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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>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.

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.

“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.

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.

Whose AOC called to execute?

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

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