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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

> I am consistently baffled how a political party can make so many decisions that are objectively wrong and still garner support ...

I find that this hypothesis explains the observations:

It's an ideological movement. The test of support is not truth or good outcomes, but whether it fits the ideology. That's why you see some Republicans saying more and more outrageous things. They are demonstrating their loyalty to the ideology by saying things that are unacceptable from any other perspective.

I was reading some history of the Middle Ages and rise of the Enlightenment, and it reminds me a bit of that. Speaking very generally, in the Middle Ages a certain ideology ruled, facts be damned. In the Enlightenment, reason become preeminent even when it contradicted ideologies. Maybe we're headed for a new Medieval period!

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Most movements seem to be ideological. See, for example, studies that find scientific literacy is equally appalling between climate change deniers and supporters[0].

In the case of climate change, and in everything else, the internal and private views of a politician and their inner circle are not necessarily the same as their public views. This explains why Obama claimed to be against gay marriage, why Gore made claims that he almost certainly knew were wrong about seeing a planetary catastrophe by 2016, and may explain Peter Thiel's cryptic comments on Trump and climate change from a little while ago[1]. The internal opinion may be that climate change is too expensive to fix, that the extent of the damage may be lower than predicted, that the billionaire Americans Trump hangs out with have no reason to care about poor Indians living in the Ganges delta, that climate change is too much of a talking point for the left for the right to backpedal on, or that doing anything more than we already are would not help/would not be cost effective.

Or, alternatively, the ship has an ignorant madman at the helm. Who really knows?

[0] https://m.phys.org/news/2015-02-climate-science-literacy-unr... [1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-do...

The implication of the parent comment is that it's all the same - every movement, group, etc. are equally wrong or right. That's a common defense of propaganda, but it's not reality.

Nobody is perfect; everyone is a bit ideological, but some are much more rational and empirical than others. All coders create bugs, but not all coders turn out equal quality code. Everyone is a bit violent, but we aren't all equally murderers. There are major differences, and the current conservative movement is heavily ideological; I think my hypothesis holds up very well.

>"the current conservative movement is heavily ideological"

The current Democratic establishment is also heavily ideological. Aside from a few outliers like Bernie Sanders, a lot of the Democratic rhetoric is built up around identity politics. You don't have to look far to find it, but to give you one example, listen to how much this DNC vice chair candidate hammers home the 'diversity' message:

https://youtu.be/Jjs87Y2F_FA?t=5m19s

Again, the argument is that everyone is the same. See my prior post.

The fact that it is possible for things to be different doesn't imply that they are. Entropically speaking, it's unlikely for two populations to measure up equally by any particular scale. However, that alone doesn't tell us much.

On another note, suppose both groups actually are quite similar in how ideological they are. One would be mistaken to then assume that the two groups have equally effective approaches for conducting affairs. Despite the fact that robustly measuring such effectiveness is currently far outside our grasp.

Coming back to reality, I would guess that both parties are not equally ideological. However, I do think there are very large segments of both that are almost entirely ideological, and that, unfortunately, these subgroups often take most of the limelight.

> The fact that it is possible for things to be different doesn't imply that they are

Right, so let's stop talking of theoretical possibilities and look at concrete reality. I don't know of the last time a party embraced ideology as strongly as today's GOP; anyone who doesn't see that will never see ideology anywhere - it hardly could get more extreme.

> I do think there are very large segments of both that are almost entirely ideological, and that, unfortunately, these subgroups often take most of the limelight.

Again, a false equivalence IMHO. Which very large, limelight-stealing Democrat group are you referring to? Hillary Clinton supporters were the largest group; she's almost the opposite of ideological. Obama and his supporters are very non-ideological. The participants in last Saturday's marches were generally non-ideological, AFAICT.

I agree with you that the Republicans are more ideological in recent years.

It's late, so I don't have the best examples, but I have a vague impression that there has been an increase of single-dimension, with-us-or-against-us identity politics. Perhaps I'm mistaking noisy for large. Even still, many of these groups do have legitimate claims...

Reflecting a bit, I suppose one main reason I posted was that I didn't like the implication that the mainstream left has become enlightened past the point of ideology. But perhaps that point is too much of a distraction in this conversation. Meh.

Btw, not that it should matter, but I lean left and voted for both Obama and Hillary.

> I didn't like the implication that the mainstream left has become enlightened past the point of ideology

I agree. It's not that the mainstream left is so great and above reproach, it's that their right-wing competition has embraced madness.

Nope, that doesn't logically follow. Different ideologies have different impacts on the world. If you group people just by ideology alone you'll be missing the bigger picture.

I hate to break it to you, but climatology is also an ideological movement.

Climatology noun the scientific study of climate.

Climatology is science. You can call this or that environmental activist whatever you want, but science is science. I hate to break it to you though, I really do. I'm really sorry for breaking this to you because breaking things to you is so hard to do, but I'm just going to take one for the team and break it to you anyway, regardless of my general feelings about breaking things to people.

But most importantly, it is going to die now that it's political purpose is at an end. There will be no climate-based global collectivism.

Hah. Nope. What's going to happen is that there'll be more damage done via the us government's new stance. There are other world governments, state governments, private businesses, universities, and, of course, individuals, to continue to work on the problems arising from the man made global temperature increase and resulting climate changes.

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