The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy
thomasprosser.substack.com
thomasprosser.substack.com
It doesn't appear that this is a fixable problem now.
“Equity” and “diversity” sound like something “non-political” that everyone can get onboard with. But in practice those terms are used to champion expressly race conscious hiring and promotion. That’s not only political and debatable, it’s unpopular among the very minorities on whose behalf it is invoked: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...
I thought I'd found a welcoming community that was interested in building something cool, and I could learn some C# while contributing to something really unique and creative.
That turned out to be sort of right, but the senior maintainers decided that it's also cool to shove their politics down everyone else's throats and ban anyone who so much as sniffs at it.
They intentionally flag-wave their political stances in Discord to bait people into mentioning it, and if they don't like someone's thoughts they ban them and pat themselves on the back for ostensibly removing "toxicity" and "intolerance". When I asked them to stop doing that they tried to bait me into saying something they didn't like, and stated that their political views aren't political at all - more like natural law.
From my perspective, these people (regardless of political affiliation) act pathologically and crave the camaraderie and support of being part of an in-group, and enforce that in-group, because they probably feel generally insecure. They don't really understand the implications of their behavior, nor do they actually care about their supposed cause, they just want to feel in control and validated, and they found a venue for it.
To stop this pathological politicization you have to create an environment of security. That isn't going to happen any time soon, so I'm not sure what the point of any of this is - just avoid them and find/create communities that don't allow politics.
But in your example, the problem was the person in charge. If it's your community, then by all means, create the right environment. But if it's a situation like your example, then what? You, the random newcomer, can't really alter the environment very much. You can stay and accept it, or you can leave, but the environment is already problematic. Now what? How can you un-politicize such a community, when you aren't the leader?
And there are people who pretend that progressive changes to society are inherently political, and also imply/openly advocate that conservative keeping of status quo isn't. Just because status quo benefits them doesn't mean that keeping it, is rational non-political option.
The editorialized title ("the politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy") frankly doesn't do the article any justice.
I'm not against using precise words when they are helpful. But sometimes I see people using complex language to obfuscate the message instead of clarifying it, and as far as I can tell that's what is happening here.
When the meaning of an essay is confused and unclear, either a) I'm just not smart enough to understand it or b) the author is a poor communicator. B is much, much more common.
This would prevent votes from being lost and would make the ability to compromise and "secure" these votes more important then populist behavior.
Is support for Ukraine a controversial issue in the UK? In the US, support for Ukraine is pretty widespread.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/public-continues-support-britain...
Personally I wouldn't say support for Ukraine is controversial here in the UK.
I wonder why the author singled it out an example of a controversial issue, then.
Does that opinion make me anti-Ukraine?
Russia should have never invaded I agree, but it's up to Russia to leave now.
No one can stop Russias war but Russia.
Ceasefires also just help Russia so what you should really want is a quick decisive defeat of Russia by Ukraine.
>Does that opinion make me anti-Ukraine?
Neither of those facts make you anti-Ukrainian. However, if you think the road to accomplishing that is to have Ukraine surrender, rather than Russian stop invading—that would make you anti-Ukrainian. I do note that you deliberately left out under whose terms a cease-fire should be signed, however.
But the author isn't talking about incidents in birdwatching or optometry—they're talking about large, expensive national celebrations. It may be hard to find the politics in birdwatching, but it's not hard to find the politics in holiday firework displays.
(And if the author can't see how sex can be political, I'm not sure they read their list of controversial incidents, or have paid attention to modern politics)
Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren#Election
I don't think this would be a panacea, but it would definitely help things quite a bit. The largest voting block in the U.S. isn't Democrats or Republicans, but voters that have chosen not to be affiliated with either party.
I've heard a lot of people say this, I've never seen any good data on this. Every analysis I've seen that compared how moderate and more extreme candidates did compared to the president consistently showed the moderates did better than the extreme. I'd be curious to see your analysis/commentary that shows the opposite.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/just-how-many-swing-vot...
Just because a person consistently votes for one party does not mean they like that party or agree with its platform. In many cases, they consistently vote for the same party because they see it as the least worst option.
It’s gross.
That fact supports the "no one" generalization.
Still, I’m not sure I would consider everyone who voted for Trump as part of the “Trumpy right” any more than I would consider myself part of the radical left just because I voted for Biden.
Extremists, by contrast, tend to be absolutely certain of whatever opinion they happen to hold at the moment and nothing can shake them of that. There has been a lot written about the alleged differences between the conservative mind and the liberal mind, but I think that completely misses it. Extremists, even those on opposite ends of the political spectrum, have a lot more in common with one another than they do with moderates and other normal people.
You're also trying to frame it so that anyone who does consistently choose a side is inherently an extremist, and that these two extremes are "liberal" and "conservative."
The idea that political extremes are more similar to each other than to a moderate position is called horseshoe theory, and it has very little support among political scientists. It doesn't even apply in this case because, again, the two "sides" in american politics aren't even opposite extremes. In most peer countries the democrats would be solidly center-right and the republicans are off to their right. On the far left is a gaping hole where communists, anarcho-syndicalists, revolutionary socialists etc would be.
In practice people who call themselves moderate are usually consistently aligned with one of the two major parties, they just don't want to incur the social costs of that alignment in at least one context. Or and relatedly, they want to present themselves as being morally and intellectually superior to both, too "enlightened" to be duped into taking sides like inferior thinkers.
There's nothing wrong with understanding yourself and your world well enough to pick a side on an issue, or find allies for it. Again the self-questioning you describe isn't unique to centrists nor the reason for their centrism.
My positions are extreme, as are those of many of my friends and associates. We doubt too. Yet we find that we must act anyway, and risk being wrong or foolish.
Political parties have no external goals; they are self-interested and use the people within them to achieve that goal by offering carrots (which result in fulfilling the external values of normal people) or sticks (which punish defection or opposing party members).
Progressivism and conservativism are not opposed on a single axis. Political parties lay claim to and label particular issues which benefits both major U.S. parties in the long run by giving them each a grab bag of issues for a particular set of voters. This is why, for example, guns and wombs have opposite signs in the personal-freedom axis for both parties. As long as the shared belief exists that an issue "belongs" to "one side" it remains useful as a political tool but nearly worthless as a policy tool for normal people.
Finally, it is not the extremes leading this charge. The core DNC and RNC execute this strategy because they are locked in a struggle for survival. The DNC and RNC have successfully used the threat of the least-aligned party to trap moderate and progressive voters within the party structures. Non-partisan primaries and ranked-choice/runoff voting are starting to show moderate success (AK and NH) at changing the game theory to favor politicians who compromise on multivariate issues versus enforcing party platforms.
Once you accept that, the absurdity of politicians claiming to speak for large swaths of your country is just comical.
Downvoters are free to explain why unimpressive people have any say over how you think or how you should behave.
That's an interesting mindset, in theory, but not very grounded in reality. Being a democracy is no guarantee of freedom, but it has let more people live in more freedom than any other system. (The great danger is that tyrants convert democracies into pseudo-democracies, keeping the trappings while removing the freedom, and that makes democracies look bad to those who are unaware.)
Seriously, if you've got a system that leads to more freedom, put in into practice somewhere, and show us how it works in the real world. If you can consistently deliver for several decades, we might start to listen.
> Once you accept that, the absurdity of politicians claiming to speak for large swaths of your country is just comical.
Politicians speak, not for the population, not even for everyone who voted for them, but for everyone who agrees with the politician on that particular point.
> Downvoters are free to explain why unimpressive people have any say over how you think or how you should behave.
I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say here. But it sounds like you're saying that, in a democracy, "unimpressive people" have a say because they get to vote. Well, I don't know anybody who lets voters decide how they think. How they behave? Well, votes lead to laws, so, yeah. But in a non-democracy, someone was still going to be making the laws, and almost certainly that would be someone who is not you. So it seems to me that you're always going to have other people having a say over how you should behave. (And, in a non-democracy, they can be a lot more serious having say over how you think, too.)
The phrase "unimpressive people" I find a bit disturbing. It sounds like you're looking down on them, that there's some contempt there. Frankly, that does not make your position more persuasive.
People go along with this idea of democracy because they believe (read: they've been told) that the possibility of freedom and prosperity exists if they are simply able to convince enough of their unimpressive friends to vote hard enough for the correct team. It's absurd.
My belief is simply that nobody else speaks for me. I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from democracy, just as I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from authoritarianism. It's all the same thing.
Having said that, I could probably be convinced to follow a truly heroic and impressive person if one were to ever appear. Jesus seemed like a good fit, but the mediocre leaders running his local government killed him because he was a pain in their asses.
I disagree, but less strongly than I wish I did. You could be right. Even if you're wrong now, you could be right soon.
> People go along with this idea of democracy because they believe (read: they've been told) that the possibility of freedom and prosperity exists if they are simply able to convince enough of their unimpressive friends to vote hard enough for the correct team. It's absurd.
Agreed. There was a reason that the original American idea was for a strictly limited government. The current belief seems to be that freedom is getting the government to do what you want to "the others".
> My belief is simply that nobody else speaks for me. I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from democracy, just as I'm not responsible for the depravity that arises from authoritarianism. It's all the same thing.
I agree or disagree, depending on the specifics of how you mean this. In both cases the depravity comes out of the selfishness in people; so far I agree. If you mean that democracy and authoritarianism are equally depraved, then no, I don't agree. (If you mean authoritarianism and "fake democracy" authoritarianism are equally depraved, then maybe I do agree.)
Re your last paragraph: You know, following Jesus is still an option today. (I mean, his goal then wasn't political power, but you sound like that fits you...)
During the aforementioned Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a subreddit for collecting articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Basically, a Lord's Prayer to preemptively avoid the devil's accusation of maybe possibly being a (shudder) Trump sympathizer in some small way. Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
We are all dealing with crap, we are all at the bottom of the pile getting the dregs from trickle down economic theory.
It's not about one tiny fringe group, when we fight only for ever more specific fringe groups we ignore the injustice we are all subjected to.
It's also true that injustice and danger is not evenly distributed, and it's shitty and dismissive to pretend that it is. Far right extremist violence against queer people is absolutely a thing and it has been increasing for several years now, for example. How many of your friends have been killed violently by extremists in the last two years? If it's zero you maybe should just stfu about the injustice we're all subject to, in this context.
I don't think I understand—which friends are you suggesting that 1attice get rid of?
My home society had shops during my life time that had recruitment signs that said things like "Catholics need not apply" or not long before that signs that said "No dogs, no Irish".
But we are just fighting among ourselves for scraps. We are lied to continually and our ire is constantly misdirected.
Since Roman times the world has been ruled by oligarchies of one form or another. Those are the people who would never give you or I the time of day. We are nothing but cattle, locked in our homes, mass medicate and marched off to the slaughter fields.
It drove me nuts during the Trump era when non-Muslims acted like banning refugees from Muslim countries with high levels of terrorist activity was the same as discussing how to round up brown people into internment camps. You can’t piss on people’s leg and tell them it’s raining. Those were conversations that people in Muslim countries had also. Shouting down that debate won’t make the concerns go away, and will only lead to problems down the road.
Publicly promising that you're going to ban all Muslims from the US and then immediately afterwards banning travel from some predominately Muslim countries and telling your supporters that you fulfilled your promise was.