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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

As far as I'm concerned, America is divided because of two reasons:

* The media wants sensationalism, because sensationalism gets them peoples' attentions and thus money. There is nothing more sensational than riling up and pleading to peoples' emotions.

* The political powers that be want to keep the people divided. A divided people is easier to control and manipulate, whether it's smear campaigns during elections or undermining the safety mechanisms of our governmental institutions or straight up cancel culture.

How do we solve all this? Beats me, I'm in my mid 30s now and already tired of all this bullshit. I'll spend the rest of my days by myself in the countryside just enjoying the simplicities of life while y'all go and club each other silly.

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To expand on your second point, if the other side is an unthinkable evil, then the leaders of your side can be as corrupt as they want and betray as many party ideals as they like, because at least they aren't the unthinkable evil. Because in the US you don't get to vote for anyone, you only get to pick who you vote against. Otherwise you are throwing away your vote and letting the unthinkable win. And in the vast majority of voting districts even that doesn't really matter because they aren't swing states.

Ranked voting would solve this issue. I have never read any critique of it that I found convincing. It exists at state and municipal levels. But until the big states switch it won't change the problem. If swing states adopted it, along with proportional allocation of electoral votes (a couple states do this now) it would definitely change strategies for the better.

The effect is that you can't be the most extreme version of your party and ignore moderates in the hope there are more people that hate the other corrupt extremist, because the moderate candidates will get ranked higher than you by both sides of the artificial duopoly.

In that world, the sensational nature of the media works to uncover sneaky extremists so you can rank all the boring candidates higher, or least higher than the extremist you don't secretly agree with. Either way the boring candidates win.

Someone once wrote that the best kings produce the fewest pages in history books.

Ranked voting will help, but it's a stretch to day it will solve it. There's still the issue of money/publicity and party loyaty/identity. If you don't have the money for the publicity, many people won't even know who you are. You'll still have people who use one of the two main parties as part of their identity and won't entertain the thought of outside candidates. Politics has become a religion to many.

I have family friends and neighbors who subscribe to both of the state religions. None of them ever start their evangelizing by telling me what their party stands for. It is always about what they stand against. I think the religious fervor is primarily a side effect of fear of extremism they don't like, instead of the extremism that doesn't really effect them. If they can rank their cuddly extremist first then the moderates whose name they only vaguely recognize in some random order based on what they think they might have read, or some stereotype based off the name itself, then the unthinkable evil dead last, they will still serve to moderate things, just via the central limit theorem.

Edit: there will be a fortune ready for the person that has a generative model in hand to let candidates change their name to something minimally scary.

The problem with that theory is that parties still hold primaries. Primaries have the most extremist representation since those are the people who are most motivated to vote. This is a problem when voter turnout for primaries is something like 15-20%

If via some magic, the electoral system changed as I described despite those who won in the current system being in power, then the primary candidates would lose against moderate independents hardly anyone knew except for the reasons described. Except that the parties would forsee that and run different candidates using ranked voting in the primaries as well. Again, that is if somehow the changes could ever be made. Where it has happened it has often happened via referendum, and even then, it has been reversed on multiple occasions as well. I think Seattle just selected for local elections? It will be interesting to see how that goes.

It is amazing to vote in Ireland where it isn't rare for a candidate that nobody loves but most people can at least somewhat tolerate wins because of 2nd or 3rd preference votes.

The US has been polarised to its core.

I don't know if it's because of the two-party/first-past-the-post political system, or if that's a consequence as well, but everything about the US just oozes binary thinking (even on the international stage: remember Bush's "if you're not with us, you're against us" war rhetoric).

There's no room for nuance, everything must be black&white. The typical HN visitor should have the mental bandwidth for nuance, but more often than not that same mentality is showing even here.

Funny enough I moved to the countryside and ended up leaving after four years because of the people...

> As far as I'm concerned, America is divided because of two reasons:

The American people have always been divided. Until semi-recently (~1960s) the political parties didn't sort themselves neatly on these divisions but over the last 30-40 years they have.

To be tribal/clannish/insider-outsider also seems to be an innate human trait.

Ezra Klein wrote a good book on both the (US) political history and various psychology studies on it:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized

I always remember Scott Alexander's piece about left-wing vs right-wing attitudes, and what seems to define the split:

"My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory...

If you're trying to push as many people as possible to a "survive" mentality, I assume a divided and polarised community helps. Others are coming for your stuff! For your jobs, for your neighbourhood, for your status quo, etc. Make out that your opposition is some ultimate evil.

A more diverse political field and different voting system would likely help. Might stop single issues dominating the playing field? Bring back some nuance.

I think it's too simple to say "the media wants sensationalism" because we all collectively favour sensational content. It suits for-profit publishers, it suits politically active people, etc. But we're making it work for them. We can pretend we're above it, but if @dang let through all the Musk threads on HN, many here would turn full-time arguing in them.

The hypothesis has a lot going for it, but I think it's missing a level. I don't think it explains the degree to which right-wing politics has become optimized for ignoring real threats and inventing fake ones.

I don't think that's necessarily inherent to right-wing-ism. Left wing politics has also had similar problems, and still does (say, organic food, or the way vaccine denial used to be a left-wing position), but it doesn't seem to dominate the position. Its bugaboos are "merely wrong"; they don't elevate to a movement-wide denial of well-understood sciences or a TV news network devoted solely to falsehoods about their opponents.

Perhaps that's just a way of redefining the terms of discussion: America's issue right now isn't really about right-versus-left at all, but about something else that happens to organize loosely along those lines. Perhaps rightism lends itself better to that, but I'd say that's inconclusive. Certainly left-wing-style thinking was the cause of a great amount of authoritarian violence in 20th century "socialist" countries. And we're left to argue whether that really is left-wing, or whether it's all just no-true-Scotsman.

> I don't think it explains the degree to which right-wing politics has become optimized for ignoring real threats and inventing fake ones.

You're assuming that they believe in the same sets of "real" and "fake" threats, or at least prioritise them similarly.

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