an unreliable ally. And, above all, the existential threat of climate change looms over their entire future.
It could be you were just checked out. I certainly paid quite a bit of attention during the Bush years. (When I was a teenager) I wouldn’t say many of my peers paid as much attention but I grew up in a very conservative and rural area.
Devolution of power is a solution to the polarisation. The division in the country is real and deep and in some places inconsolable, rather than just a media mirage. Rather than increasingly violent competition for the presidential office or the federal government, a more flexible union is probably a sane idea.
The US faces no threat of being conquered, it has the most powerful military and intelligence capacity in the world by a healthy margin. Insofar as foreign interference creates division, it's precisely the lack of decentralisation that makes these attacks dangerous.
From what I see, the polarization is continuing to grow, and with Trump grabbing 70 million votes even when his gov failed majestically at beating the virus, the next few years is going to ne interesting.
Most people I know are happy and celebrating, but I can't seem to get that worked up. Certainly I'm glad Trump lost, but the 70M votes he got, and the fact that this was a close election... man, this country is screwed long term if we can't figure out a way to find some common ground and listen to each other. Being at each other's throats all the time will only destroy us all in the long run.
Interestingly, tech workers are responsible for such a resilient divide. Tech workers, the most numerous demographic on this thread, are the ones coding up the bubbles or creating and maintaining their infrastructure.
The purpose of the bubbles is to keep you clicking or pressing. The purpose of that is to deliver ads or sell premium services. If uncomfortable views are presented a user may click or press out of the service. Those uncomfortable views are not to be confused with click bait allowed to drive bubble responses.
No use blaming the architects or company leaders. If you are coding it up, maintaining the infrastructure, or providing auxiliary support to the bubble, you are responsible. The companies making the bubbles can't do it without you, and you are the one actually making it happen.
how would you design away filter bubbles though? people actively seek out agreement and avoid argument even when there are no filters and barely any moderation like still begets like, see the split between /pol/ and /leftypol/.
I absolutely agree with you and I think we've gotten ourselves into a state where the "fix" (whatever it may be) will be so unpalatable to either party or to anybody who wants to survive in a political environment that it'll be impossible to implement.
For example, want to bring manufacturing jobs back?
1. Implement trade-protectionist tariffs and import restrictions.
2. Unionize rural workforces to make the pay and work conditions attractive.
3. Offer massive tax incentives to build manufacturing centers in rural states.
4. Reinstitute a manufacturing oriented education system that outputs ready-to-work trained trade employees.
The parties are too far apart now to be able to put in place something like this.
2-4 would have a plurality of support in the country, And with that, bipartisan support.
They can also be done without isolationism, but probably not without redistributing the wealth that has concentrated in the hands of the 0.1% over decades (under both parties) back into the general population.
I think the events of the past week have really highlighted the divide, or rather the gaping chasm. And it's a gulf that seeks almost impossible to bridge, any time soon at least - it encompasses race, education, financial status, social class, even history.
Trump's actions this week have been utterly shameful. He and his cronies have lied and lied in an organised effort to sow discontent among the huge segment of republicans that appear to believe their every word (regardless of how baseless or ridiculous they may be).
It seems like such a blatant attempt to subvert democracy - the kind of thing we'd expect in a tinpot dictatorship, not the "land of the free". This is not only shameful, but downright dangerous, especially with the level of gun ownership in the US.
As a European, it seemed utterly incomprehensible how he has been able to get away with his actions, inactions and lies over the past few years - and I have not the words to describe how incomprehensible it is that many of his supporters are behind the past week's events.
was al gore utterly shameful when he contested florida?
the prevailing attitude among liberals ever since is that he never should've conceded, that the bushes and the courts stole the election.
This divide is a business plan, not an organic phenomenon. If you want advertising revenue, you must build a cult of fanatical viewers/clickers. We won't solve this until we deal with advertising as a revenue stream for media.
Also realize that may not be possible. Regardless of who won this, half of the country does not approve. So the division you speak of has already occurred. Probably earlier than now. I could imagine a time when a Roman said the same thing you did there. "let's unite" and then the eventual collapse happens. I don't really see "conquer" in the normal sense, but the U.S. will be weaker and other countries will surely gain as a result of our division. Then I think I need to get out of here, and I wonder where I would go in the world? In the end, I agree with your sentiment. It's disturbing. The polarization is palpable. M
Political pluralism in other democratic countries seems to do a good job of countering this trend. When there's only two parties they are free to drift to ideological extremes, without other parties being able to take up the center.
US social discourse shows that people don't understand how to debate and how to negotiate with opposing views for a better outcome. These are merely group behaviours and they can change with time and education.
I feel that the first structural steps must be
1./ Replace First Past the Post (it distorts the will of the people) with some version of ranked balloting (already in use in at least one US state)
It used to be that reps from both sides of the isle would come together on things. Think John McCain not voting to kill Obamacare as one of his last votes before he died. There was a give and take. It seems that that is what is missing.
We’re actually at an inflection point where before white men were the elite, no question, that was what it took to get in the door outside a few congressional districts.
Now it’s still mostly that but it takes more, and due to demographic shifts it will be that less and less. The right — belatedly (far too little far too late, and quite awkwardly) — has already started outreach to Latino and black communities. They will continue but it will take a while (what an embarrassment for the party of Lincoln. FFS.).
Obama was a lighting strike to those who assumed it would always be the old way, and Trump was the response to Obama.
Fortunately, that failed (unfortunately it took hundreds of thousands of dead Americans to convince enough Michiganders, Wisconsinites, Pennsylvanians (I’m sure about “Michiganders”, being one myself, no idea on the others) but at least it happened.)
The left, quite cleverly, responded with Biden, an old white guy in the classic mold. Literally: nothing to fear here, white peeps... but with Kamala as VP — a powerless position yet a powerful symbol (especially as the VP of a VP cum President).
So It’s the changing of the guard. Republicans can no longer simply ignore black and brown people (at best) or use them as bugaboos (and then Democrats won’t be able to simply count on their votes by not actively being racist). Once the powerful engage those groups they’ll find them not to be uniform, and (hopefully) that will lead to meaningful, nuanced, deep engagement... if that happens, there will no longer be such a thing as the “black vote”. (This is further along with Latinos, where some groups aren’t too overwhelmingly for one party or the other).
So...
Not really an existential crisis, at least not to my mind. It’s real progress. We can no longer force certain groups into blocks based on whether we actively believe they should be subjugated or just kinda ignore them.
Then the transition of power or the changing demographics you speak of will disenfranchise those once in power and that could lead to violence (think white heavily-armed men intimidating or worse those they disagree with). This is what I fear as well.
What country in the world could conqueror America? You would need a better blue water navy and the ability to sustain 3 thousand miles supply lines over contested waters.
As for dividing the US, I hope the lesson of this election is that you shouldn't assume what you see online is representative of the real US - otherwise it would have been a landslide for Biden.
Physical borders, yes it would be near impossible to conquer us. But our digital borders (social media) are wide open. You use the power of a beast to destroy itself.
I fear this too. As someone who had read a fair bit of the history of India, and how the British/east India company mind-fucked and pillaged them it scares the hell out of me. The after effects are still there even 70 years later.
They already are. Russia & China's tactics are not so much disinformation, but simply taking our own talking points and pushing them to us even harder.
That is a very interesting point of view. I fully agree with it, I think it will be an existential threat to the country as we know it now.
Do you think that the bipartidism is to blame, amongst other factors? If there were more options then some of the most radical electorate will have their own candidate and it could help divide the support they get at the Chambers.
Also smaller parties could help in having more negotiation for bills and laws.
Russia, Facebook and the media have already divided and conquered us. The conquest is over. We are just trying to collect the bits and scraps. The conqueror doesn't have to be another nation. Fox News, CNN, Twitter and Facebook are the countries that have benefited the most.
gigatexal says>" the ever increasingly large divide that is the polarizing of the electorate. We have to come together as Americans or someone will divide and conquer us."
No way. Polarization will continue. The politics of New York and California will remain anathema to the majority in "fly-over states" (e.g., Texas, Montana, etc.) for generations. The former two states (NY, CA) will economically self-destruct long before such acceptance occurs.
I realize this will sound snarky and/or overly aggressive. However, I'm being entirely serious and can't quickly come up with a better way to phrase this:
How do people with functioning moral compasses come together with the kind of people who see pictures of children in cages and say "America, fuck yeah?"
How do people who want some form of democratic government come together with the kind of people who think it's entirely right and proper for a president to do his best to prevent his political opponents from voting -- by disrupting the postal service, by soliciting the help of multiple hostile foreign governments to smear his opponent, calling for his opponents to be imprisoned without charge, and by attempting to halt vote counting in the courts?
How do people with any kind of respect for the value of human life watch video of the George Floyd killing and come together with the kind of people who watch the video and argue that the police did nothing wrong?
I don't think these divides can be healed. These issues are not matters, like arguments over the size of government, where compromise is both possible and mutually beneficial. Instead, they are moral red lines about which compromise is neither possible or desirable. What the 70-odd million who voted from Trump want out of their country isn't compatible with the basic moral outlook of the 75-odd million people who voted against him.
To take an extreme example, if a bunch of Nazis want to kill 10 million people, 'compromising' by agreeing to let them kill only 5 million people isn't acceptable -- and yet, this is exactly the kind of moral compromise (truly in the other sense of the word) that would be involved in bringing together Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions.
In addition to the moral divide, there is a reality/gullibility divide between the Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions. Trumpists believe an awful lot of stuff that is factually untrue. They reject global warming and dismiss the scientific evidence as the product of a Chinese hoax to destroy America. 56% of Republicans now believe in Qanon (an ideological conspiracy theory born out of the argument that Democrats eat babies) to some extent[0]. The overwhelming majority of Trumpists get their news from Fox, a media outlet which spreads more misleading information than accurate information.[1] How does anyone with a commitment to respecting consensus reality reach people who have chosen to live in comforting fantasyland rather than cope with the world as it is?
I don't see any way for the US to get out of this mess without breaking up into multiple countries.
And, to the usual 'downvote to -1' crowd: what part of this analysis is wrong?
Unfortunately that would require a revolution. The system is designed to prevent substantial change because the players are already aligned with its incentives. The last big systemic change was direct election of Senators in 1913.
I think you need to take a step back and really try understand those who disagree with you - your views or maybe just the way you express it is toxic and dividing. If you can't think of one reason why someone might not want to vote your candidate I feel sorry for you.
There are many valid reasons to vote for all candidates and the weighting of the issues is personal and perhaps not everyone agrees with the weighting that you do.
> If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power
And these 47% would say exactly the same thing about the others. That’s the divide GP was pointing out and ironically your response is perpetuating it. Stop dehumanizing people.
This is a very western view, you have war criminals as former presidents. This was not the worst of the US. You have people bombing weddings and you find this to be the worst.
I would be surprised if as many as half of those who voted for him believed that they were voting to either kill democracy or rewarding immoral behaviour.
Perhaps I’m overly-cynical, but in my (limited) experience, most people just don’t pay enough attention for such motivations — or even expectations — to be plausible.
IMHO if you ask Americans bluntly if they’d be willing to end democracy so that their candidate remains in power, you’d get only a small percentage agreeing.
What actually happened was that large numbers of voters are stuck in a filter bubble and their only news sources were telling them the election was being stolen. So by supporting Trump they probably thought they were defending democracy.
Of course, those particular news stories were pure lies. But we should focus on the peddlers of lies more than those who were duped by them.
On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen.
It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.
But the polls then and now weren’t just bad, they were shockingly bad and not representative of any real population that matters in an election. I’d expect something like this from junior engineers looking at metrics for the first time, but these are supposedly the most respective organizations in their field that have failed spectacularly for the second presidential election in a row. What value do they possibly serve?
Should Biden ultimately be declared the victor, I’m concerned that the public will never receive the postmortem on what went wrong and how it happened again that it deserves.
I really have no idea where this idea that the polls failed comes from. There were only two bad calls this cycle and every other outcome was within the margin of error. It was pretty much the same case in 2016 where people who had no idea what they were talking about suddenly decided they were certain polling failed because they are unable to grasp the concept of margin of error and sample size.
Polls can only guess about turnout and the try to work backwards from there. The turnout estimates were wrong but not shockingly so, and as a consequence a lot of polls ended up having the result be at the far end of their margin of error. Nothing went wrong. Polling is hard. Get over this idea that you can have some sort of certainty regarding an election until we actually hold the election.
I feel like everyone who's criticing these polls is forgetting one thing: COVID. These polls can only be as good as historical elections, and there really is not a lot of data for US elections during pandemics.
3-4 point polling errors are relatively normal, definitely not shocking. That's why the best forecast models still gave Trump a nonzero chance of winning even though the polls showed Biden up by 8+ points.
Polling is really hard. There are fundamental problems with it that are impossible to fully solve. It's frankly amazing that they get as close as they do.
Nate Silver gave Biden a 90% chance of winning, citing 3-4 tossup and 3-4 likely states. I don't see how his predictions don't look reasonable. Silver gave Trump a 27% last election - that's a very reachable percentage . Polls have considerable margin for error. It's standard for people to take a poll result as an absolute prediction and then rail against any error but that's not the fault of the poll itself. [2]
I think the big issue was the "margin of error" in many of these cases. For example, when Quinnipiac did a poll a few days before the election [1], they said Biden was winning Ohio by 4 points with a +-2.5 point margin of error... which happened to be very far off. And this wasn't isolated-–if memory serves me, Wisconsin was even further off?
I really want to know what went wrong with the polls (again). Shy Trump voter doesn’t explain how wrong the polls were about Graham or Collins, outside of even the margin of error.
Accurate polls are important to running campaigns and to legislative positions. Selzer got her polls right in Iowa and she posited that she knew the local electorate better than other pollsters so she weighted correctly. Maybe Trafalgar Group has a better method or maybe it just weights GOP voters more heavily (we don’t know, it won’t disclose its methods). Or maybe Trump just breaks polling and the polls will be fine next time. Whatever the reason, I’d like to know, but I’m not sure we ever will.
I grew up in a right wing province of Austria and saw that sort of wrong polling throughout my youth — which is why I wasn't surprised the slightest about things going as they did.
It boils down to: a fraction of the electorate will vote for $bigotcandidate but would never ever admit it to anyone outside the voting booth, because they know it is wrong. They will tell people they will vote for $notbigotcandidate, but vote for him nonetheless.
This fraction is not insignificant and you cannot easily represent it in polls without guessing the effect. In my home province it eas consistently around 10 to 15% over a decade.
The campaigns do not rely on the publicly available poll data for the reasons you pointed out - they need accurate polling in order to make serious decisions about resources. They pay polling companies to get accurate polls and they keep this data private.
The publicly available polls are done for free by polling companies or by news organizations. Unfortunately some of these companies apparently have an agenda to push. So they skew their sample away from what the likely voters are to get the result they want for propaganda purposes.
I think that the rise of Nate Silver has ironically made this situation worse. He advocates taking an average of polls to get a true view of the situation. So if you are skewing you poll to get a certain outcome and you know the poll will be averaged, you need to warp your results even further.
Ok, disclaimer time - I don't have any inside knowledge or real evidence of any of the above. It does seem to fit however. I can't explain why it seems all the distorting is to make the Dems lead seem bigger than it is - that is, why aren't there pollers on the other side of the aisle doing the same thing?
So you'll have to decide for yourself if there is any merit to the above theory.
What you're saying is that any result with a non-zero chance of happening should be unsurprising to us, because it was still in the realm of possibility? If that's the case, what use are polls? What makes an election forecast based on polls more valuable than a coin flip?
Your coin flip analogy is spot on. But instead of a 1 in 2 probability, Trump had a 1 in 10 probability of winning. We knew this probability precisely because of polling data (and historical error).
This wasn’t some rare weird outcome. This was probably a standard deviation or so closer to Trump in a forecast. Perfectly normal thing to happen.
Polls are astrological race science, and the reason you'll never be able to convince anyone of this is adequately covered by the book When Prophecy Fails. I've come to think that their bias is only slightly ideological, but instead springs more from a self-serving impulse to mirror the current beliefs of the audience most likely to believe in polls i.e. people overly impressed by credentials. They enjoy the sheer volume of numbers, rather than their actual usefulness.
Alternate phrasings of identical questions asked in polls creates differences in outcome vastly larger than the effects they claim to detect. Somehow Nate Silver managed to get rich by selling synthetic CDOs of arbitrary polls (to people with his identical political outlook.)
The only real poll is to ask the same questions, in the same way, as the ballot sheet does. Ideally these should be asked as people are entering or leaving the voting booth, and people should be paid for their responses, in order not to bias yourself towards bored loudmouths with nothing to do. This would be good for accuracy, not for usefulness in anything but generating a suspicion of election fraud.
Instead, they're trying to figure out what percentage of black people go to the polls in Missouri, and pretending that the self-selected black voter has more in common politically with the general black phone answerer than the Missouri voter. Relying on that arbitrary assumption is the entire basis of their field.
edit: I haven't read https://site.pennpress.org/aha-2021/9780812250046/race-and-t... yet, but I heard an interview with the author around the time that it came out, and it's another hidden history of a field that has completely unearned legitimacy. "Political Science" might largely be considered an outgrowth of scientific racism.
I'm on the nerd side too, but I was quite surprised. Sampling isn't the only source of error in election polling - people also change their minds. In this election, people decided who they were going to vote for historically early - the lowest portion of people in the history of exit polls indicated they decided in the week before the election. In theory, this effect should reduce the width of the probability distribution, and yet, the polls were off again, in the same direction as they are always off, by a little bit more than average.
A little scrutiny here is worthwhile. In 2016, for example, the polls were off in part because pollsters weighted the black demographic in proportion to their voting behavior in 2008 and 2012 (when a black candidate was running, boosting turnout). The actual 2016 black turnout looked more similar to 2004 or 2000 - other elections where a black candidate wasn't running. Though I haven't dived into the 2020 polling data, it wouldn't surprise me if a similar effect were at play.
It's also become noticeable harder to do polling. Once upon a time, everybody had a landline, so random dialing worked really well. Now, some people have more phones than others, and people are increasingly less willing to talk to pollsters, increasing the error rate.
These are all important things to talk about - when you dismiss it as "oh yeah, polls are never perfect," you prematurely shut down the conversation. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The polls could be better and it's important to talk about how.
There is also "what polls directly measure" and "what we infer from them".
Besides the usual adjustments for likely voter models, we also do things like infer how people will vote in House and Senate elections based on Presidential polling, because we do a lot more Presidential polling than down ballot, because money.
So one early thing that seems to have happened this year (and again, we are still early in the process to be making final verdicts in "what happened" retrospectives) is that people split their ballot more than anticipated, which means that the inferences we were making about down ballot races based on Presidential performance were off.
So not quite a polling error, but an example of uncertainty that may not have been correctly taken into account in forecasting.
<< These are all important things to talk about - when you dismiss it as "oh yeah, polls are never perfect," you prematurely shut down the conversation. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The polls could be better and it's important to talk about how.
I think the complaint is that here the polls were not just imperfect. They were at best, misleading raising questions over methodology ( lessons, apparently, not learned in 2016 ), wishful thinking, and their usefulness, or, at worst, attempts at influencing desired income.
I can absolutely agree that polling is not an exact science, but now it is twice in a row that polling science has grossly miscalculated the mood of the nation.
What % chance did the polls/forecast give the republicans gaining seats in the house (I actually don't know but from reading pundits it sounds like very little)? I think the interesting thing this cycle is betting markets were pretty much also at odds with pollsters/forecasts on Trump's chances, basically baking in a pro-trump (R?) polling error. Perhaps there really are issues with some of these forecasts / uncertainty estimates?
if you're a data nerd, how can you NOT be shocked by so many results falling far outside the confidence interval (often multiple sigmas), and all in the same direction?
Well this measures how many people are willing to admit they would vote for Trump which is not surprisingly a lower number than people who will vote for him in an unobserved secret vote.
Even if the pollsters are the most neutral nonjudgmental people on earth there will still be a fraction of the electorate that will (irrationally) shy away from telling them the truth.
Five Thirty Eights' "snake graph", which hasn't changed since before election day, accounted for poll error successfully and predicted exactly which states would go blue and which would go red, along with which several states were uncertain. Some of the uncertains went red, others blue. Florida was the only outlier in precisely how red it went.
I don't get why people care so much about predictions vs actual results in case of presidential elections in the US. The rules look like they were designed for maximum entertainment and sudden changes. The fact that you can win with less votes. When the other person already has 250 electors, but then on the last second you flip Florida or Pennsylvania with a few thousand votes and bam! you are the president!
That's why people love watching your elections so much. Or maybe also because of the fallout in their countries.
You're picking the easiest number to misread - the overall "chance of being elected", which doesn't really mean anything.
Much more interesting are the direct results predictions, especially per state where they matter most. Those are polls that give a particular result with a +- confidence interval. If the polls were to any extent competently done, you expect the result to be well within that margin of error.
The reality though has been that the results have been well outside the margin of error, sometimes multiple sigmas from the actual result - that is simply unacceptable for a poll. The only conclusion should be that polling data can be completely ignored, as it doesn't seem to have any clear relationship with the final results.
Individual polls were sometimes outside the margin, but collectively the polls were not far off the mark and collectively they were within the margin of error. This is why sites like 538 were able to model the various outcomes with some degree of certainty and ONCE AGAIN manage to get results within the range of expected probabilities. You really seem to have a hard time understanding both polling and probability and in particular the relationship between sample size and error. I suggest a bit more research.
I think it's more fundamental than numeracy. If the polls suggest there is a 2/3 probability you are going to win an election, but you lose, does that mean the polls were wrong? What if the probability was 9/10?
I think the problem is trying to make sense of outliers and uncertainty, and that, in an election with 150M+ variables, you will end up with a result that isn't quite what anyone predicted. In other words: it's not numeracy, it's epistemology.
Fivethirtyeight's polling averaging model underestimated Trump in all the swing states. Trump wine 2-3 states predicted for Biden, and 0 vice versa. States that Biden had a supposedly strong lead in turned out to be statistical ties in the official vote. The direction bias in the polls (about 20 of 25) is obvious, it's not symmetric random error.
Polls should say: “we’re 2/3 confident you will win” and not “there’s a 2/3 probability you will win”. The uncertainty is epistemological; it’s not describing a stochastic process.
Great comment, agreed. The wonderful books from Nassim Taleb ‘Black Swan’ & ‘Fooled by Randomness’ touch on this in a way that forever changed my thinking.
The problem that has appeared again is that without a representative sample of information gathered, it doesn't matter how fancy your models are, you will not have accurate results. And quantifying how unrepresentative your sample is basically impossible to figure out in this situation.
Based on what? I think part of the problem with our politics these days is confusing social media engagement / metrics (specifically twitter) with national sentiment. Seems like there's a large mass of unobserved "silent" Americans out there.
Whats even more frustrating is recognizing the population difference in day of voters and mail in votes, expecting a "blue shift" as votes are counted, and then watching pundits chime in on Tuesday about surprising results.
As far as I can tell the most surprising result was Trump's popularity among Cuban Floridians.
Once Biden's team let Trump paint him as socialist I was not surprised to see the Cubanos go Trump (or the Venezuelans for the same reason) but I will be interested to see some of the breakdowns of the Puerto Rican vote in FL and some of the Central American Latino vote in Texas; I am betting there is going to be a reasonably large gender difference in some of those groups.
To be fair, we still don't know the loss of votes through mail-in voting. Mail-in voting is more convenient which would likely increase participation, but missing signatures, naked ballots, late or undelivered mail, etc can prevent those ballots from being counted.
When there is a major difference in voting patterns between the two political parties, then polls may not actually be inaccurate. In this case, Democrats chose mail-in voting and Republicans, by and large, chose in-person after being directed by the president.
Also, some percentage of mail-in ballots may not have reached their destination because of possible election interference through reduced post office efficiency--in particular, fewer mail sorting machines, lower hours, deprioritized mails, etc.
In short, the polls don't take into account election interference in the post office or unsuccessful delivery. If most people from both parties were voting in-person, maybe we might have had more parity between the polls and election results.
As an outsider all I can think is that this is an issue with the US media. The easy story is talking about the latest poll. The more difficult, but actually useful story, is focusing on the policies being put forward by each side.
>Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data.
They would give you a probability distribution if they were truly random samples. But in reality, response rates are very low, and pollsters make up for this using demographic weighting and modeling - so the results don't actually represent any real population, but rather are extrapolated from people who respond onto a hypothetical population that the pollster thinks is likely to vote. This is why they are spectacularly and systematically off, more and more over time. It's not just variance.
You could also fit the same data with "people polled thought they could vote until their vote was preferentially suppressed". So the polls will never match outcomes. And that it happened in the same direction two cycles in a row leads credence.
(I do not know why the forecasts are wrong, but I don't see why Parent is at all justified in his statement).
For me the bottomline of the Trump administration is that he has started zero new wars, sparing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. As an outsider I hope that the US will not go back to its foreign military interventions.
I can also tell you that many people in the middle east are sad to see Trump leave. His strong stance on Iran and some of the new alliances and shakeups in the region regarding Israel, though possibly done through some brute force, have certainly changed the status quo, possibly for the better.
Just yesterday Trump administration sanctioned Gibran Bassil, a corrupt Lebanese politician who is very close with Hezbollah. I hope Biden has the same sense to chase these guys down...
Well he did serve half as long as the others, and we did come pretty close to a few. I don't think it's a very good metric regardless though, because it depends hugely on external factors and world politics which the President doesn't have as much control over. As war-mongering as Bush may have been, 9/11 was an external force. If something similar would've happened during Trump's presidency on US ground, I have zero doubt he would've started another war.
It's not so simple, I think, to say that by avoiding war he saved lives.
The US withdrew from Syria, and it does appear to me that for a moment that were a sense of morality from Trump there, he genuinely did not like the idea that lives would be lost as a consequence of his actions. That is commendable, though perhaps something that should have been considered in advance of such a situation rather than reactively.
But what was the consequence of not intervening? It created a vacuum, into which stepped many military powers, and many people have died or been displaced. We also have to consider the long-term consequences of an isolationist foreign policy.
There is a balance to be found between war-mongering and exerting influence to shape the world positively. Particularly, you have to avoid leaving a vacuum that can be exploited.
At the least we can say he didn't start an arbitrary new war, and that is a small but significant positive.
What moral calculus allows deaths from a pandemic, even if the by-product of negligence and mismanagement, to be placed on the same moral plane as deaths from bombs, drones, tanks and bullets, or the displacement of tens of millions of people from the War on Terror, or the slave markets and anarchy that still persist after the NATO bombing of Libya championed by Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, or the world’s worst humanitarian crisis from the U.S.-supported bombing campaign of Yemen that began under Obama?
Trump has not created the virus and followed the independent advice of Dr. Fauci. The UK, Spain and Belgium (all with the advantage of socialized healthcare) did even worse judging by per capita deaths. So he can't be that bad.
I also think its quite disingenuous to compare his handling of the virus to the suffering and deaths caused by wars that only serve to establish economic and power advantages.
People are dying from Covid in every country, regardless of who's in charge and what the approach is. Maybe I'm just crazy, but I really don't think that people would just magically stop dying under Biden.
That is good, but counts for very little when he has helped sow the seeds of numerous other wars, especially by rolling back most climate change fights.
He got lucky with foreign policy, and he did start a war against immigrants and people whose skin color is not white in the USA itself, led by Stephen Miller.
Can we have a conversation about broader implications of the increasing power in the public discourse of Twitter et al.? I’m no Trump supporter but I do wonder if the tables were turned and Twitter e.g. turned Biden’s page into a wall of hidden tweets because of something it disagreed with (there are enough grievances with Big Tech from both sides).
Do people think this is isolated (because Trump is, well, Trump) or there’s a broader tendency here?
Your premise is wrong. Twitter's actions weren't as a result of something it disagreed with. Your comment/thought illustrates one of the REAL root problems ... and that is we are living in a state of two apparent states of "factual reality". Unfortunately this is not possible. There is only one set of facts. Until we can return to that, we will be repeating similar scenarios.
In other words, there is nothing inappropriate about Twitter putting disclaimers on objectively factually incorrect statements.
I am strongly anti-Trump and pro truth and reasonably pro Jack Dorsey and don’t disagree with anything you say except — I’m not sure why Jack Dorsey should get to decide what’s true just because he invented a social media platform
I wonder how you'll feel when they do this to you or someone you care about.
I don't quite understand the epistemic certainty people have that such weapons will never be turned against them, especially when history so dramatically demonstrates the opposite.
Echo chambers, algorithmic recommendations, and powerful filters all but guarantee multiple realities for different people. If all you see are facts X, Y, and Z, then those facts are as real and true as someone else's facts A, B, and C. I have family members and friends who live in seemingly totally alternate universes, dominated by what I see as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and a cultural persecution complex. But as they describe it: it's I who live in a media-manufactured alternate reality characterized by trust in institutions, corruption, and a false belief in science and data.
What everyone is missing is: both universes might as well be correct, to the observer. It's like measuring what speed someone is going in two different relativistic frames of reference. You can both be right and come up with different numbers. It's a tough problem to solve. We can't solve it by just pointing at the out-groups and saying "ha-ha how stupid are they for believing in rubbish!" They are just not going to be convinced by someone who believe a totally different set of facts.
I’m sorry but how do you reconcile your second paragraph’s criticism of the coexistence of two factual realities and your last paragraph in which you simply pick the one you happen to personally favor?
> In other words, there is nothing inappropriate about Twitter putting disclaimers on objectively factually incorrect statements.
Not necessarily inappropriate, but it might be ineffective. I don't know if this has already occurred but I'd bet a great deal of money that those click-through warnings about blatant or dangerous falsehoods will become a badge of honor among twitter conservatives, if they haven't already.
It's not just Twitter, it's the media in general. When I watch CNBC, and they decide to stop airing the President's presser because he's lying, that says to me that the media believes that they should do the thinking for me. That says a lot about how they view the public.
We're building a world where "think for yourself" means "defer your thinking to Trusted Sources™", which is not a world that I support.
Some of the networks wisely determined that the speech was unfounded, baseless, and harmful. News networks do not need to be a spigot for outright lies and fabrication.
What are you talking about? CNN aired the president's presser in full without stopping it; I know because I watched it live on CNN. Are you mixing up CNN with other networks?
> We're building a world where "think for yourself" means "defer your thinking to Trusted Sources™", which is not a world that I support.
"defer your thinking to Trusted Sources" is the world we're coming from. Our incoherent polarization is a result of the traditional authorities having been routed around (and then leaning into their own demise). We've apparently got an awfully long road ahead of us to get to a world where everyone is actually thinking for themselves, as demonstrated by how readily blatant lies spread when they're politically and personally comforting.
That's always been true of the media in general. The publisher of the NYT presumably said something (years ago) to the effect of "We don't give people what they want; we give them what they should have." Arguably there are far fewer or more porous gatekeepers today relative to the historic norm--for better or worse.
It’s hard to think of a realistic example of the type of misinformation that is damaging to our society and democracy that Joe Biden could post. I think we need to acknowledge the unique threat that Trump is/was and stop both sides-ing this.
I think that while it may seem like a slippery slope at first, it is what we need. I think it's actually quite similar to the immune system analogy in the comment above. We need to have democratic participants in a democratic process. Our immune system needs to repel the undemocratic elements in some capacity.
Admittedly the question becomes how we can in a fair manner judge what ideas in which context can have such a dangerous impact as to be non-democratic.
We all have to reflect how close fascism and other kinds of ideologies always are just beneath the surface, and that we are all susceptible of falling on that train it isn't specifically another group that is.
I think the harder problem is not the binary cases but the shades of gray.
Want to ban Nazi's? I wont disagree, most people wont.
Want to ban group X which is fighting with group Y in a tit-for-tat skirmish over decades? How do you decide who is right? How do you decide truth?
What about cases where someone has done something bad in response to something bad done earlier? Do you ban one side? The other? Both? Does the side with more political/status power decide who gets banned?
> Want to ban group X which is fighting with group Y in a tit-for-tat skirmish over decades? How do you decide who is right? How do you decide truth?
I think there is a difference between ‘right vs wrong’ and ‘factually correct vs incorrect’.
Platforms like Twitter will rarely be in a position to decide right/wrong, because in many opposed discussion both sides will use the platform.
On the factual correctness, platforms can more easily take a stance in high impact cases. I would assume that they’d have out the same warnings on Biden’s Twitter if he had said ‘I won’ on Tuesday.
That leaves a challenge: how do you decide what’s a fact? For example on the vote count. Most outlets say the reported figures are fact, but it implies trusting the process of counting and reporting. Removing that implied trust means others can take ‘there is fraud!’ as fact just as well.
Twitter seems to use the mainstream media (eg AP predicting the election outcome) as a base of trust (and so do I). But I’ve come to realize that once you don’t trust the media, it is easy to believe in another set of facts (that are true for you), and suddenly (to you) it seems Twitter is censoring.
I hope people will find and trust each other again.
This reminds me of the episode of Mythic Quest where they decided they wanted to ban Nazis--but then they started asking, "Who else should we ban?" The committee ended up with a horrifyingly-unwieldy list of hate/predatory groups. They felt it was just too many, so they put them all into a bracket and voted--Nazis still won.
By the time the meeting was over, the engineers had figured out a way to flag all the Nazis and just moved them all to their own instance. Problem solved.
Trump is making blatant baseless claims and accusations. That gets you a Twitter timeout. Other people receive similar treatment. (Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter page is entirely censored because all she does is spread QAnon conspiracy theories.) The solution is to just stop spreading disinformation.
Twitter didnt hide Trump's tweets because they disagreed, the hid them because they were unsubstantiated falsehoods, that could have a deleterious effect on peoples faith in the process itself. They would have hidden Biden's too, if he did something along those lines.
How famous does one have to be to get this special treatment? Or is it just for political candidates?
(I'm firmly in the "Their platform, their rules" camp, so I agree that Twitter CAN do this, I'm really just curious as to why people think they SHOULD).
Its fascinating. I'd never think the most important person in the world would have their tweets hidden. I'm quite impressed with how they did it. Though if I really liked Trump I could feel hard done by.
There are a few parts to your question. Can I find anything salvageable in the flagged statements that he made on Twitter? Definitely not, I’m pissed off we elected someone who thinks it’s OK to say things like that in public. I think Colbert said it best: Trump doing those things puts an eternal stain on the Office of Presidency; now among the things Presidents of the US have done, being subjected to Internet moderation is one of them. This was unimaginable merely a decade ago. Trump forced Twitter’s hand here, but now we live in a world where that precedent exists.
Am I excited that We the People are delegating the decisions what speech to amplify or not to fickle private companies? It’s hard for me to get behind that. Something just feels very wrong about this idea.
My Facebook account was recently restricted from 'complex entities interactions' a week before the election until November 28, with no explanation as to why, and an error thrown whenever I click a link to contest the restrictions (for lack of a better term).
Thus far, it seems to mean that I can't follow, comment, post, or dm on/with groups or facebook pages. I cannot create events, pages, or new groups.
I can only post to my timeline, dm my friends, or comment on my friend's posts.
I do not post, or comment on Facebook, though I am a member of a number of politically engaged and activist facebook groups on the fringes for the purposes of having access to on the ground primary sources.
I have a number of friends active on the right who received a similar set of restrictions, ending on the same day. They're used to these kinds of restrictions, comment often, and thought nothing of it. This is typical of facebook to them.
More unexpectedly, and in my opinion a disturbing development in an already unsettling moderation regime, a number of second-order contacts (friends of friends and coworkers) who work as left and progressive organizers/activists (not liberals, progressives and leftists) also received the same levels of restriction.
This was accompanied by the removal of quite a few fringe activist and political pages, the most infamous which comes to my mind being 'God Emperor Trump', a large meme page that had significant reach during the 2016 election.
I don't think this is circumstantially unique. This is a preview. Assuming recounts and court challenges go Biden's way, I believe we're looking at a future where social media uses the tools they've developed over the past four years to enforce a bipartisan moderate consensus over their user-bases, restricting any populist, revolutionary, or potentially dangers speech or users that might produce it.
The activist left has largely been shielded by its circumstantial alliance with the DNC establishment and its allied institutions, given their mutual opposition to the Trump administration.
The populist right has partially been shielded by the implicit threat of Trump's executive authority.
Libertarians (I'm including the Boogaloo movement, and many lockdown protests under this umbrella) have had no such cover, and in my limited experience I've seen entire networks of users and pages been scrubbed off the platform over the past two years with little fanfare, and largely as a product of their affiliations. I believe their experience will be mirrored on the left and the right going forward.
The censorship is getting scary. I'm recently permabanned from reddit for being too progressive. I shouldn't have criticized mayor Pete for his takes on M4A on the politics sub. Both ends of the spectrum are being deplatformed.
The way you phrase it is as intellectually dishonest as it gets. Twitter didn't hide tweets they disagreed with, they hid tweets from a public official who cast doubt on the election process with no shred of evidence and acted in a responsible manner. With additional security on his account, there's are also additional responsibilities and since he didn't care, they had to interfere. They didn't delete anything, they didn't remove anything, they just made it perfectly clear that there's no proof to his allegations. That's responsible behavior and something that should have come way sooner.
I definitely think this is the future. And other countries are wise to take note, and consider very carefully the threat Twitter poses to their sovereignty.
It's exceedingly likely that American liberals will tell you what to do, and pat themselves on the back.
It's a ridiculous and absurd stretch to say that Twitter poses any threat to American sovereignty but Trump claiming an election he lost isn't a threat to that same sovereignty.
Statements fall on a spectrum between pure opinion and incontrovertible, undisputed fact. Somewhere along there is a threshold where it's no longer about agreeing with something.
I'd say it's impossible to do a perfect job of finding that threshold, but I think Twitter has done a decent job of it with Trump's tweets.
But yes, as it stands right now, it is in their hands and we are relying on them to do a good job of it when they decide to.
I wonder how much public opinion was impacted by Trump's tweets (one way or the other). I also wonder the magnitude of the impact of Twitter's actions. I sort of also wonder why some public figures are subject to fact checking and others are not.
Censoring really ought to be driven by the individual, not the platform. By getting involved in censoring certain parties, Twitter is implying here (whether intentionally or not) that its platform is a source of truth. That's a horrifying notion on its own. If anything my trust in Twitter (what little I had) is basically gone. It has nothing to do with politics. The minute a social media platform starts meddling with user content (especially the content of public figures, especially especially the current POTUS, whoever he is), I no longer believe anything I see on the platform.
It's hard enough to know what to believe without questioning the authenticity of people's statements.
It feels like twitter staff are (ab)using the popularity of its users to promote their own agenda. That is not right and will probably have implications about their relationship with Article 230 (which IIRC assumes "good faith"). It's not fair to other biased media, which are legally liable for what they publish.
The trend where large Internet platforms control political content propagation will intensify, and prevail in the end. Elites all over the world will not easily cede control of important narratives, which they wield in traditional media (news paper, TVs). For me, deleting COVID misinformation is ok. Blocking Trump's tweet on the election results is a bit more dubious (why not leave it to the people to judge, which are given the right to vote anyway?). And we will see more of these in the coming years.
Whatever their justification, it is obvious that there is absolutely going to be a tendency to do this with anyone who is even half as much of an outsider as Trump. The notion that these watchmen are simply protecting us from “lies” is a naive delusion. And yes, regardless of your politics, that is not a good thing for citizens.
If the 'outsider' does nothing but lie, threaten, and harass opponents then I think Twitter will continue to do it job and suppress the assholes. If you happen to be a political ally of the asshole then I guess it sucks to be you.
"because of something it disagreed with" is a mischaracterization of "because of provable falsehoods dangerous to public safety, and democracy".
A President with a massive angry following with guns, tweeting falsehoods about the lack of integrity of the electoral process (And I don't mean the vague things, I mean the explicitly false things like his party not having access to view vote count processes, which they do) is about as close as you can get to yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater on the internet.
Not only is it Twitter's prerogative to act accordingly, I'd go further and say it is their ethical duty.
And yes, if Biden did the equivalent "from the other side", Twitter would act in exactly the same way.
Readit News
Edit: There are now multiple pages of comments in this thread. If you want to see the later pages, click 'More' at the bottom of the earlier pages. Or get there like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=2
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=5
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=6
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967&p=8
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As many have pointed out, a dozen or so submissions on this topic were flagged by users. That's actually the immune system working as intended, but another component of the system is that moderators rescue the very most historic stories so HN can have a single big thread about them. We did that 4 years ago, also for Brexit, etc.
Since this was the first submission on the topic, it seems fairest to be the one to restore. (It's still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and/or lottery.)
I changed the URL from https://www.cnn.com/ since that is not the most useful link and the AP seems as close as one can get to a neutral source.
I've noticed the same phenomenon with political views.
People on the left think that anyone on the right is a lunatic, and everyone on the right thinks the same thing about the left. I, as most people do, lean in one direction politically, so naturally any comment I see coming from my side seems reasonable to me. In fact, it seems impossible that a reasonable person could think any other way. But since I grew up in a family that leaned in the opposite direction, and I shared their same mindset in my younger days, I can now draw on that experience, and I can take a political tweet that everyone on my side thinks is insane, and I can stare at it, and just as with the spinning dancer, I can flip it in my head so it seems reasonable.
To me, it's a testament to the power of the tribal instincts within us. We think it's the other side that's crazy, but we're all under the same spell.
Trump saw the highest turnout among minorities for republicans in 60 years and it’s for a reason. I look back at Ben Franklin or Jefferson or Washington and feel inspired, I don’t think “oh, I’m not privileged I could never do what he did.” I can see people as products of their time and separate the good from the bad. As someone who grew up in an apartment shared between 2 families and worked my way up into college and the tech field I’m just shocked at how many people today have grown into learned helplessness and think that the system is so bad and irreparable that they need to vandalize and protest in cities for months.
The left has done so much more to insult me and my appreciation for this country than the right, and it’s just tragic that they think they’re the only good guys. I really do believe that foreign interference to agitate our society is real, as discussed by Tristan Harris in his interview by Joe Rogan, and it’s convinced millions of young Americans that they’re somehow resisting literal Nazis.
You point this out as if it is some moral failing on the right. In fact, this is a personal failing. It should be simple enough to recognize that for any ideology that is large enough there almost certainly exists coherent and constructive thoughts within it. If you have yet to discover them, this is not because they do not exist, it is because you're not actually looking for them. I think this is done by people on both the left and the right all the time. They fail to deeply investigate the ideas of the other side, and then criticize the other side for having no good ideas.
If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/
Note: I'm not conservative and I don't necessarily agree with the quote. The point is not that the quote is correct, the point is someone (not me) thought it was the unthinking young person that thought alone liberal lines and the experienced wise person that thought along conservative lines.
Again, not agreeing, just pointing out some feel the opposite, that more experience and exposure to the world leads to more conservative thinking for some people.
I think it's inevitable when majority of people that surround you have conservative views. Don't feel bad about that.
It seems you had a bad experience with what you felt were 'right wing' ideals but probably had little to do with that, as it would be a pretty intellectually shallow description of any kind of Conservatism (although understandable if one were to equate 'Trump' with 'Conservative' and I don't think many people would in the intellectual sense) and also oddly experientially 'upside down'.
Most 'young people' are progressive, people tend to get more conservative as they get older.
Cynically, one could say it's due to age and myopia, but more likely it has to do with responsibility, perspective, maturity and frankly living through decades and seeing how the world adapts.
Believing in the institutions of family (and monogamy as a commitment to that institution), the objective rule of law, moral obligation through duty of various kinds of community service, prudence, faith as an integral part of worldview, a sense of community that can possibly be expressed through nationalism, the notion that people must act responsibly to the extent they are able and assume responsibility for their actions - these are not ideals of 'entitlement' frankly.
Barack Obama, for example, is a 'Progressive Conservative', and he is in many ways in his own personal life a model 'cultural conservative': religious, church going, mild mannered, straight forward marriage, traditional formal education. He speaks formally and graciously, and is literally a living embodiment of many cultural historical artefacts. He didn't serve in the military but he very well could have, it's totally within his character.
He's not at all that far away from Mitt Romney for example.
Donald Trump is not a 'Conservative' or even 'right wing' really, he's just a jerk who found a 'following' in appealing to the worst qualities of 'bad right wing tropes'.
"In 1999, Trump described himself as "very pro-choice" and said "I believe in choice." (Wikipedia)
Donald Trump was a tough-guy New York 'kind of Democrat' most of his life. He always supported gay marriage. The Clintons were literally at his wedding to Melania.
He's a serial scammer, effectively a polygamist who marries woman purely on the basis of their attractiveness and then dumps them later, cavorts with prostitutes, lies, cheats, steals.
He changes his political views to suit the day, because they don't matter to him - he's just about being rich and popular.
He's managed to convince a lot of people that he is something that he is not, and that's sad, and it's brought out the worst in so many people, and that's what we are seeing today.
Have a look at this Charlie Rose interview with Senator Jeff Flake who's a much more traditional conservative, and FYI detests Donald Trump and 'fell on his sword' rather than go along with the toxicity. [1]
[1] https://charlierose.com/videos/30822
Dead Comment
Thank you for saying this. It's hard to admit an error.
This isn't always the case with politics, or any kind of view for that matter. It's important to empathize with people you disagree with, but it's just as important that we start with a foundation of agreed upon facts.
In other words, reality isn't a point of view.
I don't think these two things are as strongly related as you suggest. Two reasonable people can look at the same problem with the same facts, make reasonable guesses on what the best course is, and yet reach two completely different, reasonable approaches to the problem. Otherwise, we would have already decided which programming language is the best one.
Some situations are more clear cut than others, and I agree that we need to separate facts from opinion better. But for situations as complex as the present and future of a country there might very well not be a "right" way.
"Reality" is not a point of view, but we only experience it through the lens of our personal experiences. No one experiences "true" reality.
My local supermarket has precisely no empathy for me and the only thing I expect to agree on with the local store manager is price. Yet it is by far the most effective conduit for getting me cheap food. Effective systems simply are not very good at empathy and agreement on non-core issues is unimportant. Empathy in particular recommended at a personal level but not especially useful in politics. The critical tool is the ability to comprehend, negotiate, compromise and articulate why things are necessary.
Having "empathy" for "the left"/"the right" isn't possible. The groups are too large and diverse. Ditto for major components of the left or right like "the black vote", "the evangelicals", "people in cities", "people from Detroit", "the wealthy", etc, etc. Entities that you can have empathy for or agree on facts with are too small to be politically important like individuals or families. Politics is done by large groups who's beliefs are too nebulous to align.
The more facts we get, the more likely our views diverge and become more strongly held.
Various factions within the US left have been trying to convince everyone for decades that subjective truth is more important than objective facts; that "lived experience" is what really matters.
Then those same people pull a surprised Pikachu face when Orange Man comes swinging out of right field with the same argument, just in the opposite direction with "fake news" etc.
It can be controversial and felt by all sure, but it shouldn't be a lifestyle or ideological platform that the general public use to divide themselves.
It's backoffice stuff, for the most part, and I am too busy being friends to really mind what someone's political views are, if they even think about it much at all themselves.
Now more than ever the US needs democracy, and the government needs to work harder than ever on protecting it.
But I argue that the people of America, the general public, need to give it a bloody rest with the politics. Be humans again and meet your neighbors as you are, part of the same cohort as citizens. Your vote is just as powerful, no matter how many flags, banners, or yard signs you have. Your vote is what decides the direction of your country, not the chest thumping and rallies and flag brigades.
Which countries are those? Because the US are insane, but politics is heartfelt in all countries I'm familiar with.
Which doesn't mean we have to reach such levels of infighting of course.
For example, during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial for sexual harassment of his woman intern, I thought that his behavior was no big deal, that we accept that powerful men like to play around with women, and that the intern knew what she was getting into when she got the job working for him. Later, I realized that I was wrong. Those beliefs enable sexual harassment of women across society. We must reject those beliefs so women can have equal opportunity and good quality of life.
Other wrong ideas that I had:
- Poor people are poor because they are lazy.
- Violent criminals are violent because they don't want to control themselves.
- Unlucky people failed to prepare properly or were careless.
- Gay people are bad for society.
- Men should be breadwinners. Women should be housewives.
- USA is powerful because God is rewarding its Christian citizens for following His rules.
All of these ideas are wrong. These ideas harm people and make our society poorer.
Yes, I can remember my previous thought processes and see the dancer spin the other way, but the dancer is carrying a single-edged sword and spinning the other way way hurts people.
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Trump was even a Democrat 20 years ago.
Got lots more attention as a Republican now, since 2009.
Isn't this an oversimplification of politics, though--that our political opinions are nothing more than preferences around which we form tribes, and that there is not one single tribe that is objectively correct when it comes to matter of policy when, in fact, there are correct ways of deciding on policy.
Take vaccines, for example, or the matter of wearing masks. If I am for vaccines and for wearing masks during the pandemic, am I simply in some kind of "spell" and am I not, objectively speaking, correct, because my opinion on those matters are backed by science?
There are conclusions that are more true than others, but it gets messy when people start talking policy. Ground level facts have regularly led to horrible policy decisions despite being 'correct' according to the science.
> am I not, objectively speaking, correct, because my opinion on those matters are backed by science?
It is true that shutdowns, distancing, masking are all evidence based methods to contain the pandemic. However, politics is not only about selecting what methods work, but where they are applied, and who bears the cost. There is rarely an objective 'backed by the science' answer across the board.
There are objectively correct matters of policy when your goals, values, and assumptions have been specified. But it is these goals, values, and assumptions that separate the population into different factions. It is not simply a matter of we're right and they're wrong when it comes to settling these foundational issues.
> I simply in some kind of "spell" and am I not, objectively speaking, correct, because my opinion on those matters are backed by science?
You are under a spell that maximizing lives saved from the virus is the obviously correct goal, which is why its never even stated out loud. But your policy choices given that goal are objectively correct. The issue is whether maximizing lives saved from the virus is the correct goal. Lockdowns have a cost which is mostly borne by those who do not have the means to go for weeks or months without work or cannot work from home. There's also the mental health costs of extended social distancing. These questions are not answered by simply referencing the science behind controlling pandemics. There are very contentious foundational issues that that must be settled before we can make factual determinations about policy.
I think Trump and his administration lie somewhere between just being misunderstood by "the other side" and 100% depraved. I tend to think they're actually quite far to the depraved side of that spectrum, but that doesn't mean we can't still pay attention to making sure we see things from other perspectives (within reason).
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07
This is what often happens in politics. There are a small subset of extremist on either side, and when people argue, they're pointing out the worst things the other side's extremists did. Calling each other KKK and Antifa and racist and SJW. Realistically, between those two extremes, the majority of people are good well meaning people who just don't know what the truth is anymore due to all the lies and disinformation on the web. All the clickbait shoving the most rage inducing stories about the other side all day long.
It's like people don't recognize what they truly think and do, but instead imagine themselves as a reflection of some ideological group they associate with and apply that image to their ultimately selfish motivations.
I firmly disagree. Not all political climates and discourses are as poisoned as they are in the US.
That said, not all political disagreements are created equally. We can have a rousing polite disagreement about immigration levels, national financial priorities, cultural values and so on, but if the discussion is premised in a fundamental disagreement about whether or not certain people deserve dignity as human beings then there's very little common ground to build off of.
That's utter nonsense, political spectrums aren't all or nothing, take it or leave it, all inclusive things. A person is capable of having a range of views on different issues that may fall on either side and it's perfectly acceptable for this to be the case.
Politics like everything in life isn't black and white all or nothing, take it or leave it, it'a a bunch of shades of grey like everything else and as with most things the average person, when asked about issues without the context of left or right involved, will likely express views that fall across both sides of the political spectrum.
Just like most religious people are the religion that their parents were, most people don't really choose their political beliefs. It's not to say we don't learn justifications for what we believe, but it means that the fact that we believe in one thing over another is somewhat random imo.
Somewhere out there in the US is someone who's pretty similar to me in most ways, they were just born in a part of the country where their default beliefs are different.
And for consistency, I do put more stake in someone's beliefs when they change from their "defaults".
But then I always remember that in the United States, there is only one major political party that believes Climate Change is real. The other party believes the phenomenon is some sort of gigantic ruse.
I consider Climate Change the most pressing issue of our time, and myself a single-issue voter. Not because everything else is unimportant, but because Climate Change is even more important. We have to get this right, and we have to start immediately!
If the two parties disagreed on how to address Climate Change—say, with a carbon tax versus renewable energy subsidies—that would be one thing. But that's not the world we live in. As long as one of the parties insists that Climate Change is a complete fabrication, I don't see how I can possibly take anything they say seriously.
This feels a lot like GP/OP — Orwell’s politics and the English language, let’s metaphor away values and principles to the relativity of sounds from our meat flaps and we will all be free of this human condition
No, it wasn’t, obviously. What a disgusting thing to say.
One word for this is "tradition". If I've piqued your interest, please read Alasdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue," and also it's sequel with a more provocative title, "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?"
In this case, one side is provably crazy, and the evidence from our intelligence agencies shows they are dangerous lunatics. The other side wants empathy, equality, science, and truth to rule the day.
I'm not sure how you can just hand-wave that away. Your comment is the same old "both sides" fallacy.
Like, if you believe that all humans have rights and dignity, then you shouldn't be saying crap like that.
If you don't then how are you different from your enemies?
I'd humbly add that at least to my eyes, most of the time the discussions on disagreements between two political parties are simply ineffective at trying to solve the disagreement, and rather irrational or badly arranged. In other words: most political discourse you hear these days seems useless.
I can disagree with you on economic ideologies, I can disagree with you on military spending, how to treat the drug epidemic, how to solve the incarceration problem, etc. However when one side literally empowers those that executed my family in WW2, it is no longer a disagreement, but a fight for my life.
Oddly, Trump is the most staunchly Zionist / Pro-Jewish President in American history (of course, all for his own benefit, I don't think he actually cares about any of it.)
Literally his daughter, and most trusted advisor converted to Judaism.
Paradoxically, it's now the 'global left', particularly in Europe who have faced real and serious problems of anti-semitism. In the UK, the Labour Party has had to eject several members for anti-semitic views (not just anti-Israel) and had to embark on programs to remedy the situation.
"In October 2020, the UK's human rights watchdog found Labour to be "responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination"." [1] From the BBC no less!
Most of my childhood friends grew up behind the Iron Curtain (Ukraine, Poland, Czech) or in Communist nations like Vietnam, Cambodia, China. Many family members murdered, starved. My Uncle fled with his mother through a forest across the border, chased by soldiers to escape. Many Serbian/Croatian friends who's parents lived through a very special kind of hell.
Perhaps you can ask one of your workmates from Hong Kong what he thinks about 'Socialism With Chinese Characteristics'? [2]
Please don't let us assume that one person's history or clan's mortal enemies represent the 'big picture' of anything.
Trump is a 'thuggish businessman with authoritarian tendencies' - not actually an ideologue. The extreme views on either side are toxic and have quit a history of mass murder. If we want to compare 'Deaths Caused by Stalin/Mao vs. Hitler' that would be a futile effort I think.
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are both fairly good representations of either side and they're both fine men, if you're having trouble grasping why most people would be ok with that statement, maybe spend some time in another part of the country (Utah?) and make some friends there.
[1] In October 2020, the UK's human rights watchdog found Labour to be "responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination".
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_charact...
Especially when neither party has much to offer the average citizen any more, they have built their strength traditionally on low voter turnout where extreme factions loudly broadcasting gradually become over-represented in the most polarizing way.
As cycles continue only the most polarizing issues drive the turnout, and for turnout to grow beyond a certain point the majority of the potential voters must perceive the other party as a more serious threat, when compared to any security offered by their own party which they (might) have chosen because they found it less offensive (maybe only in past cycles too).
The parties no longer need to have as much to offer the average citizen as cycles go on, when they can get contending turnout from their own extremists combined with orders of magnitude more sympathizers who can be convinced to strongly fear what the _other side_ could take away.
Seems like after a party has been around for longer than any living person, they will not get support by having more to offer average citizens than in previous cycles, only by taking less away from them.
So the average citizen hasn't had a positive outcome within reach for a while.
Now it's too late, these top candidates are realistically as youthful as you can get compared to the grand old parties themselves, and regardless of personal integrity or leadership style can not offer anything above that from the parties alone.
Even in the case of Trump's extreme personality, which the Democrats did not even try to nominate a candidate having that feature, so this element was as one-sided as you can get.
I saw agreement from both sides that a wet dishrag could defeat Trump if only 270 electors represent voters who just plain dislike or hate him. Conversely it was recognized Trump would win if he had merely 270 electors of voters who dislike or hate one or more of the current items on the Democratic party platform.
Neither strategy can offer anything to the majority of the citizens in the political middle, the true average citizen, since turnout has been driven by fear not opportunity.
Building a coalition from a carefully-crafted extreme attention-getting position, and pushing hard from there so the other side ends up below the 50 percent needed to be in power, has turned out to prevail over representing even the middle 50 percent of voters which is how it was supposed to be at a minimum.
So once the issues and/or personalities representing them have reached full polarity, 50 becomes more of a constant to be converged upon from afar rather than a starting point to build a majority from in both directions.
Resulting in half the voters who turn out, and half the politically centrist citizens (which is a much larger group by a variable multiple of active voters) who will always be dissatisfied and these are two different groups (but having significant overlap), the latter of which is the core of the majority that all parties are supposed to be treating as constituents.
But the core of the majority in the middle doesn't have a voice because they don't have any party which represents them any more, the parties are doing other things with the money and the concerns of centrist citizens are given lowest priority.
The party gets more votes over the long run by fear-mongering against the other side regardless of who the candidates are at the time, and only declining resources can be justified which might actually benefit the majority of citizens.
Problem is, the majority are voting against their own best interest because their own best interest has not been available for a number of cycles. Rather each side votes against what's perveived as the other's best interest instead, since that's the only thing at stake anyway.
So the majority of voters end up speaking for the entire population as designed, but all votes are cast against someone's best interest because the minority party is voting exactly the same as the majority in this regard.
So it's unanimous by both parties that as few of the average citizens as possible should have their best interest be served, and to redefine democracy in that direction can not be accomplished during a single cycle or maybe not even a single generation.
Ending up with the choice between a trustworthy Joe and a dishonest Don the thing that doesn't really matter to half the voters as much as it should.
It would probably help if there were parties which were younger than the candidates.
In my country where there isn't a two party only system, but a plethora of positions ranging from the most extreme to the most moderate, for decades the left Vs right battle created a gradient of opinions
There are lunatics on the left and on the right, sometimes they have been violent, sometimes they put our democracy at risk, but in the end both left and right rejected them
We had our momentary lapse of reason when we (not me, but still...) elected Berlusconi, it seemed we lost our mind (we probably did) and nothing worse could ever happen to any other country politically speaking
Trump is on a new level of tribalism, divide and polarization though
How a real lunatic, with evident sever mental health issues ended up at the white house is gonna be a big black spot on American history (the greatest democracy in the World, the greatest country in the world, etc. etc.)
Generally speaking my echo chambers leaned anti-trump. The one thing I failed to find in the last 2 months is any actual discourse. There is absolutely no neutral viewpoints. There is absolutely no discussions between the 2 camps. The political divide in the USA is worse than I have ever seen it.
The perception I have, that wasn't a free and fair election. What's even more curious is that nobody seems to care. Ends justify the means. Which hey, I personally very much prefer Trump to lose. However, if healing the political divide is a goal, that's basically impossible now.
Uniting the country is definitely a commendable goal, though it is easier said than done. The election results across all levels clearly illustrate just how divided and polarized this land is. Thus, it will take quite a lot of time and effort to see a reasonable progress on this front. We all can play our part in it by a polite and constructive dialog with opponents and first finding common ground on such pressing and all-encompassing issues as coronavirus pandemic, environmental protection, social justice and health care reform.
In the meantime, let us not forget that, in order to restore the heavily damaged moral fabric of this country, relevant measures should pass through the Congress. And while Democrats retain control of the House, the opposing party might retain control of the Senate. Which most certainly will lead to a significant gridlock in moving forward with the democratic and, in some cases, progressive agenda unless Democrats retake control in the Senate. Remember, winning a battle is not a guarantee for winning a war. That is why the U.S. Senate run-off elections in Georgia to be held on January 5 (https://georgia.gov/vote-2020-runoff-elections) are crucial.
My experience talking to the other side during this administration is that they are completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views. How do you debate with people who don't care about facts or reason?
In addition their leadership appears to be completely unwilling to act and good faith and the rank in file appear unwilling to hold them accountable for that fact.
I would love to be able to see some way to find common ground, but It seems to me that doing so would just be playing the sucker.
Some policies, when detached from political partisanship, could be appreciated by voters on both sides.
For instance, for those who believe in human rights and social justice (a supposedly 'left' concern), there's good cause for opposition to China. In terms of jobs and national security, wresting some of China's high-tech manufacturing capability back within US borders would be a boon for employment across 'middle-America' (a supposedly 'right' concern). More importantly, I think both the concerns of human rights, and the employment of your fellow citizens, should not be a partisan issue.
I think most people want the world to be a better place to live, with better human rights, and a wage. Allowing China to gain leverage on the world, despite a track record of human rights abuses, and building a trade deficit with them, isn't really in the general voters interest.
And this is just one example. I'm sure there's more common ground if you look just at policy.
If one big problem facing U.S. politics right now is that everything is distilled down to a binary either-or with no room for nuance, its sibling problem is assuming that everyone on the "other side" from you is the same, i.e. that the crazy extremist you see on TV is a prototypical example of everyone in that group. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
This absolutely goes both ways; that is the biggest problem.
Wait what?! Doesn't one side want to take the guns away? Doesn't the other side want teachers with guns in schools?
Well, it turns out the majority of Americans not only agree on the need for better gun controls, they actually agree overwhelmingly on certain specific controls as well.
It's a classic wedge issue though, and FUD is deployed to drive that wedge between both sides which prevents most major cooperation on the matter. Unless there is a crisis, and then both sides will make an easy sacrifice to look like they are doing something. Like bump stocks. Nobody really gives AF about bump stocks, so they banned them.
Is it easy to find that common ground? Of course, not. Will it take a lot of time and effort (from all sides)? Absolutely. But, in the end, it is certainly worth trying, at the very least. That is why I have listed the areas, which I think represent some aspects that I hope we all could easier agree on than some other aspects.
Finally, I think that it is important not to generalize people, based on our own (limited) experience. Some people on other side(s) are more flexible than others. Moreover, I believe that people can change, including their point of view on various issues. If we will dismiss the idea that others are or can become open minded, we will shut the door to a potential dialog, which could bring us even more trouble.
(If you are a Republican, assume a Democratic autocrat, and if you are a Democrat assume a Republican autocrat.)
Democracy in general has the weakness that the party in power can constrain the ability of the opposition to compete. We don't yet know how to stop the slide into illiberal democracy from happening.
Until someone trusts you to handle their concerns and vulnerabilities with care, you aren't going to get anywhere.
The relationship is paramount in communication, and it's the one thing that social media (and the pandemic) has most effectively eliminated from our daily lives. In this particular case I think we all need to 'act local and think global'...stop sparring on the Internet and try to make inroads to mutual understanding with those that you can see and hear.
Florida Amendment 2.
That's right, on the same ballot where Florida solidly selected a republican president, republican legislature and republican house delegation, they went >60% on a $15 minimum wage.
Progressive legislation is popular. Progressives are not, because of branding and demagoguery (and no small amount of bald-faced lying).
That's common ground. It may not look like it, but it's there.
Politics is all about uncommon ground. People hardly ever can have one, as the word suggests the tragedy of commons follows quickly upon reaching it. Mutually beneficial status qua don't last as somebody always want to get more of the benefit than others, and exploit the situation.
People are not born equal, tribes are not equal, nations are not made equal. There are always the weaker, and stronger.
Politics is how you get along, and live another day with all above concerned. How somebody weak can live along somebody strong, without having the later kill him simply because he can. Same way, how a strong one can live with peace of mind knowing that if he lets the weak leave, they may well live to grow big, and surpass him in the future.
Life is an endless play of king of the hill.
I remember having a very fruitful discussion with a Trump/Pence supporting friend, somewhere in the middle of Trump's presidential term.
My friend's background as a conservative evangelical is _very_ different from mine. He is a decent and caring man, and I am 100% sure he'd describe me in the same way.
It started with hearing the news together. A few discussion points were Trump's pussy grabbing video, his anti-intellectualism, and the environment. The discussion also meandered through science and religion, religion as a fertile ground for symbolic language and ended up with virtue signaling.
We were able to come to the conclusion that this Trump-evangelicals alliance would damage them for years to come. How it would be better for them to ally with decent people instead, whatever their view on religion.
And here we are...
When you need to expand your knowledge beyond YouTube videos I’d recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Mind-Conservatism-Edmund-...
A conservative plea for “common ground” is very similar to a mind game explained here: https://youtu.be/YOqJ4sc9TAc
I worry more about those for whom politics is a team sport, and who ignore whom they marginalize in their quest for ideals.
First one must ask whether there is "common ground" within the factions of the Democratic party itself.
Once victory has been declared and legislators and executives ensconced in their offices, a feeding frenzy will ensue within the Democratic Party. Each faction will demand that their agenda be pursued first with the most money, time and effort. Unfortunately resources are limited (in particular time is limited to 4 and, in some cases, 2 years). Political infighting amongst these factions will increase to a level so intense that people may long for the return of Donald Trump.
I've seen a lot of people noting how drug policy liberalization won big across the country, even in red states.
Your comment about "facts or reason" is sort of odd given your post gives no details concerning what you consider these to be. I mean, I could fill in some but it seems like without you giving a clue as to what you're referring to, people can only shout for you or against you.
Most of the difference is, I think, not based on factual disagreement, but based on principal disagreements on issues like the personhood of fetuses.
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This election has been a repudiation of Trump but not Trumpism.
But over the last few years friends called me a nazi and a racist, coworkers ostracized me for having unfashionable political views, many people cut contact entirely under the premise that I "support" white supremacy. This isn't some shit you easily forgive, and it isn't something you ever forget.
This wasn't just about politics, or teams, or policy preferences, or red vs blue or whatever. This is people denying your humanity on no grounds whatsoever, and when you point it out they say "well, minorities have always felt this way, so shut up and take it." That's fair enough, but it isn't about groups of people oppressing other groups of people. It's about Bill and John and Sally-- people who used to be friends and colleagues-- treating me like I'm a monster for no reason whatsoever other than a mass psychosis. That's not something you can ever come back from.
Here's where they are coming from: Donald Trump was denying people's humanity on the grounds that they came from south of the border. He was literally separating children from their parents to scare others away.
When I have explained that to Trump supporters, they immediately gaslight me; telling me it wasn't that bad, or Trump's fault.
> It's about Bill and John and Sally-- people who used to be friends and colleagues-- treating me like I'm a monster for no reason whatsoever other than a mass psychosis.
They don't mean to. Really, they don't. The trouble is, they just can't find a reason.
The only reason I can think of is that Trump supporters really don't know what's happening. That they don't believe it. It looks a lot like mass psychosis.
It looks even more like a cult. I would know: I grew up in one. If I can come back from that, you can come back from this. The first step is empathy.
Are you certain that you aren't in the "group of people oppressing other groups of people"?
I know it can be hard to confront that question. I did it about a year ago. When I did, I found out the answer was "no".
I dug a little deeper, and realized it wasn't a soft "no", either. I was an instrumental part of an institution that tears families apart and drives children to suicidal ideation. I always knew there were issues, but I had plenty of excuses for those issues and the institution's part in them.
If you really aren't a Nazi or a racist, then will you reconsider your support for the GOP? Bill, John, and Sally didn't just pull that out of their asses. What they said to you was disrespectful and dehumanizing, but it didn't come from nothing.
Or: Ignoring funding, what would you do?
An example year 1 goal: "Get X million people to watch 10 hours/year of strangers who they would normally not encounter or agree with, and to see them as real people."
To do that, produce and televise + stream a long-form TV show, like a version of Braver Angels' Red/Blue Workshops[1] that's actually fun to watch. Imagine a well-produced show with deep participant profiles - a cross between a reality TV show and a HBO/Netflix long-form movie.
It would humanize the participants first, then after viewers care about them, their lives, and their families, the actors gradually explain their backgrounds and opinions - some of which a viewer will disagree with. Viewers would "meet" people they may not interact with regularly. (Sarah Silverman's "I Love You, America"[2] is the closest I've seen to this, and it's not all that close.)
This would need to be a multi-decade plan, probably with philanthropic and public funding.
[1]: https://braverangels.org/what-we-do/red-blue-workshops/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmQpf-B94mc
In other words, we can avoid winner-take-all dysfunction by allowing more diversity in governance. If we make every issue national, it makes it too important who runs the national government.
Within reason, we should find ways to let California be California and Alabama be Alabama. Alabama and California shouldn't have to struggle against one another as much as they do.
Opinion journalism can be w/e. Reporting journalism has to be fact checked. Masquerading as reporting journalism should be a big bad. You gotta disclose opinion journalism up front, like you gotta put a Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes.
2. Mandate non-partisan districting boards and do away with "safe" districts.
This would lose majority-minority districts, which are responsible for a big proportion of our Reps of color. But safe districts skyrocket partisanship; politicians in safe districts can wander super far from the mainstream--think Steve King for example. And actually they oftentimes have to become radical in order to survive primaries. There's only so much you can do here with the current system but, a little would help a lot.
3. Empower state and local governments by repealing balanced budget amendments and term limits.
State governments have really hamstrung themselves with these policies, and as a result the federal government has to do a lot. This creates a perception--right or wrong--that a far away government is telling you how to live your life. If the federal government has secured rights for all and managed federal concerns, it should be reasonable for say, Oregon to have one set of gun regulations and Illinois to have another.
4. Make voting compulsory, make Election Day a holiday, expand early voting, establish same day registration everywhere.
The majority of Senators (and in midterms, the majority of Reps) are elected by a minority of people who are much more partisan than the mean. This pushes politicians out of the mainstream.
5. Federally finance elections, shorten the length, and amend the Constitution to obviate Citizens United.
Campaigns and their ads are super polarizing. Special interests run messaging campaigns on wedge issues (abortion, immigration, gun rights) in order to pass bills like SOPA or subsidies for fossil fuel energy companies in the night. Campaign finance reform disarms all this.
6. Limit the terms of Supreme Court Justices to 18 years and enact jurisdiction stripping.
The stakes of Supreme Court nominations are so high that it drives us all crazy. We should limit their terms so that 2-term presidents get to nominate 2 Justices, and we should limit the power of the Supreme Court on the basis that it's a deeply undemocratic and unaccountable institution. Pro-lifers feel this every day, as do progressives. We all agree it's bad; let's change it.
7. Enact affirmative action for mortgage companies, fund housing assistance, and reform public schools.
The US has a huge de facto segregation issue due to generations of discriminatory practices by mortgage companies, and the sky high cost of housing in neighborhoods with good schools. This creates fertile ground for bubbles and othering, not just in adults but also in children.
8. Re-establish affirmative action for colleges, and make it free.
The partisanship gap in the US now largely traces the education and income gap.
9. Establish clear boundaries on religious freedom.
Religious freedom is a fundamental part of the fabric of the United States, but so are personal liberty and individual rights. We need to give people the ability to live out their beliefs, but also establish a pluralistic society free of discrimination towards _and from_ the religious. Fighting a culture via religious freedom debases us all.
It's my opinion that freedom should be of primary importance in America, not feel good authoritarian inducing woo.
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This is hard and may backfire in a deeply divided country. To me, instead of trying to achieve a common ground (which, in the current situation often means forcing 49% to the position of the 51%; with the chance of a swap in 2-4 years) we should learn to live, share space and collaborate with folks who hold different political views.
We can disagree on politics, but it should not prevent us from working as a team on software or sharing a beer after work. We are not at war with the other half of the country. We should respect their opinions and avoid unnecessary confrontations. My 2c.
The problem here is that treating politics as 'just politics' is the realm of people privileged enough that they have never directly suffered because of those politics.
Transgender rights, for example, are never 'just politics' for me: they are a basic moral issue that deeply affects the life of one of my close friends.
I believe the fundamental dichotomy is that, for some of us, our opinions are not who we are. We can change our opinions and remain the same people.
For others, their opinions ARE who they are. They cannot separate out their beliefs from themselves, so when you question their opinions, they feel you are attacking them personally.
This implication directly contradicts the part about 'unity'.
'One side' having the run of the system will absolutely lead to greater divisions.
Trump is gone, I think most reasonable people will take solace in that. Now that he is gone, having regular checks and balances is a 'good thing'. Having the 'other side' with a narrow, 1 vote majority in the Senate is probably a really reasonable check on power, as Senators often break ranks with the party so there's plenty of room for a 'really good bit of legislation' to get through if the Dems want to push for it.
As for your argument on checks and balances - yes, generally, it is definitely a very good thing. However, when one side uses their position of chamber majority not to collaborate and compromise, but to throw a wrench into "wheels of democracy" and gridlock the Congress (especially, considering the voting record of the current majority in the Senate and essentially zero breaking ranks history), which might be extremely unproductive and even damaging to the lives of the American people, that IMO does not represent the "checks and balances" that you're talking about.
The playing field need to be leveled here so that party leadership doesn't have a stranglehold on what comes to a vote via backroom deals. Legislators need to have skin in the game, with real debate and actual votes to show where they stand.
There's apparently plenty of room on Mitch McConnell's desk. There are already hundreds of bills that passed the House sitting there.
To put it simpler, I would define moral fabric as a set of foundational moral principles (common moral ground) that most people in a particular society agree on and recognize as guidelines throughout their daily lives. These principles form a cohesive environment of values, which is referred to a moral fabric.
Here's a blog post with a potentially better definition: https://nomoralfabric.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/the-loss-of-m....
As for your argument on checks and balances - yes, generally, it is definitely a very good thing. However, when one side uses their position of chamber majority not to collaborate and compromise, but to throw a wrench into "wheels of democracy" and gridlock the Congress (especially, considering the voting record of the current majority in the Senate and essentially zero breaking ranks history), which might be extremely unproductive and even damaging to the lives of the American people, that IMO does not represent the "checks and balances" that you're talking about.
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I don't accept the demonization of fellow Americans based on bad faith arguments, but I sometimes I feel like this is a minority opinion. We should absolutely fight against specific events, behaviors, political rhetoric, and policies we disagree with. And sometimes individuals or small groups deserve to have their actions demonized as completely against our values. But looking for simple labels to place on literally millions of complex humans in order to point at simple answers to issues where simple answers don't exist is a fool's game.
Only one side denies climate change. Only one side denies medical consensus on vaccines and pandemic prevention techniques. Only one side is okay with mocking a disabled reporter (to pick one egregious example among countless).
Yes, if you're red/republican/conservative/right, you're voting for those things, you're signing off on them.
We don't need to "come together and find common ground" on those issues. We need to figure out how truth and decency lost their footing and slipped off the center stage.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
[2]https://smashthebubble.com/
1. Reality is often only reported in “liberal” news sources. A lot of information is censored on right wing sources.
2. Both types of news sources editorialize in the headline. Sometimes it’s hard to know they even refer to the same story.
3. People trying to achieve balance in reporting often relocate players onto the wrong team. For example, the Mueller report is not a “left wing” document and balance is not achieved by putting Mueller against a Trump surrogate.
4. “Liberal” sources already include plenty of right wing opinions. For example, David Brooks and Ross Douthat write for the New York Times. There’s no equivalent among the Wall St Journal columnists or Fox News hosts.
5. News stories found only in right wing sources are usually mendacious. For example, reporting about the Michigan ballot glitch without mentioning that it was human error and corrected before reporting the results.
Fundamentally, it’s not that we have differing information, it’s that we only accept information that confirms our world view. I can read dozens of articles written from the point of view that universal health care will destroy the country and not one will ever resonate with me. It’s just too silly to me.
I think that they see their role to push for their side and have zero ideological commitment to any semblance of anything else. Do you get sleepy Biden in clear stage of dementia, again and again.
Note that I an not claiming journals should be objective. They can't. Just that there are more lines to cross. And frankly, liberal journals do go out of their way to extend empathy to "other side" more often.
It's really hard to get a balance look at the news when everything has it's own slant but it's worth the effort I think to understand the nuance.
Carl Sagan, in his 1995 book ‘The Demon-Haunted World’, wrote:
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The moment he prophesied now appears to be upon us. I don’t know how we can restore this country to one where people mostly act in good faith and try to base decisions in science and fact. I see so many incredibly compassionate people supporting the most despicable politicians. Right-wingers on Twitter repeating false talking points that the left are trying to destroy the country while tweeting about how proud they are of local youth offering free lawn care to disabled and senior citizens. Left-wingers openly insulting rural and conservative people as the scum of the earth while relentlessly supporting policies intended to improve those same peoples’ lives. How does this happen? What do we have to do—as individuals, as nations, as humans—to get it to stop?
[0] - https://twitter.com/KySportsRadio/status/1324552953861210112
Thinking you understand technology seems to reliably lead to overconfidence. That's better left to advisers, who then have their advice filter by people who are sceptical of things that aren't tried and true and well understood on the holistic basis of actual use in practice.
Individuals, their inner world and potential are very important, but you have systematically mortified the importance - and the “evolutionary advantage” - of the human societal organization.
Over optimization for the hedonistic “self bootstrapped” man turned most of you - that don’t have the strength, but most likely the luck, to be Randian heroes - into the exact opposite: submissive corporate drones.
It’s time to lay the groundwork for long term change, isn’t it?
A higher degree of basic solidarity will help us a lot.
Dead Comment
I sort of feel like we're in that old tale where king Solomon says they should cut the baby in two, and both sides are like "ok, I'll take my half of the baby, then."
Ultimately, though, I personally blame the extreme right wing, mostly. I think they're dying, and they're not going down without a fight, like, you know, disinformation, bullying, holding the country hostage metaphorically, whatever. If they're going down, the whole system's going down with them.
Part of the problem is the candidates the parties are fielding. I know lots of people who view trump, clinton and biden as corrupt. None of them are good candidates.
0. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/politics-industry/
However, the key point is that such a system would mainly benefit a potential third party, but any changes to the system need to be agreed upon by the current representatives whose interests and reelection would be hurt by such a change.
I'm just wondering if there is a good way for a strong third (and fourth and fifth...) party to form under the current system? Are there any good examples from other countries making that transition, and can they be applied in the US as well?
I believe this is really just a return to the way things used to be, before the US decided to intervene in WWII and had to find a way to pay for the massive cost of that. Conservative and liberal are not opposites like everybody thinks these days. Conservative and progressive are opposites. Liberal and authoritarian are opposites. Both parties are (or should be) focused on the American ideal of liberalism and representative government chosen by the people while either preserving traditional values or advocating for enlightenment values.
However, real life is not that cut and dry, politics are messy, parties don’t fall exactly along these lines and the media plays a part in dictating who should believe what. But in general I think Trump is an indicator that we’re headed for a more traditional alignment of values. Who knows, perhaps a viable third party will emerge from this. A Conservative party, a progressive party, and a Bretton Woods establishment party.
I would agree, to some extent, if Trump wasn't the Conservative candidate. Trump has flouted the law to the extent that very, very few American Presidents have. Where I was afraid that Obama was passing too many Executive Orders, Trump outright tried to rule by Executive Order fiat. Conservative parties pre-Bretton Woods were certainly isolationist and domestic-first, but also had a deep affection for the rule of law. I would oppose a traditionally conservative party politically, but would not be nearly as negative about it as I am about a President that seems to want to actively subvert rule of law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Meh, I must have become a cynical grumpy old person: to me politics has always been a game for rich, old people.
The Cold War ended and the USSR peacefully dissolved, democracy was ascendant, the Good Friday Agreement ended The Troubles, East and West Germany reunified, the Schengen Area and the Eurozone were established, the International Space Station opened an era of international cooperation in peaceful space exploration, life expectancy was up, disposable income was up, new and amazing technologies were developed at record pace, substantially improved treatments for fatal conditions like HIV and cancer were entering the market, we’d nearly cracked the human genome, we’d made great progress in eradicating infectious diseases, people around the world were being lifted out of poverty, crime was down, the Western economy was strong. The world seemed less divided and closer together than ever.
Today, tensions between superpowers are up. Russia and North Korea have renewed the threat of nuclear armed conflict. The UK exited the EU. There’s an obesity crisis. Many of our amazing technologies have turned out to be terribly unhealthy and destabilising. Authoritarianism is on the rise, along with domestic and sectarian terrorism. The Western economy was shattered in 2008 and now there’s a global pandemic. Immigrants fleeing instability in other countries have led to political upheaval and conflict. The US became an unreliable ally. And, above all, the existential threat of climate change looms over their entire future.
The US faces no threat of being conquered, it has the most powerful military and intelligence capacity in the world by a healthy margin. Insofar as foreign interference creates division, it's precisely the lack of decentralisation that makes these attacks dangerous.
The purpose of the bubbles is to keep you clicking or pressing. The purpose of that is to deliver ads or sell premium services. If uncomfortable views are presented a user may click or press out of the service. Those uncomfortable views are not to be confused with click bait allowed to drive bubble responses.
No use blaming the architects or company leaders. If you are coding it up, maintaining the infrastructure, or providing auxiliary support to the bubble, you are responsible. The companies making the bubbles can't do it without you, and you are the one actually making it happen.
For example, want to bring manufacturing jobs back?
1. Implement trade-protectionist tariffs and import restrictions.
2. Unionize rural workforces to make the pay and work conditions attractive.
3. Offer massive tax incentives to build manufacturing centers in rural states.
4. Reinstitute a manufacturing oriented education system that outputs ready-to-work trained trade employees.
The parties are too far apart now to be able to put in place something like this.
Open the gates for immigration.
Work with allies to impose extreme tariffs on China.
Build manufacturing in India, Mexico, Vietnam, and Africa. Own the shipping.
Offer US statehood to Taiwan and keep the South China Sea open to all US Allies. Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc.
They can also be done without isolationism, but probably not without redistributing the wealth that has concentrated in the hands of the 0.1% over decades (under both parties) back into the general population.
Trump's actions this week have been utterly shameful. He and his cronies have lied and lied in an organised effort to sow discontent among the huge segment of republicans that appear to believe their every word (regardless of how baseless or ridiculous they may be).
It seems like such a blatant attempt to subvert democracy - the kind of thing we'd expect in a tinpot dictatorship, not the "land of the free". This is not only shameful, but downright dangerous, especially with the level of gun ownership in the US.
As a European, it seemed utterly incomprehensible how he has been able to get away with his actions, inactions and lies over the past few years - and I have not the words to describe how incomprehensible it is that many of his supporters are behind the past week's events.
I feel that the first structural steps must be
1./ Replace First Past the Post (it distorts the will of the people) with some version of ranked balloting (already in use in at least one US state)
2./ Dissolve or fix/improve the Electoral College
Pardon, but isn't USA already divided approx. 50/50?
From the outside (I'm from Norway), I can't even believe how shit the US politics is.
We’re actually at an inflection point where before white men were the elite, no question, that was what it took to get in the door outside a few congressional districts.
Now it’s still mostly that but it takes more, and due to demographic shifts it will be that less and less. The right — belatedly (far too little far too late, and quite awkwardly) — has already started outreach to Latino and black communities. They will continue but it will take a while (what an embarrassment for the party of Lincoln. FFS.).
Obama was a lighting strike to those who assumed it would always be the old way, and Trump was the response to Obama.
Fortunately, that failed (unfortunately it took hundreds of thousands of dead Americans to convince enough Michiganders, Wisconsinites, Pennsylvanians (I’m sure about “Michiganders”, being one myself, no idea on the others) but at least it happened.)
The left, quite cleverly, responded with Biden, an old white guy in the classic mold. Literally: nothing to fear here, white peeps... but with Kamala as VP — a powerless position yet a powerful symbol (especially as the VP of a VP cum President).
So It’s the changing of the guard. Republicans can no longer simply ignore black and brown people (at best) or use them as bugaboos (and then Democrats won’t be able to simply count on their votes by not actively being racist). Once the powerful engage those groups they’ll find them not to be uniform, and (hopefully) that will lead to meaningful, nuanced, deep engagement... if that happens, there will no longer be such a thing as the “black vote”. (This is further along with Latinos, where some groups aren’t too overwhelmingly for one party or the other).
So...
Not really an existential crisis, at least not to my mind. It’s real progress. We can no longer force certain groups into blocks based on whether we actively believe they should be subjugated or just kinda ignore them.
Hallelujah.
Then the transition of power or the changing demographics you speak of will disenfranchise those once in power and that could lead to violence (think white heavily-armed men intimidating or worse those they disagree with). This is what I fear as well.
As for dividing the US, I hope the lesson of this election is that you shouldn't assume what you see online is representative of the real US - otherwise it would have been a landslide for Biden.
“History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes”
Do you think that the bipartidism is to blame, amongst other factors? If there were more options then some of the most radical electorate will have their own candidate and it could help divide the support they get at the Chambers.
Also smaller parties could help in having more negotiation for bills and laws.
Dead Comment
I feel like we're likely already in the middle of a divide and conquer situation.
The problem is that the US has a historical example of what happens when the "economic engine" and the "conservative culture" reach an impasse.
The "economic engine" wins. The question is how much damage will get done until that happens.
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No way. Polarization will continue. The politics of New York and California will remain anathema to the majority in "fly-over states" (e.g., Texas, Montana, etc.) for generations. The former two states (NY, CA) will economically self-destruct long before such acceptance occurs.
How do people with functioning moral compasses come together with the kind of people who see pictures of children in cages and say "America, fuck yeah?"
How do people who want some form of democratic government come together with the kind of people who think it's entirely right and proper for a president to do his best to prevent his political opponents from voting -- by disrupting the postal service, by soliciting the help of multiple hostile foreign governments to smear his opponent, calling for his opponents to be imprisoned without charge, and by attempting to halt vote counting in the courts?
How do people with any kind of respect for the value of human life watch video of the George Floyd killing and come together with the kind of people who watch the video and argue that the police did nothing wrong?
I don't think these divides can be healed. These issues are not matters, like arguments over the size of government, where compromise is both possible and mutually beneficial. Instead, they are moral red lines about which compromise is neither possible or desirable. What the 70-odd million who voted from Trump want out of their country isn't compatible with the basic moral outlook of the 75-odd million people who voted against him.
To take an extreme example, if a bunch of Nazis want to kill 10 million people, 'compromising' by agreeing to let them kill only 5 million people isn't acceptable -- and yet, this is exactly the kind of moral compromise (truly in the other sense of the word) that would be involved in bringing together Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions.
In addition to the moral divide, there is a reality/gullibility divide between the Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions. Trumpists believe an awful lot of stuff that is factually untrue. They reject global warming and dismiss the scientific evidence as the product of a Chinese hoax to destroy America. 56% of Republicans now believe in Qanon (an ideological conspiracy theory born out of the argument that Democrats eat babies) to some extent[0]. The overwhelming majority of Trumpists get their news from Fox, a media outlet which spreads more misleading information than accurate information.[1] How does anyone with a commitment to respecting consensus reality reach people who have chosen to live in comforting fantasyland rather than cope with the world as it is?
I don't see any way for the US to get out of this mess without breaking up into multiple countries.
And, to the usual 'downvote to -1' crowd: what part of this analysis is wrong?
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...
[1] https://www.politicususa.com/2015/02/06/fact-checker-finds-6...
Dead Comment
If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power, often justified by religious beliefs...
And Trump is not gone yet... Who knows what the Republicans will do with the stacked Supreme Court...
There are many valid reasons to vote for all candidates and the weighting of the issues is personal and perhaps not everyone agrees with the weighting that you do.
And these 47% would say exactly the same thing about the others. That’s the divide GP was pointing out and ironically your response is perpetuating it. Stop dehumanizing people.
If you think half the country wants to rewrite the Constitution and remove democracy...I'm not really sure what to say.
Perhaps I’m overly-cynical, but in my (limited) experience, most people just don’t pay enough attention for such motivations — or even expectations — to be plausible.
What actually happened was that large numbers of voters are stuck in a filter bubble and their only news sources were telling them the election was being stolen. So by supporting Trump they probably thought they were defending democracy.
Of course, those particular news stories were pure lies. But we should focus on the peddlers of lies more than those who were duped by them.
It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.
Should Biden ultimately be declared the victor, I’m concerned that the public will never receive the postmortem on what went wrong and how it happened again that it deserves.
Polls can only guess about turnout and the try to work backwards from there. The turnout estimates were wrong but not shockingly so, and as a consequence a lot of polls ended up having the result be at the far end of their margin of error. Nothing went wrong. Polling is hard. Get over this idea that you can have some sort of certainty regarding an election until we actually hold the election.
Polling is really hard. There are fundamental problems with it that are impossible to fully solve. It's frankly amazing that they get as close as they do.
[1]https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
[2]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-pollsters-have-cha...
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[1] https://poll.qu.edu/florida/release-detail?ReleaseID=3683
Accurate polls are important to running campaigns and to legislative positions. Selzer got her polls right in Iowa and she posited that she knew the local electorate better than other pollsters so she weighted correctly. Maybe Trafalgar Group has a better method or maybe it just weights GOP voters more heavily (we don’t know, it won’t disclose its methods). Or maybe Trump just breaks polling and the polls will be fine next time. Whatever the reason, I’d like to know, but I’m not sure we ever will.
It boils down to: a fraction of the electorate will vote for $bigotcandidate but would never ever admit it to anyone outside the voting booth, because they know it is wrong. They will tell people they will vote for $notbigotcandidate, but vote for him nonetheless.
This fraction is not insignificant and you cannot easily represent it in polls without guessing the effect. In my home province it eas consistently around 10 to 15% over a decade.
The publicly available polls are done for free by polling companies or by news organizations. Unfortunately some of these companies apparently have an agenda to push. So they skew their sample away from what the likely voters are to get the result they want for propaganda purposes.
I think that the rise of Nate Silver has ironically made this situation worse. He advocates taking an average of polls to get a true view of the situation. So if you are skewing you poll to get a certain outcome and you know the poll will be averaged, you need to warp your results even further.
Ok, disclaimer time - I don't have any inside knowledge or real evidence of any of the above. It does seem to fit however. I can't explain why it seems all the distorting is to make the Dems lead seem bigger than it is - that is, why aren't there pollers on the other side of the aisle doing the same thing?
So you'll have to decide for yourself if there is any merit to the above theory.
This wasn’t some rare weird outcome. This was probably a standard deviation or so closer to Trump in a forecast. Perfectly normal thing to happen.
Alternate phrasings of identical questions asked in polls creates differences in outcome vastly larger than the effects they claim to detect. Somehow Nate Silver managed to get rich by selling synthetic CDOs of arbitrary polls (to people with his identical political outlook.)
The only real poll is to ask the same questions, in the same way, as the ballot sheet does. Ideally these should be asked as people are entering or leaving the voting booth, and people should be paid for their responses, in order not to bias yourself towards bored loudmouths with nothing to do. This would be good for accuracy, not for usefulness in anything but generating a suspicion of election fraud.
Instead, they're trying to figure out what percentage of black people go to the polls in Missouri, and pretending that the self-selected black voter has more in common politically with the general black phone answerer than the Missouri voter. Relying on that arbitrary assumption is the entire basis of their field.
edit: I haven't read https://site.pennpress.org/aha-2021/9780812250046/race-and-t... yet, but I heard an interview with the author around the time that it came out, and it's another hidden history of a field that has completely unearned legitimacy. "Political Science" might largely be considered an outgrowth of scientific racism.
A little scrutiny here is worthwhile. In 2016, for example, the polls were off in part because pollsters weighted the black demographic in proportion to their voting behavior in 2008 and 2012 (when a black candidate was running, boosting turnout). The actual 2016 black turnout looked more similar to 2004 or 2000 - other elections where a black candidate wasn't running. Though I haven't dived into the 2020 polling data, it wouldn't surprise me if a similar effect were at play.
It's also become noticeable harder to do polling. Once upon a time, everybody had a landline, so random dialing worked really well. Now, some people have more phones than others, and people are increasingly less willing to talk to pollsters, increasing the error rate.
These are all important things to talk about - when you dismiss it as "oh yeah, polls are never perfect," you prematurely shut down the conversation. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The polls could be better and it's important to talk about how.
Besides the usual adjustments for likely voter models, we also do things like infer how people will vote in House and Senate elections based on Presidential polling, because we do a lot more Presidential polling than down ballot, because money.
So one early thing that seems to have happened this year (and again, we are still early in the process to be making final verdicts in "what happened" retrospectives) is that people split their ballot more than anticipated, which means that the inferences we were making about down ballot races based on Presidential performance were off.
So not quite a polling error, but an example of uncertainty that may not have been correctly taken into account in forecasting.
I think the complaint is that here the polls were not just imperfect. They were at best, misleading raising questions over methodology ( lessons, apparently, not learned in 2016 ), wishful thinking, and their usefulness, or, at worst, attempts at influencing desired income.
I can absolutely agree that polling is not an exact science, but now it is twice in a row that polling science has grossly miscalculated the mood of the nation.
I think it’s interesting too how some of the qualitative predictions (like Sabatos crystal ball) were pretty close to the outcome in the Pres race.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/...
Even if the pollsters are the most neutral nonjudgmental people on earth there will still be a fraction of the electorate that will (irrationally) shy away from telling them the truth.
This effect is certainly real.
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That's why people love watching your elections so much. Or maybe also because of the fallout in their countries.
Much more interesting are the direct results predictions, especially per state where they matter most. Those are polls that give a particular result with a +- confidence interval. If the polls were to any extent competently done, you expect the result to be well within that margin of error.
The reality though has been that the results have been well outside the margin of error, sometimes multiple sigmas from the actual result - that is simply unacceptable for a poll. The only conclusion should be that polling data can be completely ignored, as it doesn't seem to have any clear relationship with the final results.
I think the problem is trying to make sense of outliers and uncertainty, and that, in an election with 150M+ variables, you will end up with a result that isn't quite what anyone predicted. In other words: it's not numeracy, it's epistemology.
‘We just can’t predict’.
As far as I can tell the most surprising result was Trump's popularity among Cuban Floridians.
When there is a major difference in voting patterns between the two political parties, then polls may not actually be inaccurate. In this case, Democrats chose mail-in voting and Republicans, by and large, chose in-person after being directed by the president.
Also, some percentage of mail-in ballots may not have reached their destination because of possible election interference through reduced post office efficiency--in particular, fewer mail sorting machines, lower hours, deprioritized mails, etc.
In short, the polls don't take into account election interference in the post office or unsuccessful delivery. If most people from both parties were voting in-person, maybe we might have had more parity between the polls and election results.
“What are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me... ending up together?”
“Not good”
“Not good like one in a hundred?”
“I'd say more like one in a million.”
“So you're you’re saying there's a chance!”
I know enough about probability distributions and modeling to know you can improve your models to lower that uncertainty.
And sorry, you are the Lloyd Christmas in this one.
They would give you a probability distribution if they were truly random samples. But in reality, response rates are very low, and pollsters make up for this using demographic weighting and modeling - so the results don't actually represent any real population, but rather are extrapolated from people who respond onto a hypothetical population that the pollster thinks is likely to vote. This is why they are spectacularly and systematically off, more and more over time. It's not just variance.
... and a lot of assumptions about the supposed underlying probability spaces.
(I do not know why the forecasts are wrong, but I don't see why Parent is at all justified in his statement).
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Just yesterday Trump administration sanctioned Gibran Bassil, a corrupt Lebanese politician who is very close with Hezbollah. I hope Biden has the same sense to chase these guys down...
In other words, you just like the side of the war that he picked.
Dead Comment
If you were 4 years old today, Trump still would only be the second President in your lifetime not to start another war.
The 34 prior years may or may not change that depending on whether you look at starting armed conflict or starting US involvement in the conflict.
The US withdrew from Syria, and it does appear to me that for a moment that were a sense of morality from Trump there, he genuinely did not like the idea that lives would be lost as a consequence of his actions. That is commendable, though perhaps something that should have been considered in advance of such a situation rather than reactively.
But what was the consequence of not intervening? It created a vacuum, into which stepped many military powers, and many people have died or been displaced. We also have to consider the long-term consequences of an isolationist foreign policy.
There is a balance to be found between war-mongering and exerting influence to shape the world positively. Particularly, you have to avoid leaving a vacuum that can be exploited.
At the least we can say he didn't start an arbitrary new war, and that is a small but significant positive.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-have-bombed-yemen-more...
Also he also didn't take Covid seriously, thus helping contribute to hundreds of thousands of people dying? It didn't have to be a political issue.
- Glenn Greenwald
Dead Comment
Do people think this is isolated (because Trump is, well, Trump) or there’s a broader tendency here?
In other words, there is nothing inappropriate about Twitter putting disclaimers on objectively factually incorrect statements.
But what is that set of facts?
Twitter felt no need to censor the Steele dossier for years despite it being a politically-funded piece of nonsense.
I don't quite understand the epistemic certainty people have that such weapons will never be turned against them, especially when history so dramatically demonstrates the opposite.
What everyone is missing is: both universes might as well be correct, to the observer. It's like measuring what speed someone is going in two different relativistic frames of reference. You can both be right and come up with different numbers. It's a tough problem to solve. We can't solve it by just pointing at the out-groups and saying "ha-ha how stupid are they for believing in rubbish!" They are just not going to be convinced by someone who believe a totally different set of facts.
If Twitter could make money in China would flagging Human Rights Campaign be okay?
Do you?
Not necessarily inappropriate, but it might be ineffective. I don't know if this has already occurred but I'd bet a great deal of money that those click-through warnings about blatant or dangerous falsehoods will become a badge of honor among twitter conservatives, if they haven't already.
We're building a world where "think for yourself" means "defer your thinking to Trusted Sources™", which is not a world that I support.
EDIT>> s/CNN/CNBC
"defer your thinking to Trusted Sources" is the world we're coming from. Our incoherent polarization is a result of the traditional authorities having been routed around (and then leaning into their own demise). We've apparently got an awfully long road ahead of us to get to a world where everyone is actually thinking for themselves, as demonstrated by how readily blatant lies spread when they're politically and personally comforting.
Joe Biden: We stand with independent Taiwan. Fact check: This statement is false. Taiwan is part of China.
Does this hypothetical not give you chills?
Admittedly the question becomes how we can in a fair manner judge what ideas in which context can have such a dangerous impact as to be non-democratic.
We all have to reflect how close fascism and other kinds of ideologies always are just beneath the surface, and that we are all susceptible of falling on that train it isn't specifically another group that is.
Want to ban Nazi's? I wont disagree, most people wont.
Want to ban group X which is fighting with group Y in a tit-for-tat skirmish over decades? How do you decide who is right? How do you decide truth?
What about cases where someone has done something bad in response to something bad done earlier? Do you ban one side? The other? Both? Does the side with more political/status power decide who gets banned?
I think there is a difference between ‘right vs wrong’ and ‘factually correct vs incorrect’.
Platforms like Twitter will rarely be in a position to decide right/wrong, because in many opposed discussion both sides will use the platform.
On the factual correctness, platforms can more easily take a stance in high impact cases. I would assume that they’d have out the same warnings on Biden’s Twitter if he had said ‘I won’ on Tuesday.
That leaves a challenge: how do you decide what’s a fact? For example on the vote count. Most outlets say the reported figures are fact, but it implies trusting the process of counting and reporting. Removing that implied trust means others can take ‘there is fraud!’ as fact just as well.
Twitter seems to use the mainstream media (eg AP predicting the election outcome) as a base of trust (and so do I). But I’ve come to realize that once you don’t trust the media, it is easy to believe in another set of facts (that are true for you), and suddenly (to you) it seems Twitter is censoring.
I hope people will find and trust each other again.
By the time the meeting was over, the engineers had figured out a way to flag all the Nazis and just moved them all to their own instance. Problem solved.
And "antidemocratic" gets defined by, well, Twitter.
(I'm firmly in the "Their platform, their rules" camp, so I agree that Twitter CAN do this, I'm really just curious as to why people think they SHOULD).
If you haven't see its worth a look. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump
Am I excited that We the People are delegating the decisions what speech to amplify or not to fickle private companies? It’s hard for me to get behind that. Something just feels very wrong about this idea.
It's not even censorship, they are all there still and anyone can read them.
But proven lies need to be called out. Freedom of the press allows us to call out politicians on their lies.
Thus far, it seems to mean that I can't follow, comment, post, or dm on/with groups or facebook pages. I cannot create events, pages, or new groups.
I can only post to my timeline, dm my friends, or comment on my friend's posts.
I do not post, or comment on Facebook, though I am a member of a number of politically engaged and activist facebook groups on the fringes for the purposes of having access to on the ground primary sources.
I have a number of friends active on the right who received a similar set of restrictions, ending on the same day. They're used to these kinds of restrictions, comment often, and thought nothing of it. This is typical of facebook to them.
More unexpectedly, and in my opinion a disturbing development in an already unsettling moderation regime, a number of second-order contacts (friends of friends and coworkers) who work as left and progressive organizers/activists (not liberals, progressives and leftists) also received the same levels of restriction.
This was accompanied by the removal of quite a few fringe activist and political pages, the most infamous which comes to my mind being 'God Emperor Trump', a large meme page that had significant reach during the 2016 election.
I don't think this is circumstantially unique. This is a preview. Assuming recounts and court challenges go Biden's way, I believe we're looking at a future where social media uses the tools they've developed over the past four years to enforce a bipartisan moderate consensus over their user-bases, restricting any populist, revolutionary, or potentially dangers speech or users that might produce it.
The activist left has largely been shielded by its circumstantial alliance with the DNC establishment and its allied institutions, given their mutual opposition to the Trump administration.
The populist right has partially been shielded by the implicit threat of Trump's executive authority.
Libertarians (I'm including the Boogaloo movement, and many lockdown protests under this umbrella) have had no such cover, and in my limited experience I've seen entire networks of users and pages been scrubbed off the platform over the past two years with little fanfare, and largely as a product of their affiliations. I believe their experience will be mirrored on the left and the right going forward.
It's exceedingly likely that American liberals will tell you what to do, and pat themselves on the back.
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I'd say it's impossible to do a perfect job of finding that threshold, but I think Twitter has done a decent job of it with Trump's tweets.
But yes, as it stands right now, it is in their hands and we are relying on them to do a good job of it when they decide to.
Censoring really ought to be driven by the individual, not the platform. By getting involved in censoring certain parties, Twitter is implying here (whether intentionally or not) that its platform is a source of truth. That's a horrifying notion on its own. If anything my trust in Twitter (what little I had) is basically gone. It has nothing to do with politics. The minute a social media platform starts meddling with user content (especially the content of public figures, especially especially the current POTUS, whoever he is), I no longer believe anything I see on the platform.
It's hard enough to know what to believe without questioning the authenticity of people's statements.
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Then we as a democracy could decide via legislation and law what is approrpriate and what is not.
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A President with a massive angry following with guns, tweeting falsehoods about the lack of integrity of the electoral process (And I don't mean the vague things, I mean the explicitly false things like his party not having access to view vote count processes, which they do) is about as close as you can get to yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater on the internet.
Not only is it Twitter's prerogative to act accordingly, I'd go further and say it is their ethical duty.
And yes, if Biden did the equivalent "from the other side", Twitter would act in exactly the same way.