That's a pretty superficial view of things.
There are a lot of very real issues that matter in real life to a lot of people.
To pick an extremely important one from the past: slavery.
One side thought it was ok to enslave other human beings. The other did not.
Most political disagreements are nothing like this. Most political disagreements come down to some combination of (a) a trade-off between two reasonable values or (b) differing predictions about the consequences of a particular policy in the future.
If “slavery vs not slavery” is your go-to example of what a political disagreement looks like, then you’re likely to fall victim to the sorts of bad thought habits (other side evil!) that lead to dumb polarisation and tribalism.
It's a rhetorical trick to invoke slavery/genocide, and then group all the other controversial positions held by my political opponents as being in the same category of clear right/wrong.
But if they really were so clear-cut, they'd be invoked as broadly indisputable, standalone examples just as much as slavery and genocide are.
There are tons of issues that are not clear cut, like, say, the optimal rate of taxation. It's healthy to argue about those things and try different approaches.
Other things, like trying to subvert democracy, are clear as day.
The reason people tend to just choose a political "team" and root for that team is that there is individual value to that process. If feels good to be part of a team, to cheer with your team's victories, and to complain about your team's losses. That's a big part of what is so fun about sports fandom. It doesn't depend on your actual individual influence on the outcome, which everyone correctly realizes is nearly negligible.
But there are a lot of sincere people trying to right wrongs or improve our world out there too.
And there are genuinely evil people who seek only to further their own self interest, or power, or both.
Slavery was bad.
Nixon was a crook.
Of course people are complicated and you have to look at the entirety of things, which makes it complicated, but still, I don't buy the "both sides" stuff either.
As a gay man it would be completely unconsciable to support Republicanism as it exists today, because the overwhelming majority of people in the party are somewhere between apathetic and enthusiastic about denying my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
A fairly prominent LGBT person, Latrice Royale, at one point did not support gay marriage. That doesn't mean that I agree with that position, nor does that mean the majority of gay people do or should.
In general, having opinions and keeping them to yourself is fine. Being shitty to your colleagues because of it is generally not. And publicly threatening or attacking others is not. It's not about your beliefs, but what you do with them.
I agree with you, US Republicanism is completely incompatible with the healthy existence of gay and queer people as understood by the communities in for example San Francisco (where I am from). There must be gay republican communities in other areas, but I'm sure more west coast queer communities would consider those republican gay (prob not queer) communities to be repressive and unhealthy.
It's a shame people cannot relate to what you are saying, and plenty of evidence that even liberal Silicon Valley (assuming it has an outsized influence on this comment thread) has a lot of growth needed before queer people can really be appreciated in tech circles.
Just because I see them as humans does not mean I have to ignore what they caused to other humans. Or that every human actions must be necessary been seen as good by me.
Nixon: Well, no, actually, but as far as I know, his foreign policy was reasonably decent and somewhat effective. The problem was his attempt to subvert the American democratic process and, primarily, his use of presidential power to conceal that attempt.
But you have a good point: the other side is never Snidely Whiplash, twirling his mustache. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Of course, Roman slavery still had plenty of problems but it's significantly easier to find examples of humane and (relatively) equitable treatment of slaves (who could be well-educated and own their own property) in Rome than in Europe/early America. And then there was the prostitution/torture/slave soldiers...
Well put. But take it a step further - had you been raised in the antebellum South, or had you been Nixon's friend - would have arrived at the same moral conclusions? For the same reasons? It's easy to condemn "the alien other" - it's much harder to reflect on one's own beliefs and the peers that hold them.
In that case, loudly and publicly condemning groups of people tends to cause them to circle the wagons and double down on their positions. I think there's a lesson for today there as well.
For less important issues, sure, talk it out. Like most domestic political issues, those are just little things. No one's dying, no one's being enslaved. So talking it out is actually not only the preferable choice, but the correct choice.
But for acute issues, say something like slavery, or Germany processing thousands of Jews through death camps weekly, or even domestically if some guy goes to shoot up a Walmart, the time for talk has past. I suppose we could ask them to stop, just as a formality, but any answer other than "We'll stop immediately and unconditionally" has to be met with force. That's the whole reason we have police, because sometimes, it's just not practical to "talk it out" in the hopes that the bad actor stops doing what they're doing.
Certainly with slavery we probably waited far too long to stop the behavior, and that hesitation made forcing an end to the problem worse than it otherwise would have been. It's a good reminder that in life, as a general rule, it's always best to handle acute issues as soon as possible.
Now what's funny about all of the animosity today, is that other than the problem of domestic terrorism, there are no acute issues. So there is nothing really worth fighting over. (Again, stopping mass shooters excepted. And I'm not sure anyone is arguing against that idea anyway?) So it's kind of perplexing to me that people get so mad over issues these days? As most of the issues seem so petty in a historic or even cultural sense.
I'd just like to point out that "Germany processing thousands of Jews through death camps weekly" didn't matter to anyone until after the war was over. (Well, anyone outside Germany. And there were people who knew what was going on and tried to show it to the world, but there are cranks everywhere.)
I was with you the whole paragraph until this. Unless you're living in a nice Suburb and haven't been paying attention to news, we (well, the US, but some are global) face a lot of very serious issues that do demand an urgency of action, since talking hasn't been very useful in resolving them:
* Climate Change and decarbonization * Social Media destabilizing and undermining democracies all over the world leading to violence against minorities worldwide * [US] Police brutality and general incarceration of African Americans * [US] Rising healthcare expenses potentially putting reasonable healthcare out of the reach of most Americans, especially the most vulnerable * [US] Inequal economic development completely devastating most regions of the US leading to social instabilities * [US] Massive student load debts, trapping an entire generation under the weight of unpayable debt
And those are just a few things I thought about right away.
There are a variety of issues that need urgent action to tackle them.
Unfortunately, I suspect it's mostly the later.
You'd think that. It was amazing to see the mass protests while W was president that simply evaporated as soon as Obama was in office.
But I disagree that people changed their minds. People were still protesting while Obama was president, and anti-war writers like Greenwald kept up a consistent position.
What went on is the press, really a handful of editors, simply spiked stories about the wars and the protests, and by starving them of media coverage, they didn't weigh on people's minds so heavily.
The higher-ups in a news office have to make judgement calls about what a news program is going to focus on, and to them some stuff feels more or less newsworthy depending on who's in office. It could be some shadowy conspiracy, or, more likely, just their personal unconcious biases.
However, it's also true that the anti-war movement died off partly due to failure essentially, as the Iraq War proceeded with essentially no resistance from elected officials, and no coverage from the mainstream media. I think this, more than partisanship, explains why it's basically dead in the water now. If the movement fails to achieve its goals, people will eventually go home. This all happened within W's term.
Protest altogether didn't die out under Obama, however, Occupy Wall Street started in 2011, and was heavily critical of Obama's coziness with the finance industry. Within left movements that exist now, many seem to see a through-line from Occupy Wall Street.
Overall, this speaks to the narrative about tribalism, because there's a tendency to see the opposing group as one mass, when in reality, there are different groups within each side that may disagree with each other as much as they do the nominally-opposed groups. This tendency is also exacerbated by the two-party system in the US that smushes what would really be 3-6 parties together into two.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/183575/fewer-view-iraq-afghanis...
> Goes back to watching impeachment proceedings wherein our current President is being proven to have been extorting _another country_ for personal gain while his party fully stands behind him...