The Extremist's Gambit Helps Explain Why Hamas Attacked Now

> I've heard this idea before, from college students 20+ years ago, talking about US politics, and intentionally "throwing away" votes on independent leftist candidates. The goals I recall were to try to force Democrat leaders not to take leftist votes for granted and (more to this Extremist's Gambit theory) to rile up Democrat-inclined voters, by letting what they'd think of as an awful Republican candidate win.

I heard something similar from the extreme right about the 2020 election. The idea was that Trump gave a false sense of hope and “winning” but never came through on his promises, so it was better for voters to have a president that explicitly opposed their values than one who shared them in name only.

> This was before US political party polarization had seemed to hit the sports team extremist fandom levels that elected Trump.

This is putting the cart before the horse. There was already a lot of polarization, but Trump was elected for his rhetoric around immigration. His supporters continued despite his constant failures to support him to own the libs or whatever and because he was good at bloviating as though he was always just about to get around to doing what they wanted.

> In this particular case, I'm not aware that post-Trump things have yet worked out for the college student revolutionaries. Voters are polarized, in a very dumbed-down way, distracted with extreme sports team rivalry petty behavior, rather than getting much progress on the supposedly driving values.

This has almost nothing to do with Trump himself, except that the initial reaction to him in polite society was so extreme. There was constant fear-mongering about how he was going to throw everyone in concentration camps and make Handmaid’s Tale a reality. None of which is really new, but it was ramped up hard for Trump. It’s not a bug but a feature of American politics. It reinforces the two-party system and pushes out the need to actually deliver things voters want. They can both just run candidates based on stoking fears of the other one. Arthur Finkelstein really pioneered the technique. I think that’s beginning to break down now. You see a lot more cross pollination with the “anti-woke left”, TERFs, and so on than you did in 2015.