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Comment by ObsoleteNerd | Hacker News Reader

As a non-US person with zero interest in the US at all, the whole Left vs Right thing over there looks EXACTLY like a religious war from here.

Both sides are violently trying to force their beliefs on everyone else, and both sides think they're right and anyone who doesn't believe the same things as them is outright wrong and deserves to be destroyed.

Anyone who doesn't take a side, is basically considered to be worth nothing, and either mocked or considered as bad as the enemy.

The sheer amount of HATE that flows out of the US is mind boggling.

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I feel like a religious war is the wrong model for the US, mostly because I've never heard of a place with a pair of religions that both have roughly half of the followers, and are just fighting over the allegiance of the last one-to-five percent; and especially a place where this is somehow a long-term equilibrium state.

Munster's (Germany) Rebellion comes close? As far as a moment in history, I mean.

Campaigning actually involves fairly little persuasion; very little fighting over that last one-to-five percent. It's mostly identifying which half of the people are already your side's followers, and encouraging/motivating them to show up and vote.

Except I think the model has very recently changed. In the past it used to be about “chasing the centre”, and as a result, parties tended not to stray too far from centrist policy positions, because when polled on actual policies, most people tend to be remarkably closely bunched.

However, recent events have proven that (short term) political success can be attained by pushing the edges. Now, instead of parties following the relatively centrist positions of the majority of people, they are actively pushing more extreme agendas, pulling people away from the centre (using various propaganda techniques), and locking large blocks of voters in behind positions quite distant and clearly distinct from those of their opponents. The success of this approach seems to be predicated on creating ambiguities, obfuscation and false dichotomies. I’d suggest that many fervent followers would be unable to correctly articulate actual policies of their parties vs repeating glib partisan mantras.

Or at least that’s how it seems to me.

> Except I think the model has very recently changed.

It hasn't, at least in the way you describe.

> In the past it used to be about “chasing the centre”

It wasn't, at least not anything like recently; that turnout determines elections and even unaffiliated voters are just as consistently partisan in how they vote as party loyalists has been well known by both political scientists and political campaigners for decades, and deeply integrated into political strategy; it's he reason behind both GOTV efforts and selective voter suppression, neither of which are new elements of the political playbook.

> Now, instead of parties following the relatively centrist positions of the majority of people

They don't do that because there is no such thing. Distribution of political opinion doesn't have a central peak.

> Distribution of political opinion doesn't have a central peak.

But I'm not talking about "political opinion". I'm talking about "common sense" (reflective of things that may lie at the core of policies devoid of partisan spin). For example, according to a recent poll [0], a significant majority of Americans support immigration. A visiting alien might think that a consensus policy position could be achieved based on a result like that. Clearly however, that's not the case in reality. Similarly for background checks on gun buyers [1], yet, like immigration, it seems that when couched in absolutist, us-vs-them rhetoric, bipartisan policy is totally out of reach.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/immigration-polls-dona... [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-poll/over-90-per...

Aren't there countries with compulsory voting? Don't those countries still have politicians that campaign?

I should have said "in the USA".

It isn’t a long term equilibrium state. Eventually it’ll either die down, one side will be crushed, or there’ll be extensive violence that could end up in a civil war. See the European wars or religion or the Dutch Revolt. For a less violent result see pillarisation, where different religious or political groups have parallel institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation

The amount of hate in the us political discord is a feature. A beautiful result of convincing one side that the other needs to be killed (and that is darkly literal). At its core it's all about distracting the populace and getting every last dollar to the top.

The SF libertarians that always show up for these threads think they'll get swept up with the tide of the elite despite not comprehending that even with their wealth the majority of them are orders of magnitude off from the even most basic of antes.

Its Russia, and others too probably. No not that "They haxed our election!" but that they are stoking the fire. Right wing discussion is filled with cartoon-style representations of the left, and the left is vice-versa. I feel that I've seen communities of too high an overall intelligence become overtaken by the lowest quality stuff. People who attempt to discuss nuance get shouted at as being from the other side.

I guess it is possible that genuine consensus in these groups has lowered in quality, but I personally can't believe that, communities I've been in for awhile changed and got very intense within the last 3 years. It's unfortunate to see.

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