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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Bear in mind that every paragraph in this piece should be appended with "... in America".

These kinds of acrimonious, partisan political discussions only occur in places where democracy has damaged foundations. In America, this is caused by the "winner takes all" style of state-level national vote, leading to gerrymandering, battleground states, strategic legislation, and a two-party system where most people don't feel heard or understood by either party, and no politicians other than the idealists will run independent or with a 3rd party. When things feel broken enough to be threatening, politics get nasty, and the rest of the world watches on with worry.

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True, but as with many other trends, things _start_ in America, then conquer the rest of the world (often in a distorted, sometimes significantly worse way). Maybe a wrong example, but the political life of my home country was bad enough but when some politicians started to import professional political consultants from the US then everything got significantly worse. Another example: English is not my native tongue and in my native tongue nouns are not gendered so I always have to pay a bit more attention to them (e.g. someone from Germany or Italy uses gendered pronouns much more self-evidently than me). Now because I work with people from all over the world, I had to start paying attention not just to use he/she properly, but all the other stuff, it's quite stressful actually (because we all know: embracing diversity definitely does not include embracing the social mistakes made by e.g. autists, foreigners).

So what happens in America matters, a lot.

Yes.... and especially with Tech. I am actually sad this is happening. I want each nation, countries and culture to stay weird in their own way.

I'd like to add that unhealthy messed up democracy (e.g. two-party system, recent civil war, support for "extreme" wings, corruption etc.) is not a sufficient condition. I can think of at least three Western European countries that meet this standard, but still manage to have vaguely civil social media, and a naturally-aspirated culture war.

I agree this article is US-centric.

> These kinds of acrimonious, partisan political discussions only occur in places where democracy has damaged foundations.

By this definition, there are very few (if any) democracies with sound foundations. What, in your mind, is the healthiest democracy in the world?

> two-party system where most people don't feel heard or understood by either party

I don't think this is supported by evidence. Out of people who had an opinion, 50% of them had a favorable view of the Democratic Party[1].

If you add in the 37% of people who had a favorable view of the GOP, between 50% and 87% of Americans had a favorable view of at least one party.

Democracy is always about compromise. People who refuse to be "satisfied" unless they agree 100% with a party (or candidate) are never going to be satisfied.

1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/24655/party-images.aspx

I speak German and Polish. Polish politics is absolutely broken, Austrian has a lot of tension between the leftists and the rightists, German, well, let us say that they have massive fringes, especially in the former GDR.

My wife speaks Spanish and says that Spanish politics is absolutely hateful and crazy, a legacy of the Civil War.

I won't even start with Czech politics. A lot of polarization, bad.

Most democracies have damaged foundations. The reasons are different (in Spain, shadow of the Civil War; in the Eastern Bloc, legacy of Communism; in the German speaking world, legacy of Nazism; in Greece, legacy of Ottoman rule...), but damaged foundations are almost everywhere. Perhaps Iceland is better off.

Yes, the fringes in Germany can get pretty crazy, but in general politics in Germany are pretty tame overall. In fact it's nice that parties like FDP exist because then it's easier for AFD to push out their more extreme members as they grow more mainstream, while FDP remains irrelevant to the nation as a whole. You're not going to have families splitting up over politics, or super crazy flame wars except with the most extreme of partisans. The same goes for Canada. Most things are a storm in a teacup that average people don't get too terribly worked up over. If anything, it's municipal and state/province/prefecture level politics that rile people up the most in more stable democracies.

Turkey, on the other hand, has gotten pretty nasty, to the point where my friends refuse to even talk about politics anymore.

I recently did a mini internet-studies on this and some of the stuff is indeed regional, but a lot of it is international too.

https://venam.nixers.net/blog/internet_communication_narrati...

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