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Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

There's so many other things that need attention, and I am coming to think our inability to set aside our conflicting basic beliefs is a big part of the problem. Like, Nana, Ok- you and I disagree about whether fetuses have souls. But can we talk about some other incredibly important but less emotionally charged issues for a minute, where we might be able to find agreement and do something good?

I point to Colorado 2013 and Colorado 2019.

- In 2012, the Democrats got full control & went after guns. They were recalled & lost control. Little was accomplished.

- In 2018, the Democrats took back full control. Polis went after instituting publicly-funded full-day kindergarten. This was a real accomplishment for everyone.

Basically, if I was a political candidate, my platform would be a ceasefire on the most high-profile wedge issues for the duration of my term!

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We have at least two new Republican members of the House of Representatives who belong to a cult which believes that every Democrat is involved in a human trafficking operation that kidnaps nearly a million children a year, tortures them to death, and uses their bodies to generate a secret drug that they're all addicted to.

The "leader" of this cult, who our new House members have pledged loyalty to, is a pseudonymous poster on a message board that's otherwise used mainly for child pornography, who they believe is sent from a secret arm of the government and is also a time traveller and possibly an angel of God.

What common ground do you expect the Dems should find with them?

I think the parent is trying to say that you don't get very far if you always focus on the point of conflict? So in this case, out of all the Republicans, you wouldn't start with these two.

I regret using a culture war issue as my example because this is the exact opposite of my point. Even things far afield of the culture war are coming down to basic beliefs. Look at something as obviously beneficial and technocratic as Obama's Net Neutrality rules. No one disagrees that a neutral web is better but those got torn down because people fundamentally believe the government is incompetent and can't be trusted with regulation.

Look at Obamacare. Most health policy wonks see it as a pretty tame attempt to fix some issues with insurance and most people support mandatory coverage for preexisiting conditions. But it's been constantly on the defensive as government interference in free markets despite attempts in it to create a more transparent insurance market.

My wealthy suburb of Seattle attempted to block light rail despite desperate need for transit essentially because they basically don't like and don't want public transit. They don't see it as a social good.

People who want drug policy changes have tried to pass every reform you can think of and by and large it hasn't really mattered how minor or radical it is. The rhetoric against reform is the same whether we're talking about recreation marijuana, safe injection sites or decriminalization. There is a segment that believe using anything other than the boot of the law upon offenders is enabling and will degrade society. And there is a segment of society that believe drug abuse isn't a moral flaw but a health concern. Again, that's a belief stemming out of values and nothing else.

To your example, there are many places where public day care would be extremely controversial because people just don't believe in taxes nor the government taking care of kids. They are already often skeptical of public schools. Frankly, the main difference between Colorado in 2012 and 2018 is probably more to do with demographic shifts than how "radial" the policy is.

In a nutshell I'm saying, all of it, everything comes down to these basic beliefs. There can be no conversation about what the government do if one side believes the government should be trusted with nothing. There can be no conversation about what we should do with tax dollars if one side believes there should be no taxes. There can be no conversation about how to reform drug policy if one side only believes in strict punishment.

I'm going to nitpick here a bit because I think it demonstrates a larger point.

Net neutrality is far from a "technocratic" issue. In many countries, media companies like facebook or Netflix do partnerships with mobile phone operators where the two agree that use of Netflix doesn't count against a user's quota. Netflix wins because they get more customer use, the operator creates a more compelling offering, and the customer wins because they get a better deal. This is called zero-rating and it flies in the face of net neutrality. There's also the fundamental issue of ownership - if someone owns the cables, why can't they set the rules? Especially in situations where ISPs can compete? And really, do you want yet another set of regulations set in stone, by a body like the FCC, that's vulnerable to regulatory capture in how it interprets and enforces net neutrality? Can you even define "net neutrality" in terms clear enough for a regulator to enforce?

Point being, it's not just about basic beliefs. There are substantive policy disagreements that don't arise purely from social differences. Sure, there are some people who just don't like transit. Maybe others think it's wasteful. Did you see New York spent 2.5 billion dollars to build less than two miles of subway recently? Reasonable people can disagree on whether that was a good use of money.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

I never said those fundamental beliefs were baseless. Just that generally people aren't viewing these things as trade-offs. You believe the government shouldn't be trusted with regulation and that it wastes too much money when doing transit. That's fine.

You can site examples that validate those basic beliefs and I'm sure someone could site some that invalidate them. But whether you think those examples are an exception or the rule largely comes down to your values.

Is this true of absolutely everyone, no. The Cato Institute produced a health plan similar to Obamacare after all. Yes, there is a small group of policy wonkish people that get off on this stuff but I don't think it's the majority.

Edit: btw if my point seems to dismiss people's opinions I mean exactly the opposite.

IMO posts like this say "if we could just sit down, we could see eye to eye and find compromise". But I think what they really think is, "if we could just talk, I could resolve their information deficit and they'd come my way a little". I think that's condescending honestly and underestimates how much people believe they have thought their beliefs through, how much evidence they believe thwy have observed and how invested they are in those beliefs.

> To your example, there are many places where public day care would be extremely controversial because people just don't believe in taxes nor the government taking care of kids. They are already often skeptical of public schools. Frankly, the main difference between Colorado in 2012 and 2018 is probably more to do with demographic shifts than how "radial" the policy is.

> In a nutshell I'm saying, all of it, everything comes down to these basic beliefs. There can be no conversation about what the government do if one side believes the government should be trusted with nothing. There can be no conversation about what we should do with tax dollars if one side believes there should be no taxes. There can be no conversation about how to reform drug policy if one side only believes in strict punishment.

I wonder how true memes like this really are. Indeed, various statistics and observations of what people literally say can easily lead one to form this sort of conclusion, without being terribly unreasonable. However....if one had the means of sitting down with literally each individual in these groups for a very long, non-combative heart to heart discussion, would one find that the heuristic estimates of them are completely bang on, or might there be some noteworthy differential between how we perceive people to be, and how they really are (or could be after some high quality discussion)?

Good point. A lot of this is my personal impression from lots of political conversations. But there are a few known interesting facts.

1 People know their party's policy positions more than any other time in modern history

2 Legislators vote more along their party lines than at any point in history

3 People split ticket and switch votes less than any time

One partially confounding fact to my thesis here is that

4 People "identify" less with a party than at any time in history

I sometimes wonder if there is an unseen fundamental problem (or many problems) hiding somewhere that we don't realize exists, and as a result we end up attributing the cause of our problems to what may often be red herrings.

After all, many far more reasonable approaches (incremental improvements, at least) to many things are usually fairly obvious, and I suspect most people wouldn't really be opposed to it (if one was to sit down and have a serious conversation about it that truly addresses their nuanced concerns)...and yet, decade after decade we seem to make little forward progress (or at least, "not enough" - see: BLM), while a collective feeling of confident, "righteous" frustration and rage with those "on" "the other side" (on both sides) builds.

The whole thing seems rather paradoxical, which to me is suggestive that we may indeed be missing something important in our system analysis.

Can you think of an important national issue that is not emotionally charged and would be considered a win by most? I can't. Democrats lost control in 2012 because of healthcare reform (which probably had just as big an impact on Colorado than the local gun reforms). Pandemic prevention and economic relief are out. Climate change, no chance. Free school certainly isn't a unifying issue, even if it worked in Colorado.

To be honest, it just seems like you personally value education funding over gun control, and you're assuming most other people feel the same way while ignoring the broader national context of what was happening to the Democratic party in 2012 and 2018.

Also, what does "ceasefire" mean? If most people were ok with the status quo, it wouldn't be a major issue.

Can you think of...

A steady 70%+ agree our infrastructure needs a lot of work. We don't agree on how to get there yet, but at least we have a shared goal.

IMO the fact you can't think of an issue is a sign of how the wedge issues concentrate attention on themselves.

it just seems like you personally value education funding over gun control

https://co.chalkbeat.org/2020/11/3/21548349/proposition-ee-c...

68% Yes on EE, while only 55% went for Biden.

"Ceasefire" means nobody is really satisfied with the status quo, but you agree to suspend the fighting for a while.

> Basically, if I was a political candidate, my platform would be a ceasefire on the most high-profile wedge issues for the duration of my term!

Except you'll find it very hard to get elected in the first place, which is why we don't have many politicians like that. The candidate "appropriately" far enough left or right will get hit by criticisms over the large stuff the other side, and people that would vote for them will discount those criticisms. Candidates in the middle that claim they don't want to deal with those issues will be hit from both sides with criticisms, and their own side will consider them, and the other side will use it to exclude them.

If I run for office on a platform of avoiding abortion rights to instead focus on something else, my own side will say "He doesn't care about women's rights/the lives of children", and the other side will say "he says he's not interesting in doing this, but he's stated his believe here and there, and can you really trust him?"

All that's before you get to the fact that constituents are driven into a furor on these topics, and whether any change will really be made on them, they care about electing someone that will try, even if it's very unlikely anything will happen.

Finally, what do you do as a candidate that isn't focused on an issue when the other side tries to use that as a good time to push for change on that issue? Do you then devote time and effort to at least retaining the status quo? How different does that look (and how different is it) to focusing on that issue, allowing the other side to claim they were right that you were lying about not caring about the issue? Or if you do nothing, then your own side points out that you let this issue regress.

I think the whole adversarial nature of the two groups means that any candidate basically has to at least publicly present themselves as a crusader for the issues their respective groups favor. Anything else can and will be used against them aggressively. Candidates can only be as relaxed and aligned on an issue as their respective groups allow them to be, and lately that's not at all.

Completely agree. Buttigieg (Mayor Pete) talked about this a great deal in his book. As a gay man, he recounted working with Mike Pence (Trump's VP) while Pence was governor of Indiana and he was mayor of South Bend. Talk about two guys you wouldn't expect to get along.

The key, as you pointed out, as did Buttigieg, is to identify areas where there are shared problems you can work together to solve. There's something about local government that seems to encourage this, in my opinion. Maybe you think gay people are awful and I go the pride march every year. Guess what, the water main is still leaking, and building permits take too long. Maybe we can just focus on working together to solve real problems, and accept that there are a range of social issues where we probably won't ever agree? And that's just fine?

I think we used to know how to do this in the United States, but something changed.

> something changed

It's worth considering what changed. Demographics changed, but we've always had some kind of mixed cultures and ethnicities. The history of it has been an expansion of who gets to be the "majority". Like Rome redefining who is a citizen.

Maybe it's broadcast media, but there's been national publications since the founding of the US.

Looking back to Antiquity, our situation doesn't seem so abnormal. I think it's just the ebb and flow of how groups of people interact with each other.

It's amazing how old our problems are. By that I mean how much they come up throughout history.

- Who counts as a citizen

- Who has the land

- Who gets welfare/benefits

- Who is anathema

- Who mediates power (bureaucrats? nobility? monarch? people?)

It's like a laundry list of issues that bagged ancient Rome, enlightenment France and late Tsarist Russia.

EDIT: It blew my mind when I actually started to read up on the French Revolution and found that besides what to do with the Monarchy, the issue that really divided them was Universal Manhood Suffrage. For years I had been fed the vague notion that some quasi-social-utopian issues were at the heart of it. But they really just couldn't agree on whether all men should be allowed to vote.

"Don't study liberal arts. It's a huge waste of time."

"And especially not philosophy or psychology - only losers who can't cut it in STEM take those courses".

- Me, not all that many years ago

Idk, I feel like that's just conceding on the topic. The modern conservative is just a party of no. I want to do something, they say no. I move on to something else? That's just losing.

No, it's not losing, it's prioritizing.

Local issues still fall pray to this.

- law enforcement

- public transit

- property taxes

- building permits (i.e. regulation)

- zoning

- public employee pay/benefits

All redound to these basic beliefs and have the added problem of affecting people personally too.

how much time does the mayor of a state's #4 town by population spend "working with" with the Governor?

> Polis went after instituting publicly-funded full-day kindergarten. This was a real accomplishment for everyone.

No it wasn’t.

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