The World Turned Upside Down (and what to do about it)

This is a surprisingly substantive piece. I'm hopeful that it will foster high-quality discussion on HN.

It's a central problem. It feels like being mired in quicksand. If you try to ask right-leaning folks about the left, and left-leaning folks about the right, you get hatred. I haven't seen many presidencies but this seems like a new phenomenon.

The problem is that it's almost impossible to stay neutral. I've always held the belief that both the right and the left are dopey in their own special ways, but both have valid points that we should learn from. A sentence like that is easy to say in isolation; who wouldn't want to learn from valid points of view? But you know how it goes when you try to talk with anyone about X if you mention X is believed by "the other tribe."

Why does this happen? I don't know, and I'm not sure what to do about it. The underlying problem is that the volume has been turned way up. It feels like there's no room for quiet people anymore.

Maybe in this thread we can avoid talking about any specific political problem and try to come up with meta-strategies for dealing with the current political climate. How do you live well when the world wants to draft you? That's the crux of it: you're either fighting for Trump or fighting against Trump, and those who do neither are suspect.