Seems like people who are more empathic just recognize that no matter what "team" someone else blindly supports they still have valid concerns and common ground. It's certainly not some kind of bizarre mind control forcing the submission of their will.
Since emotional pain and physical pain are experienced similarly in the brain, maybe they felt a stronger sense of betrayal from the political party they typically align with and that resulted in a vote for the "other team" who they always felt had some good points anyway.
long episodes of constantly recurring pain and an increasing intensity of even small doses of pain acting as a signal that you did wrong and should feel the consequences.
if there’s a vacancy or an acting director who is given a lot of autonomy and I know what kind of autonomy will be leveraged differently with particular appointments, I will absolutely vote for a President and senators to that affect
not everything is about civil rights or the environment, there are dozens of other things that actually can be influenced over the next several years
focus on what you can control, its pretty obvious what those things are, I’m more so surprised that so many people gravitated to the far edges of their ideology. but it allows the rest of us nobodies to shape our slice of the world more easily while everyone else is distracted on causes that will never reach consensus.
The median IQ is 100, it’s calibrated that way. Meaning half of people have an IQ lower than that.
A lot of money is spent to convince/coerce people of all sorts of bull-shit.
Unless you’ve spent a lot of time around poorer/lesser IQ people, it is probably hard to understand. You think they should just try harder, think better, etc.
Also, other very informed and intelligent people vote for all sorts of policies on different sides of the political divide. And have at least decently thought out reasons for doing so.
I’m moreso politically aligned with the HN/reddit crowd, but have lots of family and friends across the political spectrum. You just have to talk to people in a non-judgmental way to learn a LOT.
Best tip if you’re feeling like passionately arguing politics in good faith, befriend some lawyers with differing political leanings. They’re the best for this over beers and won’t make things personal (if you don’t).
The reality is that IQ has less to do with it than information. Everyone attempts to vote their self-interest with the information that they have.
A dirty secret of politics is that you can't know what information you don't have unless you spend significant time on both sides.
But even then, there is a lot of hidden politics and history that makes having accurate political perspective difficult for everyone.
Obviously empathy is independent of intelligence.
You can't and couldn't have reasonably come to the conclusion that trump would have been good overall for the country.
I'm not USian so this isn't really party political, he just doesn't have respect for basic democratic processes.and that was obvious from the start
> You can't and couldn't have reasonably come to the conclusion that trump would have been good overall for the country.
If you think everyone who voted for Trump was simply unintelligent and/or morally depraved, this sort of suggests that you lack the empathy to understand their position - which does not require agreeing with it. Unfortunately, I think this is a major reason behind growing partisan divides, and is a hard problem to solve.
Voting for trump over your own chosen parties representative doesn't really make objective sense.
I'm not saying there aren't 'reasonable' reasons to vote for trump, but they're more about self interest than objectively putting the whole country first. He's a 'strong' opinionated leader, people vote for that to get things done their way, not creating consensus.
If your empathy extends to voting for the other side's candidate, surely consensus would be high on your list of priorities.
The people who feel this see Chomsky’s manufactured consent as their chief opposition. They’re looking to form a truly popular and organic democratic consensus, which cannot happen overnight.
And how does voting trump achieve that.
Unless you conclude that the current situation is unfixable, and it should be torn down. It seems an extremely unwise gamble to make though.
Im not convinced the class consensus v popular consensus is necessarily a bad thing.
You can't expect the entire population to be well informed about all issues, our current system offloads the requirement for everyone to be knowledgeable about everything, which I would say is that gap.
And again were moving away from the empathy position.
I can generally make sense of political decisions, not as a perfect representation of the popular will, but as a combination of marrying divergent views with actual reality. That seems to be more an empathetic approach than the opposite.
This seems to be an example of making a decision (right/wrong, doesn't matter) for the wrong reasons. So while it may be empathetic, it doesn't seem to be intelligent.
> Unless you conclude that the current situation is unfixable, and it should be torn down. It seems an extremely unwise gamble to make though.
Democratic-Republican (in the political sense, not the political party sense) institutions are strong enough in the US that I genuinely cannot see how Trump could fully tear them down, even for a temporary time during the course of his presidency. I still fear what he will do. For example, 16 of the last 21 Supreme Court justices - 76% - have been appointed by Republican presidents despite Republican presidents only serving for 58% of those years. It's necessary to go back to 1938 to balance appointed Supreme Court justices at 21 to 21 Republican to Democrat appointments, with Republicans having served only 44% of the time as president.
> You can't expect the entire population to be well informed about all issues, our current system offloads the requirement for everyone to be knowledgeable about everything, which I would say is that gap.
Sure, this is a fundamental problem with the increasingly complex nature of modern society. But it’s also why, no matter who you vote for as an American, you get basically the same foreign policy, whether you elect Bush or Obama. Foreign policy is really not so much decided by the President, though he gets some influence, but by tens of thousands of State Department experts and to some extent the DoD and security establishment. Americans don’t get a say in whether it’s a good idea to meddle in the internal politics of every country on Earth, or whether the particular position taken in some country benefits them or not, they simply have to accept the expert view, even when it blows up in their faces and harms millions of people and leads to 9/11s or helps the arming of ISIS. There is no easy solution to this problem of expert interests gradually diverging from average American interests.
Another example might be marijuana legalization. A large supermajority of Americans support medical marijuana but it remains federally illegal. This is an area where the “expert” political class does not really care so much and does not widely support it, so nothing happens. When there is political class consensus, forms don’t even matter - legislated law is set aside in favor of executive orders, if necessary to move as quickly as possible - and if the next President tries to rescind such an executive order, he will not be allowed.
But you can’t simultaneously make the argument that “democracy is good” and “actually, we need rule by experts.” You’ve gone from saying Trump was bad because he ignored democracy to making an argument yourself about where democracy fails.
And many, many treaties approved by Congress.
The treaty legal process in the US was honestly not very well thought out to start with - the Congressional oversight role as practiced is treated more like a rubber stamp procedurally. And of course, they are set aside when the establishment finds them inconvenient. It’s mostly settled law the executive can unilaterally terminate or suspend treaties.
Parents constantly talk about doing things for their children or grandchildren's best interest without ever talking to their children or grandchildren first to check what's actually in their best interest. These blind spots exist for many people. This is an actual psychological blindspot I just can't remember the term for it.
Unironically, I've found some of the most simplistic and emotional (unsolicited) takes on US politics when engaging with people abroad.
I could write a long essay about the issues with trump, and none of it relies on specific policies or the party he belongs to.
At root, he just doesn't have democratic instincts. I'd put him far too close to Hitler or Putin in that regard.
But even if you don't want to go that far, he isn't one to build concensus. Which is the reason for my criticism. If you're going to vote for the other side's representative, surely you would value consensus.
For Hitler the vision was so compelling that he bit off more than he could chew. Hitler was an idealist. The others are/were temperamentally focused enough on personal power that the vision is constrained relative to that personal power, and ultimately in favor of that personal power. They can still screw up (witness Putin and to a lesser extent Trump), but they're constantly adapting to what their power indicates is possible.
I'm not saying Trump is going to murder millions of Jews.
What I am saying is that trump is about personal power at the expense of democracy. That he will do things his way, come what may.
That's also an element of why people vote for him. They want a 'strong' leader. But strong leaders don't make good democratic leaders, because democracy gets in their way.
It's a truism in the US that if you care about the economy and defense you should vote Republican, and yet when you look at the actual actions of Republican presidential administrations you basically have to go back to Reagan economic and defense policies which were actually decent (and Reagan's most decent economic policy was reappointing Volcker who was originally appointed by Carter).
This is not to say Democrats have been all that much better, but at least they weren't cutting taxes during an expensive war of offense.
These same truisms exist about so-called strong leaders.
I'm from the UK, on paper we have an absolutely terrible constitution. Compare that to Afghanistan when the US pulled out. But then Afghanistan folded straight away, whereas Britain has managed to stay somewhat stable for a few centuries.
My conclusion is that democracy isn't so much about the written rules as it is culture. That means you need people at the top that actually respect that culture.
I think that the reverse would have happened if, for example, the 2016 presidential election had been between Mitt Romney and Bernie Sanders: probably a lot of moderate Democrats would have voted for Romney, as Romney is more similar to Obama (the previous Democratic president) than Bernie Sanders is/was.
Nowadays, people are a lot more partisan (understandably), and I can't see why a Democrat would ever want to vote for Trump today.