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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

You're right, but taken literally, the parent is describing a relative measure (the size of a swing), and one could make an argument that, on a ten point extremity scale, Republicans have swung from 7 to 9 and Democrats have swung from 2 to 6 (to choose arbitrary numbers).

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It's challenging to assign numbers to quantities that aren't numeric in nature and everyone could pick different weights and methods but lets be realistic.

If you compare a Democrat from 40 years ago to one today you would see a 20% uptick in support for gay rights and a substantial uptick in the desire to spend tax money on healthcare, and a smaller uptick in support to raise taxes to support the former.

If you compare a republican from the same era you would find 10% of them now want a white supremacist christian ethnostate and 40% of them are supportive of the idea of killing their wrong thinking neighbors in order to live in Republican Town and even more would gladly part ways with the US of A if they could do it at the ballot box.

It may be challenging to assign weights to these dissimilar changes in positions but one of them is pretty clearly more extreme than the other.

Neither side does a particularly good job of empathizing with the other - I say that as a socially moderate, economically progressive democrat.

There were plenty of anti-abortion democrats 40 years ago, though you’d hardly find many now. Same with anti-immigration democrats; etc etc. It seems like both parties have polarized quite a bit on the issues and moderates got left without a voice in either one.

> There were plenty of anti-abortion democrats 40 years ago,

Yes, during the historical aberration of the long 1930s-1990s realignment, on even the most salient political issues polarizing the public, neither major party was particularly coherent.

That's...not a normal, stable, or desirable condition.

Strange that you say it wasn’t desirable seeing that congress from 1930-1990 was more effective at legislating than they are today - precisely because the parties were less polarized.

I don’t think party purity tests are a net good for our republic.

> 40% of them are supportive of the idea of killing their wrong thinking neighbors in order to live in Republican Town

This sounds completely insane. Can you point to a source that actually backs this up?

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/11/966498544/a-scary-survey-find...

"39% of Republicans, agreed that "if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.""

"two out of three Republicans saying President Biden was not legitimately elected"

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/06/01/poll-finds-support...

"70% of Republicans believe in the great replacement theory"

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-q...

"A Quarter of Republicans Believe Central Views of QAnon Conspiracy Movement"

Both sides have a substantial portion that believes that there could be a need for violence. Unfortunately the Republican side believes this because they think liberals are replacing them with brown people, qanon, and election lies.

Meanwhile liberals like myself believe it because we have relatives who are talking about cleaning their guns to make ready to kill Democrats. Personally I have directly followed alt-right communication on publicly available social media platforms including gab and parler and the videos they share. It's not really a secret that the crazies want to whack us.

"the idea of killing their wrong thinking neighbors in order to live in Republican Town" is not even close to the same thing as "if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions."

They believe they will need to protect America from imaginary election fraud, imported brown people, qanon conspiracy theories. The motivation for violence is incredibly important.

I’m a left leaning libertarian in a deep red state with many many friends and neighbors who are conservative, none of them are talking about keeping their guns clean “to kill democrats”. They do keep their guns clean because they want a reliable weapon that is safe to operate. It’s pointless otherwise.

Also, Of all the people I know, one person fell into the QAnon conspiracy hole, but promptly climbed out. I just don’t buy all of this baloney that Republicans are huge extremists now. It doesn’t track with my experience and reality at all.

I don't decide the average disposition of hundreds of millions of people by polling my social circle because I don't associate with a representative sample of the population by design I prefer to deal with more reasonable people.

A VERY substantial minority on the order of 1/4 of those who self identify as Republicans believe in the core tenets of the qanon conspiracy and most think the election was stolen. These are facts that you cannot reasonable refute by telling me you a reasonable fellow associate with other reasonable people.

You claim facts. Back them up. I see a lot of these kind of comments claiming facts, but rarely see any surveys, studies, or statistics to back them up.

You may believe that a core tenant of qanon is someone believing leftist politicians are “evil”, and you might get 25% of republicans agree with that. Does that mean all of that 25% who believe leftists are evil also believe that leftist politicians are reptilian shapeshifting pedophiles that eat baby brains on sundays in a pizza restaurant basement?

Doubtful.

I provided the sources in previously in the thread here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32129721

To address more directly the point you referenced directly.

The study is discussed here

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-q...

But if you want to skip the analysis and go to the meat of it, it's here.

https://www.prri.org/research/the-persistence-of-qanon-in-th...

16% of Republicans completely or mostly agree the government media and financial worlds are controlled by a global network of Satan worshiping pedos who run a global sex trafficking operation

22% completely or mostly agree that a storm is coming that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.

18% completely or mostly agree that things are so far off track that American patriots may need to use violence to save our country.

From the second source

> To assess overall belief in QAnon, PRRI created a composite measure from these three questions and identified the following three groups:

    QAnon believers: Respondents who completely or mostly agreed with these statements.
    QAnon doubters: Respondents who mostly disagreed with these statements.
    QAnon rejecters: Respondents who completely disagreed with all three statements.

> Across the year, one in four Republicans (25%), compared to 14% of independents (14%) and 9% of Democrats identify as QAnon believers. Nearly half of Republicans (47%) who most trust far-right news outlets like One America News Network or Newsmax are QAnon believers

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