The divide between political parties is smaller than we think (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The divide between political parties is smaller than we think (2020)

behavioralscientist.org

79 pointsundefined1335 comments

This would be great news if everyone were invested in minimizing polarization and detoxing the political conflicts that we’re facing. But that’s not the case.

The biggest divide between the “parties” (which isn’t political in nature and has nothing to do with the very real and significant differences between the parties) is that one sees polarization as a tool and the other doesn’t acknowledge that.

On Twitter, this has been exceedingly shorthanded into “tan suit”. One party is so invested in conflict that they invent it by manufacturing a scandal out of a fashion choice. The other is so invested in conflict avoidance that it pathologically refuses to hold the first accountable for anything meaningful.

In other words the divide isn’t political, it’s about ambition and shrewdness. This won’t be overcome by finding common ground.

Edit: added a comma because it would’ve driven me nuts not to. Also to add a reasonable disclaimer that I’m not philosophically a member of either party, but I caucus/coalition with the one I obviously perceive to not be fundamentally bellicose.

Edit 2: well since it needed clarification, I consider the Republican Party to be the bellicose one and the Democratic Party to be the spineless one.

You could post this as a satire and it would work as is. Both sides see each other becoming more extreme & polarizing. It may not be apparent because it's very easy to ignore sensationalism from your own side as sensationalist individuals that don't reflect the party/group itself while sensationalism from the otherside is endemic of that sides philosophy.

The 'right' ran something about the "tan suit" but I am also sure I have read half a dozen articles about poorly fitting suits and bad fake hair.

The thing is, we have the data, DW nominate is a solid algorithm that can demonstrate rightward/leftward political movement over time. There has been a lot of actual scientific research on this, and over the last 30 years the democratic party has mostly remained the same with a slight left trend, while the republicans have become moved much much further right.

https://voteview.com/congress/senate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_(scaling_method)

https://voteview.com/congress/senate

> over the last 30 years the democratic party has mostly remained the same with a slight left trend, while the republicans have become moved much much further right.

On visual comparison between the 97th Congress and the 116 Congress, it's obvious that the Democrats have moved pretty far downwards as well as bit leftwards. That is, they became much more liberal on the "Other Votes" dimension while moving much less on the "Economic/Redistributive" axis. Interestingly, this leaves Democrats and Republicans with a pretty similar distribution along that axis.

I don't think this is a good method for comparing different time periods. In the 36th and 37th Congresses, the diehard pro-slavery Democrats versus the abolitionist Republicans, the graphs put the parties in the same relative positions as today and make the parties look less divided than today, even though the Democrats felt like they could no longer co-exist and seceded from the Union. It should also be obvious that the slave-economy Democratic Party was vastly different than the modern-day party, but the graphs don't reflect that.

I'm wondering what the "Other Votes" dimensions is even capturing, as Democrats seem to have been more conservative than Republicans on it up until the 2010s.

That always surprises me, especially for a crowd that prides itself on data driven approaches such as this one.

Use a source like the extremely well-researched Dark Money and it'll be evident that the GOP fundamentally isn't representative of the people, it doesn't even pretend to be, and if you listen in the right forums, their leaders don't even claim that. Yet, people, trained in data driven thinking or not, are boxed in into thinking with their guts, how they 'identify', and are taken for a run.

Maybe the strategy of making you question the very possibility of even knowing truths about political actors is working as well as the instigators of such theories think they would.

This is something I intentionally made available before I edited. But the clarification is important. “Both sides” certainly observe the same emotions in that respect. But one of the two peddles it and the other dabbles. I’ve seen people in both camps share awful, careless, unprincipled attacks. But one thing I’ve seen that’s an important distinction is that I’ve seen one side self-correct (eg a routine renouncement of body shaming and reminding people on the same side not to lower themselves to that), and the other side banish anyone who tries.

I guess that’s the other important (and still not political) distinction: one party and its cohort is self-reflective and has an internal corrective feedback loop. That broke down in the other over the last decade, quite notably after a very honest and sincere post-loss retrospective/postmortem.

Do you base your opinion of each side off of what you see on the internet?

"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

Nope I’ve definitely grown up in and road tripped/train tripped red-purple country (edit: and I’m white trash and present male so it’s an easy pass) so I know what people really think. I’ve also been on the receiving end of violence by standing up and confronting them.

This is a key point - many folks who are left-leaning grew up in right-leaning areas, have right-leaning extended family, etc. We aren't extrapolating from the internet.

There are a number of structural asymmetries between left and right, and it does no favors to any truth-based cause to assume that left and right are mirrors, as if their names required that.

Your post made me remember [0]. Can you get any more polarizing than suggesting that your opponent will start the nuclear anhilatiom of the modern world?

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/01/08/pelosi-prevent-trump-fro...

Is it that polarizing to /suggest/? I for very honest and reasonable reasons (one of his most prominent political positions prior to his presidency was aggressive use of nuclear power) worried he would and flinched anytime I saw unexpected aircraft for the last few months.

Yes, but the polarizing figures on one side are mostly random people on reddit, on the other side, it's the party leadership...

Orange man has constantly been made fun of for his dumpy appearance but Obama was accused of lack of respect of the office of the president (including by orange man) for wearing a tan suit. He wasn't even the first president to wear a tan suit.

But where is the left's QAnon? Where is the left's birtherism? Where is the left's Marjorie Taylor Greene? Election fraud claims that drag on for months, enabled by major party players who see an opportunity and refuse to clearly shut it down, culminating in an armed assault that some now claim as a false flag operation? Where is the left's Lindsey Graham, a pathetic husk of a man who waffles between saying "I'm out" and then continues to double down?

Of course the tan suit "scandal" was trivial bullshit, but that's the whole point, that that's the source material that Fox News is working with to drum up this kind of outrage— the rest is pure fabrications, a self-feeding cycle where Fox provides a legitimizing platform for it, which then generates the interest and demand for "coverage". So it may well be that both sides see the other as extreme and polarizing, but it's important to not actually equate them, because that is super unfair when one of the sides is in a state of denial about basic reality.

Extinction rebellion? Members of Congress who think that climate change will destroy the world within 10 years?

Has anyone made that claim? I've always heard it as "without decisive action over the next ten years, the planet will get increasingly bad and eventually impossible to save (due to positive feedback effects like CO2 trapped in melting arctic ice)."

This is scary, yes, but ultimately grounded in verifiable facts and many scientists have come forward to express their concerns. It is most certainly nothing like the Q nonsense.

XR is mostly a UK thing. and even then, you're comparing a generally-ignored mass movement of young people in response to decades of delayed policy action that has generated a severe ongoing and oncoming crisis, to an ancient-aliens-esque protofascist fanfiction that victimizes tech-illiterate boomers and continues to be leveraged by national power players.

>Extinction rebellion?

I would say the key difference about the left is that the supporters of these kinds of movements rarely get much support at the top. Even Bernie Sanders and AOC have stepped back from supporting certain movements after criticism (I'm thinking of Venezuela), while such contrition on the right is rare (until the Capitol sedition).

>Members of Congress who think that climate change will destroy the world within 10 years?

Who, precisely? And what did they say?

AOC: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019...

> 'The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change,' Ocasio-Cortez says

Right, so that generally falls into the category I identified in the first comment: stuff that people on the left say in the heat of the moment, but don't stick to. She was, at the time, being interviewed by the notoriously fiery Ta-Nehisi Coates. It's kind of like comparing Elon Musk smoking weed on Joe Rogan to someone who smokes weed at work every day.

I really doubt AOC actually believed at any time that the world would end in 2030 (cf. Paris Agreement's 2030 Agenda).

That's quite the stretch. We can lawyer our way out of anything if we try hard enough.

>That's quite the stretch.

It's not a stretch at all. It's an offhand comment being compared to a months-long disinformation campaign. Frankly, I was generous.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-02/sea-level...

They're both making headline-grabbing claims, but one of these is at least based in fact.

I agree that one side is worse than the other, but people tend to think the difference between their own side and the opposition is 20 to 100. In reality the difference is probably closer to 60 to 70.

What does this even mean??? These numbers don’t mean anything. You’re talking about people who’ve been intolerant of hate and shut down less of it than they should have, vs people who’ve tolerated or even welcomed and amplified hate because it suits them. Who fucking cares if they’re 10% apart? The difference is brownshirts or not.

> But where is the left's QAnon? Twitter

How much time was devoted to Trump and his "two scoops of ice cream", "dumping seed in the koi fish pond" or any of the hundreds of miniscule things he did - most of which were just mandanities, framed into a false lens and then magnified.

I'm not saying that Trump was good, just that there was so much noise from social media about how absolutely everything he did was not just "bad", but the "worst ever". A lot of left-leaning source went into an absolute frenzy about anything and everything he did to try and spin it as the worst.

Okay but "noise from social media" is very different from leading politicians and entire news organizations playing along with dangerous stuff like Trump's COVID denialism for months on end.

Trump is almost certainly among the bottom 3-4 worst US presidents in history [1]. Was each individual action the "worst ever"? No, of course not. But the sum of the pieces was indeed ghastly, and it's ridiculous to claim that these are just gaffs like any public figure has, and once everyone calms down and stops blowing things out of proportion he will be regarded as just another normal, middle-of-the-road president.

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/politics/trump-best-worst-pre...

So, do you rate GW Bush better or worse than Trump?

Why wasn’t the left all in a lather about killing 100s of thousands of innocent Iraquis based on false evidence of Chemical weapons stockpiles? Why not impeach Bush then? Why not now?

The left was up in arms and protesting the invasion and war, it was the DNC that refused to act, choosing instead to sit on their hands.

The democratic party is still in the pocket of big business. Don't confuse them with actual leftists.

If nothing else, Bush already served two terms.

That makes it even more exasperating. He was elected into office twice and caused immensely more damage.

About 20k service members and ngo staff died in service under Bush.[]

How many are dead due to Trump's refusal to address covid19? Hundreds of thousands of civilians.

[] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/24/georg...

I hate to comment but I am quite sick of seeing this "refusal to deal with covid" type rhetoric. On what are you basing that accusation, because actual reality doesn't bear it out.

Refused for months to endorse basic measures like mask wearing, undermined his own doctors, gave political cover to people protesting lockdowns (the "LIBERATE" tweets, among many others), repeatedly pretended that it was just a flu and would go away on its own, repeatedly and unnecessarily politicized the whole thing by using racially charged language ("kung flu", "China flu", etc), gave guidance and timelines that were based on his own hopes and political ambitions rather than the advice of experts, treated press briefings like a reality show, using them to speculate about miracle cures rather than platforming people who knew what they were talking about.

Never mind the absolute fiasco around supply stockpiles and the management of testing, most of which ended up dumped onto governors even after splashy announcements gave the impression that a national strategy was coming.

So yeah, reality absolutely bears out that the Trump administration's handling of covid was a complete fiasco, and that many, many fewer people could have died if it were done better.

But somehow this is all no big deal to the political movement that once lost its mind over Obama's so-called "death panels."

The reality you occupy may not bear it out.

Anyways: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/biden-covid-vaccinat...

As one example of, ? Thousands?

I am not on either side in the US, there isn't a party that represents me, but something stuck out to me.

>culminating in an armed assault that some now claim as a false flag operation?

We had to hear all summer about how it was really Boogaloo Boys/White Nationalists/The CIA and not BLM rioting. This is something I see as endemic to all sides. I think this must be perspective based as everything in the above list has a mirror image from the other party, and in both cases it seems like a fair criticism.

> We had to hear all summer about how it was ... not BLM rioting.

I think an important distinction here is that the riots had no political goal to them, and had almost no support from BLM figures themselves, and even less from national politicians. Indeed, if your goal is for the police to be defunded, then the last thing you would want to do is create a situation where people fear for their lives and their property and need the protection of the police.

Contrast that with the goals of the people storming the Capitol and you'll see that they had national politicians who also wanted to interrupt the joint session of Congress and prevent (some of) the electoral votes from being counted, to ultimately change the outcome of the election.

Double standard. You're a victim of the bias the article is highlighting.

Do you really see the BLM marches (even the small minority that turned violent) as equivalent to what happened at the Capitol? Some obvious differences:

- There were no politicians or their cronies calling for "trial by combat" or similar.

- There was no one showing up with a gallows.

- There was no intent to disrupt a democratic procedure.

- Where violence occurred, it was quickly and unequivocally condemned across the board.

- Destruction of property is not the same as threatening physical harm to people (and no, before you go there, engaging with riot police is not the same as advancing on a chamber of mostly-elderly, unarmed politicians).

Congress was able to convene immediately after the nuts stormed the Capitol inside the Capitol. Minor physical damage was committed. Compare that to the BLM marches and the nuts that rioted, burned, and seized city blocks, freeways, police precincts, harassed people in restaurants with bullhorns, drank from their cups, ate their food, etc.

The invasion of the capital was an attempt to stop the legally mandated processes that allow the peaceful transfer of power. The attackers were intent on hanging on pence and others as evidenced by their chants and the equipment they brought.

The rioters cannot honestly be lumped into the Democrat, blm, etc groups as different groups plainly held different objectives. I think the best explanation for the riots is simply revenge against people that sit comfortably ignoring the disaffected cries for help.

So then your position is:

Revenge and destruction and murder are justified so long as it doesn't interfer with a political process?

Other than a small minority of agitators, I don't think most people went to a BLM protest with revenge, destruction, and murder on their mind. I mean, the whole point was opposing the murder of unarmed citizens by agents of the state. The slogan was "defund the police", not "hang Mike Pence."

Yes, ~25 Americans were killed last year in connection to these things, but as this article shows, that may be as much about the presence of guns at these things than anything else— here's a pretty solid summary: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-kill...

That's a bad faith argument if I've ever seen one.

Understanding why people do things, even bad things, is crucial to easing divisiveness.

I understand why people stormed the capitol. I do not condone their actions and hope they are all made examples of.

Just as I understand the hundreds of years of history that is behind this summers protests. I am far more sympathetic to the tens of millions that protested against fascism and racism then I am to the actual fascists that tried to usurp democracy and install a dictator while taking scalps.

When impoverished, abused, and neglected people peacefully take to streets en masse to demand change are met with brutal policing, that could be war crimes, instead of compromise and change what else do you honestly expect to happen? When millions of people can't afford to put on the table what do you expect them to do when the majority party fails to provide even a poverty level existence during a pandemic that disproportionately effects their demographic? Should they shut up and starve to death? Should they continue to take these beatings from police? Until the field is leveled don't expect this movement to die; they're fighting for their right to live.

Ignoring reality doesn’t make it go away. Those riots caused large areas of cities to be burned and seized, killing dozens if not hundreds of people, attacked police and local politicians, stormed into residential neighborhoods targeting specific profiles of people, harassed patrons of restaurants, beat and bludgeoned owners and patrons of stores based on racist targeting, crushed the economy of certain areas, burned and vandalized courts and police precincts, and all this over a span of months.

You want to equate that with the Capitol riots which happened over a span of a few hours by a few hundred people? Seriously?

Every point you made above is easily refuted as untrue.

The only difference I see was the media approved of one and didn't of the other. There are far more similarities.

Both felt an injustice and disenfranchisement had taken place by their government.

Both were co-opted by the most extremists members of the group and caused havoc.

Both groups ridiculed the perverse and dangerous actions of a few.

I don't agree with or associate with either but they were mostly the same.

Trump's America, 2021. There's a lot of work to do.

>>>Do you really see the BLM marches (even the small minority that turned violent) as equivalent to what happened at the Capitol?

As a black American I absolutely consider last year's widespread urban riots WORSE than the Capitol raid. The summer demonstrated a complete unwillingness to enforce law and order, creating an environment which cost the lives of at least 3 black people[1][2][3], and close to 30 other American lives as well. Livelihoods of minority small-business owners were destroyed. [4][5] We can nitpick whether this was explicitly supported by politicians, but it's fairly obvious it was tacitly supported by Democrat leadership for political gain in an election year.[6] As I look for small business investment opportunities, why would I ever put money in a distressed American neighborhood, with such a high risk for destruction of assets in the current political climate? I'll do business with my Mozambican and Tanzanian friends before I ever invest in an American district run by the sort of idiots who steered their own communities towards evaporating wealth instead of building it. And I bet you we wouldn't have had the upswell in insurgent inclinations that culminated in the Capitol raid if the Trump-supporting extremists hadn't observed the rampant civil unrest for months and concluded "Oh, I guess it's okay to break stuff and violate rules now. There seems to be minimal consequences." Boy were they wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_David_Dorn

[2] https://www.kltv.com/2020/07/29/black-trump-supporter-fatall...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/us/seattle-protests-CHOP-...

[4] https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-firefighter-devastated-minn...

[5] https://fee.org/articles/here-are-just-10-of-the-many-minori...

[6] https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-hypocrisy-riots-reveals-p...

You can also argue that Republican leaders tacitly supported the BLM protests.

You didn't see republican leaders putting on riot gear to go beat people up, thus they must have been supportive

> We had to hear all summer about how it was really Boogaloo Boys/White Nationalists/The CIA and not BLM rioting.

I’m sorry the reporting is so bad. Here in the US as a leftist I saw most of my friends posting “in defense of rioting”, “property isn’t people”, and quoting MLK on the lessons of riots. The right just thought they could stage a coup and also get away without any criticism for trying.

Interesting take. The blm riots were supported and approved by both the mainstream levers of power (media, government) and continue to be so. They were both larger in scale and duration.

The capitol riots were both smaller in scale and, more importantly generally condemned by their sides equivalent levers of power.

I actually consider the right response here more reasonable than the left.

If black lives mattered and politicians represented their constituents these riots would not have occurred. I expect more. Until the consequences of treating minorities as subhuman directly effect billionaires and their very lives nothing will change.

>>>But where is the left's QAnon?

Working at MSNBC? [1]

The far-left conspiracy groups probably got really quiet after one of their own tried to murder Republican Congressmen. Did everyone just forget about that? [2]

*On May 22, Hodgkinson wrote "Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co." above his repost of a Change.org petition demanding "the legal removal" of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for "treason". He belonged to numerous political Facebook groups, including those named "Terminate the Republican Party", "The Road To Hell Is Paved With Republicans", and "Donald Trump is not my President."*

[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russia-has-been-cult...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...

Russiagate and the “piss dossier”?

The left literally treated the last 4 years as an election fraud scandal that they refused to shut down.

I'm generally in the center, but dislike when one party treats the other as solely being the problem. While I can't think of a specific qanon level of craziness on that side, they have their own, different craziness.

> The left literally treated the last 4 years as an election fraud scandal that they refused to shut down.

Hi, I'm "the left", at least for the purposes of this conversation. The left did no such thing. I tried to get us to do so because there was clearly a fraudulent election. But it didn't matter what I said, the left didn't want to hear none of it. They were more concerned (legitimately) about Russophobia and not giving too much legitimacy to the alphabet soup agencies.

"The left literally treated the last 4 years as an election fraud scandal that they refused to shut down."

Please cite sources for Democratic senators, congresspeople, and/or party officials advancing these claims.

> Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.

- Nancy Pelosi on May 16, 2017

https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/864522009048494080

The Senate Intelligence Committee and the Mueller Report both concluded that Russian propaganda affected the election. What was not shown was that Trump offered any support ("collusion") for these efforts. Simply complaining about Russian propaganda like this is hyperbolic, but not a conspiracy theory.

The alphabet soup networks pushing the Russia hoax for 4 years didn't convince you?

Do "the alphabet soup networks" include the Senate Intelligence Committee?

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

What was the hoax? The Mueller report had an entire section about Russian meddling. The investigation also indicted a number of Russian nationals.

I'm not saying there wasn't an investigation, but I'm not convinced by the evidence after reading that document. The biggest thing that I saw was the ad spend was very small (<$1M)

And of course the hack and leak of Podesta and DNC that led to a billion dollars of earned media for Trump.

Which makes much more sense as to why Trump won than a delusional Russian conspiracy theory...

The Russians hacked the emails - How is it then a conspiracy theory? These things are all facts:

Trump asked the Russians to hack Hillary, and hours later they began probing the Clinton domains.

Russian government hacked Podesta

Russian government hacked the DNC

Russian government gave those emails to Wikileaks to hurt Hillary / boost Trump and they were weaponized explicitly to do so (e.g. the Podesta release coming hours after the President was on tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy)

Russian businessmen, closely linked to the government spent millions of dollars on a social media campaign to boost Trump

Trump's campaign took several meetings with Russians offering help with the election, including explicit meetings offered as "Part of the government's assistance to the Trump campaign" and then lied to the press and the government when asked about those meetings

Trump's campaign manager gave private polling data to several Russians, including a probable spy

Trump dangled pardons for his team if they didn't cooperate with the investigation

Trump pardoned those people who didn't cooperate with the investigation

Trump's team changed the entire GOP platform to be more friendly to Russia

Trump's transition team took clandestine meetings to promise to remove sanctions that were in place for the above activity.

Trump's son-in-law offered to take meetings in the Russian embassy to be out of range of US intelligence.

So far as I can tell, the "Hoax" that people are adamant about refers to the Mueller finding where they couldn't prove that any of the above was coordinated - And it very well might not have been! - but to say that it was a hoax that Russia helped Trump win is so silly.

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

Has plenty of names and links to read all about it, if you missed it.

Attempting to impeach someone based on their actions != falsely claiming election fraud in the face of evidencd (and attempting to coerce others e.g. Pence into doing so)

https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/05/17/disinformation-from-...

"Even after the Mueller report clearly indicated that there was no provable collusion or coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, Schiff continued to propagate the lie."

> the Mueller report clearly indicated that there was no provable collusion or coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign

Except that it didn't, really.

"there was knowing and complicit behavior between the Trump campaign and Russians that stopped short of direct coordination, which may constitute conspiracy"[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report#Redacted_report...

You are realtime evidence for mikepurvis to see that the left never let go of the Russiagate conspiracy theory. Thanks for helping me to prove my point here.

Can that conclusion be any more mealy-mouthed?

You couldn't think of an equivalent of qanon for the left, so you just elevated some minor critique until it satisfied your desire to say "both sides" and shut down any actual analysis.

THIS is the problem!

That's an interesting view to have - I know that at the start of Trump's term there was a lot of discussion about Comey's involvement and Russia that I really just wish people would shut up about. Most of that died down after the Mueller report. And by the end of his term Trump was (IMO) pretty blatantly trying to subvert the election. Where do you get your news, if I may ask?

The Mueller report was released in 2019, 3 years after the election. Perhaps 4 years was incorrect of me to state.

If your last question is in earnest...I guess nowhere in particular and yet everywhere. I don't particularly like any of the news media companies, as I find they all have a blatant bias.

There is a disturbing trend of news media. It's how they have to turn a profit, and starting to quote social media. That is not reporting, and news should be balanced, not just opinions and rage.

However, in front of Tea Party, Trumpism and coup attempt, sadly outrage and calls for accountability are rightly justified.

I assume by your description that you do not consider identity politics to be a contributor for polarization?

It might just be a coincident, but from my perspective, the more aggressive rhetoric and polarization by the right coincided very close to period when the political discussion shifted focused towards gender and race being the top political issues by the left. I could be wrong, but what I remember of before that period, the political discussion was mostly on wars, taxes, social support, and abortion. Scandals had occurred before during elections, but no where near the scale and impact that we have seen in the last 10 years.

> I assume by your description that you do not consider identity politics to be a contributor for polarization?

I don't even agree that the category "identity politics" exists, or that it's a meaningful distinction.

> It might just be a coincident, but from my perspective, the more aggressive rhetoric and polarization by the right coincided very close to period when the political discussion shifted focused towards gender and race being the top political issues by the left. I could be wrong, but what I remember of before that period, the political discussion was mostly on wars, taxes, social support, and abortion. Scandals had occurred before during elections, but no where near the scale and impact that we have seen in the last 10 years.

Orrrrrrrr the right was exactly as ruthless and shrewd as I described and they shifted the narrative so any topic addressed on the left would be seen as divisive? I grew up in the state that held the capitol of the confederacy and "rebel yell" was a normal staple of our summertime parties. No one had any problem with statements that there was an historical racism problem in the country (even while saying racist shit) until it was defcon 1 must shut down discussion of racism on Fox and [friends intentionally lowercase].

Totally agree. One side constantly levels wild accusations of racism, supremacism, insurrection, attempted murder, etc, while for the most part the other side just rolls its eyes and cracks jokes to “own the libs.”

One side thinks the other is evil, the other lot just think they’re foolish.

One side invents stuff like Critical Race Theory and works with their media allies to overhaul the education system and infuse everything with divisive/polarising concepts like “privilege” and “systemic racism”, while the other side just continues writing stuffy journal articles about old economic theory.

Of course you can find fringe lunatics on either side saying anything, but I’m talking about that which is mainstreamed in Congress, in the NYT, on the big TV networks.

Sooo about the 45th president of the United States, the man who regularly labeled people enemies. Which party was he the leader of again? Was there anything you didn’t like about his rhetoric? Do you think Mexican American immigrants enjoyed it when he labeled them all as... I don’t even want to repeat it. Do you not remember any of that or did a filter bubble prevent you from learning any of those things?

Which party claims MTG, DT, and the MyPillow guy? They’re the crazy ones.

Which side claims Robin DiAngelo?

Robin DiAngelo is bad, but she's not "overthrow the government" bad. I know it's a message board and you can axiomatically six-degrees your way into saying anyone is as bad as anyone else (try it: Paul Graham vs. Slavoj Zizek, bonus points for connecting through Short Round). But DiAngelo is simply a grifter, not a menace.

Sure, but she might be “Jewish space lasers bad.”

Hang on, one of these things is straight-up anti-semitism, one of the most destructive bigotries around with a long baleful record to prove it. The other thing is... whatever it is, how is it anywhere close to anti-semitism?

What Di Angelo peddles is the same thing: racism. She has said she tries to “be a little less white every day.” If you told me I should “be a little less Bangladeshi every day” you’d get a trip to HR and probably fired. But HR invites a bigot like Di Angelo to come lecture people about race. I don’t perceive the two as being any different (particularly because I can’t help but imagine someone saying it to my half white kids when I hear it).

There is a line between explaining to a racial majority they can be insensitive or oblivious or defensive, and saying stuff like that which implies that their race is bad and they should try to minimize it. Di Angelo pole vaults over that line.

What Di Angelo peddles is the same thing: racism.

No. Anti-semitism still inspires mass shootings right here in the US, beside being the direct cause of industrial-scale genocide. There were literal Nazis at the Capitol a couple of weeks ago. Even if we stipulate what Di Angelo sells is some form of anti-white racism, these are not the same thing, they don't have the same reach, consequences or history.

I am genuinely shocked to see you argue this stuff is 'the same thing'.

Neither the MyPillow guy nor Robin DiAngelo, grifters though they may be, are elected officials.

I was offering a counterpart to MyPillow guy. I agree MTG and DJT are much more dangerous.

“MTG” is the exception that proves the rule.

MTG believes that Nancy Pelosi should be murdered.

Half of the Republican caucus in the house, today, gave MTG a standing ovation. https://twitter.com/cam_joseph/status/1357116355988910080

More Republican (citizens) have a favorable opinion of MTG than an unfavorable one. https://twitter.com/ArgoJournal/status/1356995117396201474

MTG is the Republican party.

Have fun with that, and especially, have fun defending that.

> MTG believes that Nancy Pelosi should be murdered

Oh please. This sort of rhetoric, while distasteful, is such a common sort of exaggeration that there’s a Supreme Court case on it: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/707/watts-v-uni...

> Robert Watts, attended an anti-war rally at the Washington Monument.... Watts allegedly said: “I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”

> The Court agreed with Watts’s counsel’s characterization of Watts’s speech as “a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President” that did not qualify as a true threat.

The phrase “deserves a bullet to the head” or the like is a (juvenile and violent, but common) figure of speech. It’s invariably used figuratively not literally.

I'll say three things in response:

1) There is no evidence that MTG does not believe that Nancy Pelosi should be murdered. There is evidence that she does. She has never apologized for it.

2) If you, or anyone else, makes a death threat to a public figure on social media, you will be at minimum receiving a visit from law enforcement, and will be arrested if you don't immediately disavow what you said or are thought of as a threat. "Watts" ruled that "mere political hyperbole" is not illegal, have fun in court trying to convince the judge of that. Death threats are not just "distasteful rhetoric", come on.

3) The fact that you a) gloss over the rest of my post and b) don't even bother to condemn this stuff is really telling.

One more thing: have you ever received a death threat from a stranger?

I have, I was playing poker in a casino late at night. I was not frightened, but it was not a pleasant experience. The guy was 86ed, and a few hours later I was escorted to my car by security. I stayed away for a few days despite it being my only income at the time. That was 15 years ago I still think about it some times. I don't wish that experience on anyone. Being a politician must be terrifying. Really sad to see it minimized here.

> There is no evidence that MTG does not believe that Nancy Pelosi should be murdered. There is evidence that she does. She has never apologized for it.

I have a hardcore feminist friend who repeatedly gets banned from Facebook for hyperbolic rhetoric like “kill all men.” Is that evidence she wants to kill all men? No it’s hyperbole. (And it’s stupid that Facebook bans it but the rest of the world doesn’t run by Facebook rules).

> If you, or anyone else, makes a death threat to a public figure on social media, you will be at minimum receiving a visit from law enforcement, and will be arrested if you don't immediately disavow what you said or are thought of as a threat.

The comment MTG liked, “a bullet would be quicker,” would not be perceived as a “death threat” in any court of law. It’s archetypal political hyperbole.

> "Watts" ruled that "mere political hyperbole" is not illegal, have fun in court trying to convince the judge of that.

I’d take that case in a heartbeat. It’s a straightforward application of Watts.

> Death threats are not just "distasteful rhetoric", come on. 3) The fact that you a) gloss over the rest of my post and b) don't even bother to condemn this stuff is really telling.

I condemn MTG completely. But this one is a stupid justification.

> One more thing: have you ever received a death threat from a stranger?

The whole point is that a violent comment made on a Twitter board about a public figure isn’t a death threat. If I called you up and said “I’m going to put a bullet in your head,” that’s a death threat. If I say “someone should take Ted Cruz out back and shoot him” that’s obviously not a death threat. You know this because you’ve heard this phraseology a million times.

Thank you for the condemnation, but if you continue to support (which you do, by your constant defending of them) the political party that WONT condemn, censure, or discipline her, its entirely meaningless.

As far as your other handwaving dismissals, all I can say is actions and words from public figures, especially politicians, have consequences. You might not agree, which is fine, but this is how we get January 6th. I hope you condemn that too.

And I have never, not once, heard "we should should shoot Ted Cruz", or anything even close to that. For, you know, Republican politicians. Democrats, many, many times.

That's a little hard to square with the mob that descended on the Capitol, which included people who apparently seriously hoped to kill politicians. We all get that "I'm going to kill him!" is usually just an expletive. It's not always, though.

MTG seems like a strange hill to die on. I assume you pretty much share the contempt everyone else has for her.

What does the mob have to do with MTG’s liking a violent comment about Pelosi a year earlier? I think MTG is a nut and should go the way of Steve King. But someone being a bigot and a nut and a conspiracy theorist isn’t an excuse for accusing them of sincerely wanting to murder people for using clearly hyperbolic rhetoric.

Such hyperbolic accusations aren't limited to MTG; see the effort to accuse Lauren Boebert of endangering her colleagues by allegedly carrying weapons onto the House floor (open carry is part of her schtick) or allegedly endangering the life of the Speaker of the House by "tweeting her location" (in reference to a tweet that said that the Speaker was being evacuated).

Reframing controversial political disagreements as uncontroversial issues of personal safety is a cancel culture trope that has worked well elsewhere and now being imported into our political life. Hence the ongoing theater with metal detectors and armed military guards, as well as the baseless accusations that legislators pose some physical risk to their colleagues and must therefore be expelled.

I don't know, I think you're both a little off here. You're confident MTG doesn't actually mean it when she talks about assassinating politicians. That may be the case. But she's talking about it with people who do mean it. Somebody comes up to you and sincerely starts a discussion about hanging the traitors, and you play along with them? That's on you. It's not a hyperbolic accusation.

(I don't think Boebert is in quite the same league, but give it time).

You’ve spent a fair bit of time recently on HN requiring any “liberal” here to defend the most outrageous muttering of the chattering tv pundits or college professors. People who espouse views that are clearly not in line with the national party or the populace as determined by polling.

Yet when people point out an elected national official of the GOPs words. An official that far from sanction, actually has the backing of the caucus in a named vote, you defer to defending it as figurative language.

You are applying a clear double standard. One that is dangerous. You demand your opposition abide by the Queensbury rules while your team wallops the referee with a chair and sets alight our country in the process. What could she say that you’d sanction as much as you do anything Robin Diangelo does?

When a progressive liberal says they want to pack the Supreme Court (and destroy the rule of law in the process) they mean it. It’s backed by white papers peddled by fancy think tanks. There’s like PACs backing it. The ideas are published by professors in reputable journals.

When MTG “likes” a juvenile comment saying “a bullet would be quicker,” obviously I don’t treat that with the same weight, because that’s a figurative phrase that doesn’t convey an actual plan to kill anybody.

I think it’s a fair thing for parties to have to defend the concrete policy proposals of their wings. Not so much random inane muttering of individual members.

They applauded her after she apologized for promoting QAnon.

It’s incredible how rather than indulge in a microsecond of self reflection, people like you just latch onto the most extreme caricature of your opponents that your media vendors can muster, ignoring the substantive reality.

If she did it IN PUBLIC instead of allegedly doing so behind closed doors, maybe I'd think she was only 99% human garbage.

Source?

Also, looks like you might have missed this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26021189

So no source then?

The source was the Vice article linked in the Twitter thread you posted. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en/article/b...

I don’t want to keep spending time on this. My position is that QAnon is a fringe internet phenomenon that is a total unknown to most people. Of the people who do have some knowledge of it, few take it seriously. A few crazies do, sure. But its somber elevation to grave significance by the liberal media is totally ridiculous (and gave it more attention than it ever would have gotten otherwise).

Did a few crazies invade the capitol in attempt to hang the Vice President, causing 5 deaths? Did a few crazies elect MTG, who advocates for murdering Nancy Pelosi, and then refuses to censor her/remove her from commitees?

You can minimize this stuff all you want and deflect blame to librul media, but YOUR PARTY (that you have constantly defended in these threads) is and holds these positions.

The Republican party is the party of murdering their political foes, even ones in their own party.

The Republican party is the party of Barack Obama is a Muslim (something MTG has said on video and refuses to retract).

Just own it.

> "while for the most part the other side just rolls its eyes and cracks jokes to 'own the libs.'"

They literally stormed the capitol, dude.

Here's the bottom line: there is not an equivalent of qanon or MTG on the left. You can exaggerate any number of things you don't like about liberals to ridiculous proportions, but this fact will still be true.

Honest discussions require looking at the world bluntly and clearly. If you want to list various social trends you don't like, start a thread for that. We're trying to discuss whether the parties are fundamentally different, or not.

>Here's the bottom line: there is not an equivalent of qanon or MTG on the left.

The left is currently re-enacting the Chinese cultural revolution and most people won't realize it until it's too late.

Learn about critical race theory: https://newdiscourses.com/2021/01/what-is-critical-race-theo...

You should go actually learn about critical race theory, from critical race theorists, rather than from someone's opinion of a straw man

It’s racist. It's literally based on Marxism. There are so many examples where it leads to racism once you apply it in practice: https://www.city-journal.org/racial-equity-programs-seattle-...

Where are the examples of it improving the world? There are none. It’s an evil ideology.

Assembling a mob is almost always a bad idea as it tends to get out of control. What’s notable about the Capitol riot is that it was a rare instance of Republicans doing this. The only other instance that springs to mind is “Charlottesville”, which of course the media talked about for years afterwards. Meanwhile, “the left” formed mobs all summer - in city centres, outside police precincts, outside the White House, etc.

When “the left” does QAnon it’s called the Mueller Investigation and the Rachel Maddow Show and it’s broadly embraced rather than limited to a bunch of cooks on social media.

So one side believes that rich people secretly get together to eat babies, and the other side has a news opinion show?

Yup, same thing.

I think probably <0.1% of R voters think rich people secretly eat babies, and it was certainly never an idea entertained on cable news. Whereas there was practically non-stop media focus on the Russian collusion conspiracy theory and I think probably half of Democrats thought it was actually true.

30% of Republicans have a favorable opinion of QANON, which explicitly says high ranking Democratic Party leaders drink the blood of babies/are pedos/etc. https://www.businessinsider.com/30-of-republicans-have-favor...

What is your non whataboutism response to that?

I think that poll is likely bullshit.

Only 1500 people participated which is basically nothing. How can that possibly be representative of a country of ~300mil? The questions say "Have you heard of Qanon?" and "Do you like Qanon?", but doesn't clarify what Qanon is... For all we know those 30% of people polled heard "Qanon is a movement against the Democrats" and thought, "Oh, I like that." They did not sign up for 'satan worshipping pedos'.

Without seeing their methodology, there's no reason to believe the information is accurate. How did they confirm people submitting answers were really who they say they are? And YouGov is a British company which I've never heard of, not a criticism but it does make me suspicious.

There's so many problems with surveys like this, but instead you jumped immediately from "Business Insider said this" -> "30% of Republicans are conspiracy theorists."

OK, lets say you're right. Lets say less than 30% of Republicans are conspiracy theorists who think that prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton are secret pedophiles who should be murdered.

What is the acceptable percentage of Republicans that think Hillary Clinton should be murdered? 25%? 10%? Because its certainly greater than 1%. Much greater.

This is only the beginning.

I understand where you're coming from but this isn't a good argument.

First, you're again jumping to conclusions about what people believe in order to straw man them - I've never heard anyone call for Hillary's murder, only her imprisonment. I still don't see that kind of thing as representative.

Second, by this kind of logic, the Muslim ban was a great idea. While only an incredibly small percentage of them actually committed terrorist acts, what's the acceptable percentage of those who think that radical Shari'a is a good idea, even if they don't engage in violence? 25%? 10%? Look, here's another random unverified poll that says half of all British Muslims support illegalization of homosexuality: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/11/british-musl... Guess we should systematically discriminate against them!

In both cases you are using stereotypes to hurt people. This is not to say Qanon people should be given a free pass, call them out on their bullshit. But I think the percentage would have to be nearly 100 in order to justify any extreme actions against Qanon. And it clearly isn't.

For those that don’y know what ctr is, an example of what critical race theory in practice looks like can be found here: https://christopherrufo.com/woke-elementary/

It’s scary how this racist neo-marxism is rapidly replacing liberal values in the US.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt that crt is bad, can it also be true that minority Americans are victims of racism? Assuming yes, then the problem becomes what's a better approach to embedded racism than crt.

You can't fix racism by making everyone obsessed about race. This seems like a much healthier approach: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/can-chloe-...

I can agree with that on face. I'm fine with trying things out, evaluating results, considering novel methods with history in mind and trying new things when the old ones are no longer suitable. I'm not fine with giving up on fighting racism because crt is flawed.

As long as users are watching, clicking or re-tweeting then news companies will shout "Keep doing that thing!" I think media companies mostly found out that these sorts of petty debates were popular when they all starting trying to drag out news to 24/7 and found that viewers "cared" more about the tan suit discussion than anything else. But there is another big factor, advertisers, making controversial statements on news (or, god forbid, calling out a corporation that advertises with your network) drives away ad revenue and works against the goal of media corporations.

Everyone is a lot more comfortable chatting about suit color than talking about poverty in our nation and having a complex debate over how to siphon some of the excess wealth toward addressing the issue. Copy-and-paste this for every other issue that politics is utterly dropping the ball on these days.

> Everyone is a lot more comfortable chatting about suit color than talking about poverty in our nation and having a complex debate over how to siphon some of the excess wealth toward addressing the issue.

I mean, about ~40% of the voter base, and about ~60-80% of the political class does not believe that we need to have any debate about siphoning excess wealth, because they do not believe it should be done.

Why would they want to debate it, when they can instead talk about literally anything else? When you are cheerleading for the status quo, ignoring the issue makes it go away - at least for another two or four years.

[Citations needed]

Do I really need to provide citation for the claim of 'Nearly all republican politicians, and many democrat politicians do not really endorse wealth redistribution'?

It should be self-evident from their voting records, and the rather anemic progress on that front when democrats control government. Have we all forgotten Obama's first term? If his party cared about redistribution, they would have done something to effect it. Instead, all they managed to do was pass a republican healthcare reform, and then lose a midterm election.

When polled, the voters, on both sides of the divide, view it much more favourably than politicians do, but then they largely go ahead and vote among party lines, so I suppose you may say that they are lying about their preferences. Or that, despite responding positively to left-wing ideas, they respond really positively to the, ah, moral character of the right-wing candidates.

You gave specific numbers, I want to see how those numbers were obtained. If you'd left out the numbers, or left out the part about the general population I'd not have asked for sources. So, yes, please do provide citations.

Unfortunately, you can't just approach a group of people, tell them "hey guys, would you mind being nice to each other now?" and expect them to comply.

In reality, some social and economical factors tend to make people more united, while others drive them apart.

As a person coming from a not-so-nice country, I spent tremendous amount of time thinking why the West managed to build a relatively stable society and Russia failed. My conclusion was that when people need each other economically, or have a common goal, they tend to overlook petty differences. Really, if your hairdresser is good at their job, you don't care that you like different soccer teams or music styles. On the other hand, if you commoditize people and make everyone follow the same routines for the sake of replaceability, people's energy gets redirected to rather pointless infighting over a growing amount of petty issues.

Unfortunately, the corporations dominating the global economy have a very direct financial interest in keeping the rank-and-file class commoditized, so unless the society's attitude towards the corporate-run world changes, it is only going to get worse.

It appears to me completely differently, which I guess is something else that feeds into the divide. I get the "they're pitting us all against each other" thing from the people I know I on both sides, and honestly I think they both have a point. The fact that I can't tell which party is which in your story makes believe this more so.

I think everyone agrees with you, it's just that they don't agree on which party is the crazy one.

As an outsider, I assumed you were a Republican until the last line!

Anyway, these are small matters, both parties move in the same direction, increasing spending and their power while screwing up on slightly different things.

The American century is over.

I think there's a tremendous irony in this response. Disregarding the "accuracy" of your claims or my own political viewpoints, it seems to me that you are demonstrating the same phenomenon that was discussed in the OP.

I have quarrel with my enemies. Not because I’m divided from them but because they’re a deadly threat to me and people I love. You can find irony in that all you like but I am personally motivated by not being dragged to death behind a truck or strung up for immutable facts about my being.

Yeah, if there’s one impression I get from Twitter, it’s that people on the left try too hard to be nice.

Maybe to their in group. They're just as hostile to their outgroup/traitors, if not more so than what I've seen on the right.

Now, their means of attack are certainly different though.

This honestly made be burst out laughing

Interesting, what are some things that you think democrats could do to hold republicans accountable?

It’s not that I think they could, for what it’s worth. I’ve fought with my lefty friends to stop having completely unrealistic expectations, or at least to be more pragmatic about the way they evaluate outcomes.

But what I think they could do more effectively is:

0. Recognize the disposition of their opponents (they’re belligerent and you should start there).

1. Try more, it’s not a nobody-gets-hurt game. We put you in power to wield it!

2. Focus more on goals than appearances. Nobody really cares if you look belligerent too. They just say they do. Your focus groups are lying as much as the opponents’ focus groups.

3. Set a better example by ruthlessly policing your own more aggressively. Don’t give anyone the opportunity to say you’re hypocritical.

4. Be willing to lose. It’s hard when you’re disadvantaged in most ways. But don’t play the hard game with all your betting money! Play the harder game with some of it. People are looking for you to be sincere, not just blab values and go fold every hand at the big kids’ table. Sorry for the extended gambling metaphor but it’s what I’d advise.

Pretty sure it goes both ways ;). Which is perhaps why the parent didn’t specifically mention party names. The statement is interchangeable for both parties.

Ps- I’m not a member of any political party.

It doesn't go both ways, and that's precisely the point the original poster was trying to make. US parties do not behave the same way. One has been festering extremism for 60 years.

The issue is that if you ask different people in the country which party that "one" is - you'll get a fifty-fifty split.

It's more like a persistent 60/40 (or optimistically 70/30) split, but it's understandable that some people are simply wrong.

Exactly this.

That doesn't make them correct. Constantly averaging your position is a good way to get dragged in the direction of the outlier.

It doesn't make them correct but it means that we've got a pretty gigantic societal issue to deal with.

The Democratic Party has been taking many extreme positions over the past 60 years. Name a single developed country pushing towards legalizing abortion right up to birth?

> Name a single developed country pushing towards legalizing abortion right up to birth?

Most of the developed world has abortion legal right up to birth; many countries that do so also have a time limit on when it is available on demand rather than with medical need criteria.

But Canada, notably, has no legal restrictions.

????????????

As someone from europe, the american democrats are in no way extreme on abortion, I would say they are somewhat centrist, maybe even slightly conservative.

We are to the left of Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. I stopped looking after that, so I don't know if there's a country we're to the right of.

(Rayiner is wrong about the "right up to birth thing"; as many have pointed out, even in Europe, where there are often bright-line cutoffs on abortion by pregnancy week, there's still medical abortion after that. So the answer to his "name another" question is "most European countries".)

Based on what? In the U.S., Roe protects elective abortions (i.e. abortion on demand) up to viability, 20-24 weeks. Almost all European countries ban on-demand abortions after the first trimester (10-14 weeks): https://www.loc.gov/law/help/abortion-legislation/europe.php

Lots of other issues are tied up in this one. E.g. federal funding of abortions would result in public funding on-demand second trimester abortions that would be illegal in most European countries.

Abortion laws in europe isn't decided by our most liberal parties.

The first trimester rules you mentioned are usually what everyone can agree on.

Example one: In my country (Sweden), a high-ranking party-poard member of our conservative christian party just got into a lot of trouble because it was found out that they had been a member of an anti-abortion organization 10 years ago, and now had to publicly state that they now support the first-trimester abortion rules (Personally, I think it's a lie, but this is what you have to do over here to not ruin your political career, even in the conservative christian party).

And the rest of the developed world applauds their attempts to catch up.

Is there a Democratic Party controlled state that allows this?

New York and Massachusetts are getting close: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/abortion-extremism-i.... Plenty of Democrats believe it should be entirely a medical decision. (You can find a doctor willing to do anything, of course, the 20th century had taught us.)

The current status quo of elective abortions to 24 weeks is already extreme. Few countries have generally legalized abortion past the first trimester (absent health, etc.), and less than 30% of Americans support it. (Why the developed world tends to draw the line there is obvious to anyone whose been to an 18 week ultrasound.)

According to your profile you are an attorney and so I feel you already fully understand this, but red state abortion laws do not make exceptions for the mother's health. They state clearly that after a point in time, the life of the unborn child is to be considered equally valid as the life of the mother. The health of the mother is not considered the first priority.

Abortion should be a medical decision. If a doctor is lying about the medical necessity of an abortion, that is illegal and they should lose their medical license and potentially get prison time. Same if they are giving out pills without necessity. Same if an attorney is caught illegally concealing evidence. I don't understand how it is relevant that you can find dirty doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. Or how the 1900s are related.

Yes, they do make exceptions for the mother's health. For example, here is the recent Alabama law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Life_Protection_Act

> he law provides for exceptions in cases where a fetus has a lethal anomaly (in other words, a medical condition that would cause the fetus to be stillborn or to die shortly following birth) or in cases where a pregnancy would "prevent serious health risk" to the woman.[9] The law also allows abortions to be performed "upon confirmation from a psychiatrist" that a pregnant woman diagnosed with a "serious mental illness" might otherwise take an action that would lead to her own death or to the death of the fetus.[7] The law does not ban procedures to end ectopic pregnancies[10] or procedures in which a dead fetus is removed from the uterus.[7] It does not include an exception in cases of rape or incest.[9]

> Abortion should be a medical decision.

You're arguing with me on substance, but the point of this thread is talking about what positions are "left" or "right." The idea that abortion should be a purely medical decision--that society should completely delegate to doctors the issue of when it's okay to terminate fetal life--is significantly to the left of where most countries are. Most developed countries recognize a significant state interest in fetal life after the first trimester. They make exceptions for unviable fetuses and maternal health, but don't delegate the decision to doctors completely.

It is fun to cherry-pick the most favorable facts for your argument from a source.

This[0] Time article is the [9] from your wikipedia copypasta. It discusses details of 6 pieces of conservative abortion legislation. The Alabama law you link is the only one with a provision to "prevent serious health risk to the mother". The rest all use the much higher bar of "serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function". All ban abortions starting within the first trimester, most at 6 weeks. All but Ohio have no exceptions in the case of rape and incest.

Of course I am arguing with you on substance, I am replying to you and your intellectually dishonest arguments regarding abortion. I'm not discussing the upper thread. You are an attorney; this isn't ignorance, it's dishonesty. US abortion laws are not more radical than other developed nations. The WaPo opinion piece you linked is a terrible source[1].

I hate this kind of dishonesty with a passion. If you live in a conservative state in America, getting an abortion is significantly harder than in most other developed countries. Legislation is constantly proposed to try to make it even more difficult.

Most developed countries recognize a significant state interest in the human rights of women. Parts of the United States make exceptions.

[0]: https://time.com/5591166/state-abortion-laws-explained/

[1]: It includes nice goodies, like:

> the Guttmacher Institute’s data suggests that “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” Just to be clear.

When you chase down the study[https://doi.org/10.1363/4521013], the #1 reason for late abortions is needing to raise funds for the abortion. #2 is not knowing about the pregnancy.

> "...a woman’s perhaps fleeting state would be sufficient to end a baby’s potentially viable life"

Well, you know, women, they're controlled by their emotions.../s

No, plenty of large European countries have cutoffs after the first trimester.

I've been to an 18 week ultrasound and two births, both traumatic (I put a hole in the wall of a bathroom at UCSF after the first), and while we wound up with healthy, happy kids who are the best decisions of our lives, I can't imagine forcing anyone through that experience, and there is pretty much no limitation on abortion I'd actively vote for. Also the notion that people are obtaining abortions like, the day before their due date is just silly. Rayiner, what would an abortion the day before a due date even mean? The other term for that would be "scheduled caesarian".

> Plenty of Democrats believe it should be entirely a medical decision.

Abortion being legal up to birth as a medical decision is the norm in the developed world; where there are time limits in the developed world, they are for abortion without medical need (and while most countries do have such limits, Canada, notably, does not.)

I think Dems have an uphill battle to fight - media seems strongly slanted against liberal policies as evidenced by the lack of deficit spending being anywhere in the debate when tax cuts were happening compared to deficit spending to address the viral crisis. There are entrenched interests that will put a lot of messaging toward suppressing discussions of liberal policies.

> media seems strongly slanted against liberal policies

Um... what? If you think media is strongly slanted against liberal policies, look at how it treats conservative policies.

The media, republicans, and democrats all were complicit in handing trillions of dollars to large corporations, 0% interest loans, and forgivable loans (more handouts) in the form of the covid bailouts, 2008 bailouts, and quantitative easing.

All three also seem to support practically any war proposed especially if it involves oil and false weapons of mass destruction to name a few.

True Liberals tend to hate wars and giving tax money to corporations mismanaged by rich citizens.

True conservatives don't like giving tax money to mismanaged corporations either.

Liberal - “favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.”

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/liberal

I was not referring to Democrat, but the classical meaning.

Ignoring your no true Scotsman, you're insinuating that essentially either airlines/cruise/rail/trucking/etc are managed just fine, or there's no true conservatives still in power.

Well, that means that cudgy is saying that there are no true liberals in power, either.

But I'd be interested in how you think money is being given to rail companies. Not to passenger rail service agencies, to the actual rail companies.

(And in your list, you forgot the barge companies.)

I'd not disagree with that. My point, which seemed to fall flat, is that Republicans used their majority power to prop up mismanaged companies instead of letting the "free market" do what it does best, destroy bad businesses with nary a whimper from their party about the shortsighted management mismanaging these critical companies.

Sure. Republicans have principles, until they get in the majority. That's been true for decades (at least).

Maybe that's Republicans' moral failings. Maybe it's that they don't actually believe in their claimed positions. Maybe it's just the reality of politics - when you're out of power, you say what you want to do, and when you're in power, you have to do what you can, not what you want to. But it's been observable (and disconcerting) for a long time.

I think this is a really good example of why this article is pretty damn accurate. Both true liberals and true conservatives look on their own and the opposition party as being too corporate focused because the majority of neither one represents their interest. It's on the fringes of each party that politicians that represent the interests of the people exist and those fringes are those maligned as fascists and communists, since everyone on the other side wants to pick on them and nobody on their own side wants to defend them. There's a suitable Noam Chomsky quote for this

> In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

> On Twitter, this has been exceedingly shorthanded into “tan suit”. One party is so invested in conflict that they invent it by manufacturing a scandal out of a fashion choice.

Things like covfefe and trump's orangeness and tiny hands come to mind. Or Biden's stutter meaning he's senile, or at least it did until Bernie dropped out. After that, it was only something those scandal-seeking republicans did. Both sides' social media pounce on anything and everything (and then traditional media follows).

That is true, social media is full of garbage from every side.

But the statement here is that on one side, it's goes a lot further than social media...

> is that one sees polarization as a tool and the other doesn’t acknowledge that.

Which one? I've seen this argument argued to hell and back by people on both sides, and I feel that it misses a bit of nuance.

My view is that both parties view this polarization as a tool, but they polarize in very different ways, for very different issues.

Mind you, by saying this, I am not equating their behaviour. I have very little patience for two-sideism.

I often say both parties are similar though not symetrical.

Does "manufacturing a scandal out of fashion choice" refer to the party that screams "cultural appropriation!!!" when the person with the wrong identity wears clothing deemed inappropriate?

Or are you referring to the party that screams "weak colors" when the president chooses to wear clothing deemed to be wimpy?

Both sides are idiots about fashion:

The right: Obama's tan suit. (I actually don't know much about this, can't be bothered to investigate as I'm sure it was dumb)

The left: Melania Trump's "I don't care, do u?" coat was OBVIOUSLY a secret message saying she doesn't care about migrant children (edit: this is sarcasm: she wore it to say she doesn't care about the media's articles about her, but the media went nuts and said she was saying she hates children, thus proving her point). I could also find articles about Donald Trump sticking his tie to his shirt or something dumb. God what a waste of brain space.

I only know about the whole Tan Suit thing because Reddit keeps mentioning how big of a deal it was. They will never let it go.

I could counter with "Two Scoops" and Donald Trump feeding Koi incorrectly but I would be rebuffed with example of Republicans getting upset about Barrack Obama's choice of mustard.

Right, so now the outrage is about the other side's outrage? Ironically, they probably talk about the tan suit more now?

And I don't know, how can you have it both ways? If you make fun of Trump's hair or his wife's coat, then isn't it exactly the same?

I think you're exactly right. Outrage begets outrage.

If you're trying to look at this as an outside observer, what each side is doing looks exactly the same. Mutually assured pettiness and hypocrisy.

Maybe it's my social bubble of working in tech and so on, but it seems like the left dominate the outrage more these days. Certainly social media and mainstream media is heavily left-leaning. It's obvious to me which side you have to be careful about saying you support at work. It's obvious which side will attract more downvotes on Reddit and even Hacker News. Perhaps that'll change now that Biden is in the White House, though I doubt it.

Given that your comment has been downvoted and grayed, your observation seems to have been confirmed. My hunch is that 'the left' is much more involved in activism and that translates to being more vocal in online forums and more liberal in giving out downvotes.

Haha of course. I don't have any experience being a democrat in, say, Wyoming, so I'm not entirely sure if my observation is correct. But I would genuinely feel like my career is in jeopardy if I wore a MAGA hat to the tech office. I can't imagine the vice versa scenario being equally widespread in right-wing communities. So even though I live in more leftist circles, it does feel like the outrage is more intense in general.

I understand there are two sides so our natural inclination is to say "both sides are equally bad!" like disciplining children or something. But sometimes one side is a little worse than the other at a particular moment in history. I don't think it makes me a partisan to point some things out.

Are those the things the left or the media got unhappy about trump for though? Or was it the children in cages? "Covid will be gone in a few days" ? And the like?

The one where he was very proud that he could identify an elephant annnnd that proved he was a very stable genius?

I don't know what the two scoops or the koi thing are, but i do know the republican media has been pretending Biden is senile for a while now.

You sound quite partisan to be honest, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. It is true that Trump's (or anyone's) opponents are allowed to be outraged over serious things. But you literally just pointed out at the left also got outraged by trivial things:

> The one where he was very proud that he could identify an elephant annnnd that proved he was a very stable genius?

Trump boasted about a quiz, who cares? It's not important. But it was in the news cycle.

Honestly, I think the left really despited the way Trump talked and phased things more than anything else. If he spoke more mellifluously like Obama, but did even more drone strikes in Yemon, CNN wouldn't go after him as much. Another example is "China virus". You know, like MERS (Middle East Respatory Syndrome), Spanish Flu, Japense encephalitis, German Measels, Zika, Ebola, etc.? All named after where they came from. He only called it the Chinese virus in response to a question from a reporter who said that the Chinese government claimed the US government made it in a lab. But of course, Trump must have said it because he's a racist and wants to blame Chinese Americans. It's just so silly and manufactured outrage.

I can think of a few other examples of overblown outraged just off the top of my head. I think the media just generally cried wolf a lot. Every time Trump sneezed it was a scandal. So then people either tuned out entirely, or got outraged by Trump every day. And thus here we are with are divided country.

And you can clearly see the difference:

- Obama wore some clothes that people got upset about because it didn’t look great on him.

- Melania wore a coat declaring she doesn’t care about how thousands of children are treated.

Wait, what? Are you saying Melania actually wore the coat for that reason? Or are you saying the left's outrage is worse than the right?

My OP about Melania was sarcastic: she actually wore it to say she doesn't care about the bullshit articles the media runs with. I can't tell if you agree with me or not over text.

She either wore that coat for that reason, or because that consideration was so unimportant to her that she welcomed the interpretation. Either way it doesn't compare to a bad suit.

Oh jeez. The first lady didn't wear a coat to secretly tell people she hate children. Even if she did secretly hate children (despite all her charity work), why would she want to "secretly" tell the media this by wearing a coat, and then lying about her motivation? Turn off CNN and stop visiting /r/politics once in awhile my man.

Melania Trump wore a $39 jacket saying "I don't care really care", as she was getting on a plane to visit a children's shelter in a border town in Texas where many children were separated from their parents.

What's the Occam's Razor of why she did that, do you think?

Melania Trump — like all the first ladies — spent a great deal of time doing charity work for kids and so on. Most of the time, nobody paid any attention to her clothes. One time, she wears a jacket, and explains why she's wearing it: "to show the media I don't care what they think.". This day, just like the many other days, she is also doing some charity work (she didn't even wear it while with the kids, by the way). So use Occam's razor yourself: is she doing it to send a secret message that shat she doesn't care about the kids? What on Earth would be her motivation for doing that? To help win votes from people that hate children? If she hates kids, why would she bother getting on a plane in the first place? Or, is it more likely she's doing it for the reasons she literally said? Does she really hate kids? Or, does the media hate her? What's more likely? Use Occam's razor or Hanlon's razor.

Why on Earth are you quoting it being a $39 jacket? Why is that relevant? Your overly outraged, negative interpretation is just proving my point about how people are getting outraged over fashion for no good reason.

Okay I made the mistake of paraphrasing you. I neither think she hates children of any walk of life nor does so secretly. I do think she was sending the message that she didn’t care what was happening to them and wanted it to be well known.

Edit: not that I have any reputation at stake but I’ve literally never intentionally watched CNN or visited /r/anything.

Is this a “dog whistle”? Or what I like to call “political mind reading”?

“I have zero proof, but I knows it’s true because of how you are.”

That's literally what the conversation is about: debating what someone else is likely thinking. And look, on another thread I've already been called a racist haha. Just incredible, it's like clockwork.

I think "hold the first accountable" is the wrong focus to have here, especially since so much of what the Republicans do violates norms rather than actual rules. I think it would be better to see the Democrats adopt their tactics, i.e. using every available mechanism to oppose everything they do as forcefully as possible, as opposed to meekly waiting for good faith from the other side which will never be forthcoming.

The other thing with "holding accountable" is that it can backfire. Imagine a second Trump impeachment passing. It would be perfect for the Republicans. They would have a solution to the problem of his potential reelection bid (which they would like to avoid), while simultaneously he would be a martyr as well as a symbol of what "cancel culture" / "leftist authoritarians" took away from you, the patriots.

You think a race to the bottom of decency is a better idea? Really? How do you think that ends?

A race to the bottom of decency is exactly what is currently happening. One side continuing to "take the high road" will do absolutely NOTHING to stop it.

It is delusional to think that the Republicans will ever be shamed into cooperation. They don't care, their voters don't care, and high-minded speeches about the need for civility are the stuff of a comedy sketch if delivered while the listener is in the process of hacking you to pieces.

If you honestly believe that, then who cares who wins? You'll just get one of two different brands of corrupt, power hungry, greedy, totalitarian regimes. That may happen regardless, but I for one won't be cheering it on.

I'm honestly baffled by this. I care who wins because of the POLICY DIFFERENCE, i.e. the difference between what the two parties want to DO with their power. I can't even imagine what kind of worldview I would need to have to believe that the desirability of a political regime is a function of the level of courteousness of the politicians within it, so I'm struggling to understand where you're coming from with this claim.

So in other words you support totalitarianism, so long as the totalitarians agree with you.

Sorry, I can't take anyone seriously who doesn't see a problem with that philosophy.

This a complete non-sequitur.

Authoritarianism consists in undemocratic rule in which obedience is brutally enforced, and dissidence suppressed, using the security apparatus of the state.

Authoritarianism does not consist in using every avenue allowed within the rules of a democratic system in order to exercise power, even if it's "not nice".

Again, it's genuinely puzzling how you could conflate these two things.

"Decency" is all a show. Politics has always been about power.

People need to really internalize this. It's a game for power, and depending on the circumstances, will use any tool necessary to achieve those means. Our opinions here are worse than nothing, as it accomplishes nothing of value at the expense of projecting our (dare I say propagandized) bias onto millions of people while changing our behavior in very harmful ways to ourselves and others.

We all need to just detach, because what is DC really going to do for you? I don't know, but I would put serious money on it being negligible to the impact of your immediate family, friends and community.

Two years ago I'd have fully agreed with where you're coming from, but this latest dose of celebritized ignorance has caused the deaths of half a million Americans and wasted a year of all of our lives. There's a significant difference between our traditional self-interested domestic-looting foreign-malevolent power structure, and one that's actively self-destructive. The question has become more like what is DC going to do to you?

It might also lead to another presidential candidate arising in the same mold as Trump, and people latching on to him in vengeance against what they perceive as unfair treatment of the martyr Trump.

> I think "hold the first accountable" is the wrong focus to have here, especially since so much of what the Republicans do violates norms rather than actual rules

Why not defend norms? If the premise is that the divide isn’t so bad, standing up for decency without needing to pass a law is at least as big a deal as a tan suit.

> I think it would be better to see the Democrats adopt their tactics, i.e. using every available mechanism to oppose everything they do as forcefully as possible, as opposed to meekly waiting for good faith from the other side which will never be forthcoming.

I’m confused how this is a distinction. The tactic that achieves that is holding the other side accountable.

> The other thing with "holding accountable" is that it can backfire. Imagine a second Trump impeachment passing. It would be perfect for the Republicans. They would have a solution to the problem of his potential reelection bid (which they would like to avoid), while simultaneously he would be a martyr as well as a symbol of what "cancel culture" / "leftist authoritarians" took away from you, the patriots.

Please understand that I’m not picking on you and don’t have any real quarrel with you. But this is exactly the kind of spinelessness I’m talking about. Read it back to yourself and see how much you’ve conceded before you even began. You’re accepting their advantage (which is structural not messaging) and just giving the whole battle up. They get to walk away with the win and still claim cancel culture bullshit because who would dare question them?

They need to lose. They need to be shown they can and will and do lose. That’s what accountability achieves. You can’t stack the Senate for the Dems, but you can sure as shit keep it in their hands with some real trials.

I think I have the same feelings as you about the Democrats' spinelessness, but a disagreement about what a more robust approach entails.

> standing up for decency without needing to pass a law is at least as big a deal as a tan suit.

"Standing up for decency" is completely meaningless. The Republicans do not think in those terms, and neither do their voters. They want their agenda passed and they will use the means at their disposal to achieve that. That is exactly what I want Democrats to do. What I view as "spineless" is the Democrats' insistence on continuing to abide by norms that their opponents have long since abandoned in the hopes of a return to comity. It is not going to happen.

My view is that the only way to defeat the Republicans is to enact left-wing policies that are broadly popular, e.g. stimulus checks, medicare expansion, etc., and thus eat away at the foundation of immiseration, precarity and alienation that is the root cause of rising social tensions.

I don't think that the Democrats are, as a party, capable of doing that (or even desire to), which is why the outlook is so bleak.

I think we're more on the same page than you think, see my comment about what I think dems should do[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26020497

I think a common reason behind this (and I've find myself doing this) is that when the most extreme elements of your preferred party do something crazy and outlandish, you have a tendency to push it aside and think "that's only the fringe of my party", but when you see it on the other side, you think "Anyone who could even think of being on the same side as those nutjobs is evil."

That is, most folks have a tendency to personify themselves with the middle of their party, but personify those in the other party as the extreme of that party.

Until four years ago this case might have been arguable. In 2016 it lost any cogency: a fringe candidate took the top job, and they voted for him again in even larger numbers four years later.

There is absolutely no fringe candidate on the other side with anywhere near that kind of power. The closest you get is a Presidential candidate who was rejected. The highest office holders an objective observer would identify as "fringe" are Representatives, or perhaps that one Senator.

None of them is very powerful. They receive outsized attention in the media, and are pushed by their opponents as having far more power than they do, but no rational person would compare that to electing and then re-electing a conspiracy theorist to the top job -- supported by large numbers of legislators at all levels.

We still have to deal with our own internal biases, as you say. But they're entirely insufficient to justify any kind of equivalence. The fringe really does run that party.

Bernie Sanders might well have won the Democratic nomination in 2016, if the party structure hadn't intervened for Hillary. And Bernie wasn't even a Democrat. That's almost exactly symmetric to the Republican situation, except that the Democratic Party had both mechanisms and the will to avoid such an insurgency, and the Republican Party didn't.

Exactly. Sanders may have been a career politician, meaning his presidency may have been more stable, but the same populist forces that led to the Trump presidency also fueled the rise of Sanders. Largely economic anxiety and a sense that mainstream politicians were untrustworthy.

It seems that most people just think "orange man bad" without trying whatsoever to understand why people would vote for him over a normal candidate.

>That's almost exactly symmetric to the Republican situation

Is it? Do you really think that if Bernie won in 2016 and then lost in 2020 he would call upon his supporters to storm the Capitol?

It’s just completely ahistorical too. Democratic voters picked HRC over Bernie and then they picked Biden over Bernie 4 years later. There was no conspiracy or “party machinery” involved as much as that pains the Bernie wing of the party.

Republican voters overwhelmingly picked Trump - and then turned out millions more in 2020 after they saw what he had done with the Oval Office. Just no remote equivocation between the two parties.

Democratic primary voters were leaning a few points towards Bernie. Then the DNC gave Hillary - and not Bernie - the debate questions in advance. The superdelegates - delegates that didn't come from primaries - also tilted strongly for Hillary. So no, I don't think it's completely ahistorical. It's at least somewhat ahistorical to say that Democratic voters picked HRC over Bernie in 2016. The DNC picked Hillary. The voters? Bernie had the edge, at least before the tilted debate.

Read the actual question that they “tipped” to Hillary - it was literally about lead poisoning in water at a debate in Flint, Michigan.

And read the timeline here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presid...

Bernie never had an edge; he lost 4 of the first 5 contests and finished with nearly 4 million fewer votes. It’s no secret the party apparatus preferred Hillary - to their great detriment given what happened in the general - but it absolutely ahistorical to insist that Bernie was somehow cheated out of anything.

Hmm. It appears that my memory is faulty.

It's just right wing propaganda taking its effect.

You remember that the democrats stole the election from Bernie because the GOP wanted democrats to not be excited about voting for hilary, so they spread the message as much as they could

I don't think it's that simple. I think it was at least as much left-wing propaganda that "Bernie is winning!"

Of course Bernie wouldn't call on his supporters to storm the capital. But then again neither did Trump. That didn't stop some of them from doing it however.

Trump had years of fomenting and approving of violence. Offering to pay legal fees for anyone who attacked his detractors. "Stand back and stand by", etc.

He might as well said "it sure would be a shame if someone was to storm that nice capitol building there"

He told them march to the capitol to make their voices heard, while Rudy demanded trial by combat and other speakers whipped the crowd up into a rabid rage.

But... contrary to what OP states, Trump didn't say that.

"He might as well have" is not accurate either.

“Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.”

https://time.com/4403510/george-w-bush-speech-dallas-shootin...

"Ultimate attribution error is the tendency to internally attribute negative outgroup and positive ingroup behaviour and to externally attribute positive outgroup and negative ingroup behaviour. So in other words, ultimate attribution error arises as a way to explain an outgroup's negative behaviour as flaws in their personality, and to explain an outgroup's positive behaviour as a result of chance or circumstance."

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

Until you look how each side tends to react when the most extreme elements of their party do something crazy and outlandish. One tends to immediately hold individuals accountable for their crazy actions, the other tends to give them a promotion, unless they think it will hurt their agenda more than help it.

Edit: To be clear, by "crazy and outlandish" I mean violent, oppressive, hostile. Not has a "crazy" idea about where tax dollars should be spent.

If you consider comments and posts from anyone on Twitter or Reddit who claims to support one side or the other, it would seem you have a point.

But if you look only at what the elected officials from the two sides say, it's clear that there is a world of difference. That's where the difference lies: one side doesn't tolerate anything like the level of extremism or violent rhetoric from the people they elect compared to the other.

But does that argument really work when one of the extremes got elected president?

You do realize that Republicans elected a QAnon conspiracy theorist right? Saying it's the fringes on both sides is incredibly disingenuous.

I don't disagree with this in abstract but I think the idea that both sides have extreme elements that are in any way comparable died on January 6th. There's a difference between Bernie Sanders and Marjorie Taylor Greene, but a lot of people don't see it that way because they're uncomfortable being in the same group as Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think the Republicans have a responsibility to address this and I don't think the Democrats are in a similarly dire situation.

Why did you select Bernie Sanders as the most extreme person in Congress on the left? Why not Maxine Waters or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Once you can answer that question, you might discover something you weren't expecting in why this divisiveness continues to accelerate.

Whose AOC called to execute?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/us/marjorie-taylor-greene...

I think those are fine examples too and I think my comment would be very similar if I substituted one of them for Bernie. I think Bernie has a higher profile than either of those two examples (he ran for president and neither of them did), so it made more sense to me. In retrospect, AOC would have been a better choice since they're both in the House.

Trying to assess actual policy disagreements by putting the polar extremes at 0 and 100 and having people pick a number in between for their actual policy preference without any concrete touchpoints for what those intermediary value means doesn't work. Your aren't comparing Republicans and Democrats policy positions, you are comparing Republicans and Democrats views of the relative extremism of their own policy positions and those of the other parties.

A valid summary is not that the actual differences in policy preferences are smaller than expected, but that members of each party see their own positions as less extreme and the other parties positions as more extreme than members of the other party do.

Which is very much not news, and doesn't actually indicate anyone is overestimating real policy divides as the authors claim. Their methodology could not, even remotely, support the basic claims they are making.

> We also found that Democrats and Republicans who held more inaccurate beliefs about the other side were even willing to subvert norms of democracy to hurt their political opponents.

This is the scariest bit neither side seems to realize. You think the opposition is doing a terrible thing, so you have to do a bad thing for the greater good to counter it instead of doing the good thing. Now your opponents see you do the bad thing and imagine it as an even worse thing that they need to do bad things to counter, for the greater good. Who cares about breaking social norms when the opposition has already broken them even worse (or so you believe)?

It's a positive feedback race to the bottom, with rational actions based on inaccurate beliefs every step of the way. Sure, I don't like my candidate, but they're the only way to stop the opposition's candidate, who has literal skeletons in their closet!

Both parties are advancing the neoliberal economic consensus - the free enterprise and the free trade.

The divisions between the two parties only serve to drive a wedge between the blue-collar working class on one hand and the white-collar/service working class on the other. The Free Trade generated enormous riches for the country over the last 50 years, but the worker incomes stayed flat. Both voting groups have the same economic interest in a different distribution of the spoils of the free trade, and it's only the political antagonism that prevents their collaboration.

There's a growing cohort of people who understand this and have been actively fighting against it for decades. I fully expect this issue to come to a head within my lifetime. Hopefully it's solved by policy and not bloodshed but I won't hold my breath on that after seeing the brutal response to this summers peaceful protests.

Do you think the summer protest were a move for or against the neoliberal consensus?

The BLM protests are precisely one of the expressions of the growing anger against the neoliberal consensus.

After all, capitalism requires racism to function. A united working class organising general strikes and arming themselves would be dangerous to the bourgeoisie.

Yes, absolutely. The voices against neoliberalism have grown in number and volume since 2019. Do you not?

I think the summer protests have displaced the movement against the neoliberal doctrine rather than aiding the movement.

I agree. The complete focus on all the politicians and media is on race and gender issues, completely ignoring economic issues.

That's the focus you'll see most of the time if you watch mainstream media. But even cnn just had a bad faith podcast host on so the tide is changing... Slowly. That's how grassroots movements work. Slowly, from the labor classes on up.

In 2000, Ralph Nader supporters called this idea "the two-headed uniparty"

Coming out of the hangover of the last 4 years, I'm starting to see clearly now how both parties work to keep people in petty conflict and intense infighting. It allows the power players to get away with so much. The MSM has 24-hour coverage of inane and petty things. Our politicians take turns with their heads in the trough and enrich themselves in the open. I don't want to leave my children a legacy of endless war and endless poverty.

I hadn't head that before. How very fitting.

For the life of me I cannot see why this article is written in a positive light. The result is pretty clear: Members of the two parties hate each other less in reality than they think they do and they are actually closer than they think.

"Hey you know what? The two only real options we have in an election doesn't actually disagree as much as you'd think!" How is that a good thing? With only two options they better be far apart or those left-leaning on the right and those that are right-leaning on the left starts to blend together and you have one party in reality with two names and two outer wings that hate each others guts. At least as one party they might work better together (hah, okay sorry that was stupid).

Yeah, an interesting implication of a lack of substantive policy differences is that policy-heavy partisans on either side are going to be disappointed - the necessities of tribalism generate a lot of noise and rage around controversial issues, but when it comes down to actual policy there's no appetite.

I saw an interesting example of this first-hand last year. I live in a pretty bougie area, kind of place where everyone's car radio (and everyone owns a car) is pegged to the local NPR station. BLM signs went up like mushrooms - sure, neat. Then, the local school levy election rolls around. Most of the same properties grow "Vote Yes For Kids!" signs. We even get "vote yes" mailers explaining that since the state only funds "basic education", we've got to top up our local schools to do right by our kids. Of course, any discussion of how areas without fat property tax revenues get by is conspicuously absent. There is not a lot of appreciation of the irony of holding these positions simultaneously. Words (and yard signs, I guess) are cheap but policy might actually impact upper-middle-class WASP QoL; can't be having that.

The problem with articles like this is that what matters is how people vote not what they say their policy preferences are.

But people don't have freedom to vote as they'd like. Voting in a two party system is reduced to a "which is worse" question. If you're fiscally and socially liberal but feel very strongly about preventing abortion you might end up holding your nose while voting for the R candidate.

> If you're fiscally and socially liberal but feel very strongly about preventing abortion you might end up holding your nose while voting for the R candidate.

Not to get into a flamewar or anything, but if you're trying to prevent abortion then voting for the R candidate isn't a sensible choice. Hand in hand with wishing to ban abortion, they generally are hostile to the very policies (free birth control, such as IUD, on demand) that are the most effective in preventing abortion. Colorado cut teen birth rate and teen abortion rate in half simply by offering free IUDs[1].

The thing with the two party system is that the real choice for voters happens in the primaries. This is the chance to swing the party in a different direction, since in the general election people will typically hold their nose and vote a straight ticket even if they don't like all the positions their candidate holds.

[1] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/PSD_Tit...

Unfortunately there is a non-negligible percentage of those who would follow the parent comment's suggestion due to religious affiliation. Some of those would also clutch pearls when mentioning birth control, out of prolonged exposure to FUD on the topic, i.e. "think of the children!"

Or they might be billionaires and are worried that if the birth rate continues dropping they might have to modernize their facilities or pay higher wages.

I can believe some billionaires having this opinion (since some aren't super sharp) but it's total BS. There are plenty of humans on earth - there isn't any shortage of labour out there.

People over-reproducing is a strain on society. I'm not saying we should limit how many children folks can have, but there isn't any societal upside to 14 person families.

I agree, however the options with the best evidence for success are, unpopular.

A robust sex ed curriculum, free contraceptives for everyone NQA, free abortions up to delivery. Fund social services adequately. One party is dying on the hill in an attempt to prevent these rational evidence based measures. I'd rather believe that gullible religious types are tricked into hating these things because it helps the capital class maintain a large uneducated and impoverished workforce. I realize that this may be wholly wrong.

On the other side of things..

If the birth rate declines too fast then entire generations will be raised to keep their ancestors alive, instead of doing other things like mining asteroids or creating new AI to better sell Facebook's new facehugger 3000 vr facemask with built in respirator.

No, the problem with articles like this is that they make claims about differences in people's policy preferences without actually measuring policy preferences, just on a 1-100 scale how extreme they feel their own preferences and others are.

Without objective touchstones for what 25, 50, and 75 mean on the scales between the extreme polar positions that are given as the end points, where people rate themselves numerically isn't likely to have any coherent relation to actual policy positions at all.

Great point. Measuring the divide between parties by the issue positions their voters misses the more important things like "would you rather your party try to hold onto power or admit defeat" after an election.

While using a scale to measure divide on particular issues such as open vs closed borders is interesting, the part about “disliking” opposing partisans seems to be an inappropriate way to measure political distance.

For example a Black Democrat voter probably thinks Republican voters don’t like her because she’s Black, not because she’s a Democrat.

Regardless this shows there’s room for compromise on certain hard policy issues, but soft issues (i.e. the culture wars) requires more nuanced study.

The divide is not going to be fixed without disrupting the connection between outrage and political donations. Until that is addressed there is massive financial incentive in making people as angry as possible and it will continue to get worse.

I'd expect them to be close. In a two party system, the parties will coalesce around similar policies. The electorate will always have variance along the first principal component (which probably corresponds to community prosperity vs individual comfort), and the parties will project in opposite directions, but nevertheless staying close to the centre.

How well do people do on estimates like this compared to estimates about other subjects? Because it kind of seems like a lot of the respondents are just plain innumerate. For instance, on the open borders question, the plurality of both party respondents answered that members of the opposing party had the most extreme possible view. That's obviously not going to be true on average for anything resembling a normal distribution no matter how polarized you think the parties are. Also, I bet respondents were confused about the meaning of "open borders." I've encountered people who somehow think that current (or pre 2016) US immigration policies qualify as "open borders" which would make the estimate that most democrats support "open borders" much closer to accurate.

"Second, we can engage with leaders and the media who may be exacerbating Americans’ misperceptions of each other."

Can we? Right now the fundamental model of media AND political parties is fueled by hyper-partisanship, outrage, us-vs-them, and how all of these things combine to solicit eyeballs and keep them on us and not them. Sean Hannity or one of the other talking heads at Fox (can't remember which) literally has or at least had a nightly segment on how all other media is lying to you or not covering what Fox covers, and thus they're bad so stick with us. It's like a meta-advertisement couched as opinionews.

These things _work_ to accomplish the goals (eyeballs on us), even if they're destroying the country in the process. So how is a conversation going to change any of that?

This frustrates a LOT of people who want more political difference expressed than the two parties exhibit.

Article: the divide is smaller than we think.

Comments: heck no, watch how divided we are!

great graphs for that example

I've found the same thing because I neither deflect talking points, nor do I immediately block people that don't match my talking point

and then I make the cardinal sin of saying "both sides are doing this" and that simply makes both sides dehumanize me when its fairly clear they haven't really talked to each other in a while to come up with an accurate rebuttal

depolarize yourself kthx

I wish we had a tool, like the political compass, that those who run for (re-)election had to fill out by law before they could run. As it is now no one have any idea where different candidates are on the political spectrum as all they do is talk in soundbites and repeat their slogans over and over again.

Unfortunately this would effectively pin down a candidate to their word and past promises they may have made - most politicians seem to avoid doing that when possible ;)

This is not an appropriate article or discussion for HN. There's lots of other places to "be political". Not so many to "be technical"... It would be a great disappointment to see HN turn into, say, Slashdot.

It's a great article for HN. All the folks here working on ad-tech to polarize the good people of this country so they can squeeze another penny out of them. Then they have the gals to complain about people becoming radicalized. "Oh gee how did that happennnn"

They got polarized on Facebook. Because you wanted them to. Because it keeps them coming back and your stock goes up.

If you're a Facebook employee - congrats! This is what you've created. A radicalized cesspool of idiots to increase your bottom line.

Google isn't helping anymore than Facebook. Apple is dipping their toes into privacy focused features that hurt Facebook and Amazon but I suspect they're making a long adtech play.

The division is not the problem. How we handle the division is what matters.

Cordial discourse and respect for individuals and their opinions is tantamount. Without it, there is little foundation to build compromise.

That being said, tolerating hate is the same as espousing it oneself.

Not sure we have the same definition of the simplistic buzzword “hate”.

Should it be against the law to hate (intensely dislike) someone? Seems like a basic human right to me.

If you mean hate to mean discriminate against someone based on their race or murder/assault them regardless of racist motives, then I agree.

However, those are illegal acts punishable by law and not allowed in society.

The flagrantly inaccurate usage of common words and/or attempts to change or expand their meaning (given there are pre-existing words in language) is making it more difficult to communicate and is usually a sign of a weak argument.

Ignoring the scope creep from your comment, what is your definition of hate?

It's important to realise that the last few Republican presidential candidates before Trump were McCain and Romney, hardly hard line extremists. Trump was a grass roots insurgent and until he actual won the candidacy almost the entire body of elected Republican representatives loathed him. The current situation is an extreme outlier.

The Republican party is perfectly capable of socially progressive policies. After all Obamacare was basically their idea. Conversely the Dems are hardly throwing open the borders to everyone. Illegal immigration from Mexico under Obama almost halved, yes due to fence building he didn't start but the point is he didn't lift a finger to obstruct it. No Child Left Behind was bipartisan, but started under and was promoted by Bush. The militarising of the police was arguably started by Biden.

Honestly, a lot of people like me outside the US have a hard time telling them apart when it comes to actual outcomes.

It's a perceived difference between two wings of the "capitalist imperialist" party stoked by media outlets following the money by realizing that people click more when they're outraged.

No, both parties are not the same if you're a centrist, but from the far left side of things, you definitely need your spectacles on to see the difference. Granted, one faction tends to be on the right side of history/civil rights a lot more.

If we're interested in real reconciliation within the current system, I'd definitely advocate for state and nation-wide voter reform. Some sort of proportional representation voting protocol would allow people to pick representatives that argue on behalf of maybe 50-80% of their beliefs, rather than 10-20% of their beliefs. I know that when "my person" wins, I never feel like they're going to particularly represent me or the people I care about in any impactful way.

I think the perception that there are only two real choices stokes the divide quite a bit, because being either with us or against us is a lot easier when there are only two teams. Breaking up the two party system with voter reform would be my #1 fix. That, and reversing Citizens United.

Particularly ever since the New Democrats took over the party. Their whole shtick was injecting a bunch of right wing policies into the Democratic Party, under the idea that voters had shifted to the right and the only way to win was to follow them. Clinton made good on his promise to "end the welfare system as we know it". Obamacare was an unashamed rewrite of Newt Gingich and The Heritage Foundation's 1993/1994 HEART Act, all the way to the individual mandate.

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

IMO a lot of the both party's issues right now stem from the fact that Democrats have moved so far to the right that only the far right positions differentiate a Republican from a mainline Democrat opponent.

I think this is a great analysis. One factor I would add to both your comment and about the political divide in general is earmarks. Eliminating earmarks (political "pork" in bills) seems like a great way to eliminate wasteful spending. Except now we're in a situation where many of our representatives and senators can't point to a new bridge and say "I'm the reason we have that, now re-elect me" so they move to culture war issues as a way to fire up the base. This effect, combined with gerrymandering for House seats, means that the only thing many politicians have to fear is a primary fight. In an effort to avoid primary challengers, the Democrats and Republicans both ran to the right, leaving us where we are now: Biden, a Republican by 1960s standards, is painted as a "radical socialist" against all evidence, because it turns out the base, because there's literally nothing else for politicians to offer to their constituents. I've heard rumblings that earmarks might be coming back and I really hope they do.

The Republicans have moved very far to the left over the past 30-40 years, from where they used to be.

Topics no longer up for serious discussion in the Republican Party that used to be very common:

Doing away with Social Security / replacing SS. Getting rid of Medicare and Medicaid, replacing them with entirely private systems. The gold standard, going back to it. Cutting spending (actually attempting to do it, not just paying rare lip service to it). Getting more aggressive with the war on drugs. Increasing punishment for crime, putting people into prison for longer sentences.

It was George W Bush's administration that implemented the successful Housing First program for homelessness assistance, which would have been considered an exceptionally bad welfare state program by the 1980s Republicans. Back then it would have been considered to encourage homelessness, they would have said it entrenches it.

Today's Republicans support rampant welfare give-aways in the form of stimulus checks. That would have been considered a crazy Socialist program universally by Republicans just as recently as the early 1990s. Giving people checks during a recession was unthinkable by Republicans as recently as 20 years ago (eg the 2001-2002 recession).

Trump - with wide Republican support - just implemented the best criminal justice reform in US history. That would have gotten near zero Republican support in the 1980s.

The Republicans in Reagan's time were very militantly against gay marriage, and any form of sexuality being shown anywhere at any time. In the early 1990s Murphy Brown - a fictional TV character - deciding to raise a child on her own was a very controversial matter among Republicans, so much so that Dan Quayle made it a prominent issue. Republicans just 30 years ago were radically more conservative than they are today and that's putting it mildly.

Those same Reagan era Republicans were almost universally - with very few exceptions - strongly in favor of the war on drugs. Every other word out of their mouths was about how to further criminalize drugs. Today the exact opposite is true, very few Republicans are in favor of the war on drugs. Trump just came and went and the Republicans barely lifted an eyebrow at trying to roll back the positive momentum of drug liberalization.

If people on the left think Republicans today are far right, well, ha. They don't remember what Republicans were like back then apparently. Today's average Republican is a centrist Democrat circa the mid 1980s and early 1990s.

> Giving people checks during a recession was unthinkable by Republicans as recently as 20 years ago (eg the 2001-2002 recession).

It was extremely thinkable in 2001 when George W. Bush did it[1].

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Bush-signs-1-3-trill...

>Cutting spending (actually attempting to do it, not just paying rare lip service to it).

When did this actually happen?

They didn't. It's a cornerstone of their electoral strategy to blow up the national debt when in power, then crow about debt reduction when not: https://www.salon.com/2018/02/12/thom-hartmann-how-the-gop-u...

Edit: deficit -> debt

I agree with your point about the Democrats' disastrous rightward slide but I don't think that the resulting problem is that Republicans now struggle to distinguish themselves. They're still the party of further tax cuts and deregulation, even if the Democrats have become the party of the status quo ante (or a "return to the Obama years"). I do agree, however, that economics deeply receded in importance for a decade or two.

But during that time, parties were quite content to focus their message to voters on cultural issues: patriotism vs multiculturalism, religious freedom vs tolerance, etc, and distinguish themselves that way. The problem that the Republicans had was that after decades of the conservative media stoking their voters' rage to searing intensity, Trump came along and gave the base what it wanted, which was an end to the restraint and doublespeak, and posturing / policy which produced as many "liberal tears" as possible; politics as punishment. Now in the aftermath of his presidency they have to figure out how to appeal to the mass of their voters' who are still fiercely loyal to Trump while continuing to serve the interests of their donors, who would like someone more stable.

The Democrats, for their part, are trying to figure out how to digest the left wing of their party and appeal to its voters while spending as little as possible (see the $1400 vs $2000 debacle).

I would love to see an extension of this study that includes an in-group versions of these meta-beliefs. I want to know how extreme democrats think democrats tend to be and how extreme republicans think republicans tend to be.

Personally, I'm pretty far left if I look at a right-wing community online, but pretty central if I look at a left-wing community online. I'd bet lots of people feel this way.

As an extreme lefty (repeal IP/piracy laws, legalize all drugs, safe injection sites/free for addicts, green new deal, free necessities for homeless/disabled, free college, cancel student debt, reduce maximum interest rate to on consumers to 10%Apr, AI/automation tax, steep wealth taxes up to 99% over $1B, internet/telephones are necessities, free contraceptives everywhere, 3rd trimester abortions, livable wage, punitive laws against financial criminals (put executives in prison for life for 2008), enhanced worker rights, single payer health care, etc). I think AOC and Bernie are a hairs breadth left of center trying to get their constituents what they need to survive in this boring bcapitalist dystopia. I think trump and mtg are white supremacist terrorists stoking up a hot race war. Does that help?

This can't be written after four years of Trump right? How is this even upvoted

I'm not in the USA but I tell you, the political divide is larger today than I have ever seen it. This article looks at 1 thing? Not convincing at all. There is a quote that's really interesting.

>Ideological division has been fused with an “us versus them” sectarianism that feels reminiscent of divisiveness and vitriol more commonly seen in war-torn countries than in healthy democracies.

The USA has been at war for over 20 years in Afghanistan. Longer than the vietnam war. Lets not forget Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The USA sure does seem to be surrounding Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Then you have Blinken who has been secretary of state for a week or 2 making claims that Iran is "weeks away from a nuclear bomb". Amazing he gets the job and suddenly they are weeks away. Biden's government has started seizing numerous oil tankers asserting they are Iranian under false flag.

The Saudileaks clearly indicate the Saudis are targeting Iran as well.

The USA is exhausted from war and it sure does look like Biden will be declaring war in Iran. Ahmadinejad won't survive 2021.

The world will forget that Iran's supreme leader Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the nuclear program. There's absolutely no nuclear bomb in Iran. Obama and John Kerry did a great job doing that. Yet here we are being lied to by the bidens new secretary of state saying they are weeks away from a nuclear bomb.

No, this is the USA posturing for a reason to invade Iran.

after the election I cut the ties with all long-term friends who holds a different political view, none of us can bear with another sides so let's get rid of each other. I feel so much relieved actually and never looked back, in fact I should have done this long time ago. There is no way to get along, YOLO, no need to bend just for the fake of outdated nothing-in-common 'friendship' anymore.

for those who are not even old friends and on the other side of the wall, I hope we live in different countries and never see each other ever on the street.

I never felt that disappointed in the so called democracy, for a 50:50 split in this country, something must be changed or it will tie both sides deadly, nothing can be done then. Maybe a war is indeed the way out.

That's just nuts and it doesn't need to be that way.

Your politics is not your identity. Other people's politics are not their identity. It's just differences in policy opinions which can and do change through life or as circumstances change.

If a person is intrinsically welded to political affinity as _the_ defining characteristic of themselves or others it's a huge problem. A huge imbalance. A horrible and shallow misunderstanding of the nature of the human experience.

Most people want the same things out life and for society, they just have different ideas on the best policies to achieve this. Very few people are intrinsically and irredeemably evil. Many more are simply confused or misguided. Sometimes it's us that's misguided. Its useful to keep somewhat of an open mind and understand people view the world in different ways.

Your friends are people and your friends not Democrats and Republicans.

"Politics" is how someone would treat you if they didn't know you.

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