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Comment by ultrawox | Hacker News Reader

I think the modern conservative movement largely is explained by "a group of people that oppose liberalism." That's why you have such a weird coalition of religious groups, older intellectual conservatives, young Republicans, business people, trolls. They really don't have a ton in common, but frankly I get it. I live in the Midwest and while I consider myself an independent, most of my views are moderate or left-wing. But I went to grad school on the East Coast and I felt like an outsider and the most conservative person in class just for holding somewhat moderate views.

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This is speculation but it seems like we should inevitably see political factions in the US being defined in this way (and it happens in the Democratic Party too, maybe not in as obvious or extreme a way) as a result of the well-known two-party endgame of our voting system. If your faction isn’t one of the two, your choices are to join one or be irrelevant.

So you jump on the bandwagon with whoever you hate least, and pretty soon you find out that’s almost all you have in common with the rest of the riders.

It may also be specific to conservative movements, given that by definition they oppose some change in society and so would naturally be diverse in their reason for opposing it (possibly more so than the supporters would be diverse in their reasons for supporting it).

That would explain why in our current system the conservative faction is more like this than the liberal faction. But what I was getting at is the reason that the conservative faction is essentially singular. In a less broken system, there could be multiple conservative factions and multiple liberal factions without the sub-factions feeling needing to choose whether to band together on every single issue or be irrelevant.

They could dynamically band together on a per-issue basis and have more reasoned discussions focusing on those issues instead of making sure to pronounce “shibboleth” correctly.

> and it happens in the Democratic Party too, maybe not in as obvious or extreme a way

Democrats is just as extreme. You have the science part of Democrats who vote for them since Republicans largely rejects science for religious reasons (see evolution etc). Then you have the identity politics part of the Democrats. I am 100% certain that a majority of software engineers doesn't agree with the identity politics parts of the Democrats platform, yet they still vote Democrats since they at least doesn't have the religious fanatics on their side which are even worse.

In countries where you can vote right wing without voting for science denial software engineers tend to vote right wing since it gets them lower taxes. Left wing parties are mostly for people with less money.

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