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Comment by tlogan | Hacker News Reader

Excellent post.

It wasn’t always like this. I remember when you could be pro-gun and pro-environment—and still have thoughtful, respectful conversations with people who held different beliefs.

Today, if you’re not fully aligned with every talking point of a political party, you’re instantly labeled either a fascist or a communist. And sometimes it borders on absurd: the moment party leadership shifts its stance, the whole tribe flips with it. It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans staunchly opposed tariffs. Now? They’re all in.

My question is: What changed? When did we become so tribal—and why?

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From what I've seen, tribalism is core to innate human nature. It's always been there, and until human nature can be edited like a spreadsheet, it always will be.

What's changed now is how visible it's become and how much easier it is to mass organize people and split up into echo chambers that favor a specific viewpoint.

Before, people were not well organized. The internet has been a revolution in spreading views and allowing like minded people to hang out together. Turns out that's not always for the best. But there's no going back. It's only going to get worse until something happens that unites people more than it divides them.

A combination of factors:

1. Apolitical people are now political

2. News stations running more opinion pieces than actual newsvand being selective about said news

3. Seeing politics as an identity similar to a belief instead of a state of mind

Large scale divergence in the two human moralities: social morality (rules for people around us to protect the community, largely coded liberal) and personal morality (moral intuitions for how to keep you and your immediate family safe). The two have become at odds with each other so everyone feels intensely and uncompromisingly threatened by those who ascribe more to the other, leading to two groups that can no longer even 'treat with the enemy' much less collaborate on their mutual preservation. This was aided along by a whole lot of largely unchecked fearmongering because it turns out that that sells views, clicks, and ratings.

(and possibly also a general dumbification of everything due to bad education combined with lowering social standards for who is allowed to have a public voice and be take seriously; confusingly thus was one of the points of a standard of decorum, because it served as a filter on who was intelligent enough to be a thought leader.)

IMO it was technology allowing more viewpoints to be expressed. First with more than 3 TV stations, then of course the internet. Before that transition, everyone was mostly part of one tribe, because mass media was mostly homogeneous. After, it was increasingly easy to find tribes that fit your exact viewpoints, and reject other sources of information

> It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans staunchly opposed tariffs. Now? They’re all in.

Which Republicans are we talking? The old guard that held leadership positions for decades, making the decisions while most of the public weren't invested? Or the new guard that hijacked the Republican party after the population started getting invested after recent events?

Every "conservative" I know is in favor of protectionism, and tariffs are a strong manifestation of that. Don't conflate the get-what-you-get leadership, and the disenfranchised voterbase for having been the same people.

Both Regan and George H.W. Bush were anti tariffs and pro free market. I believe the change happened with Trump. Good interview about that is here [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/19/nx-s1-5215953/how-the-gop-wen...

And most of the conservatives I know that are actually politically-aware are critical of both. For many reasons. Bush for his wars and the Patriot Act, and Reagan for his anti-2A policies and eternal blue-ification of California.

People were always tribal. You just call out a group to be evil. And it takes just a little bit of propaganda and people will ignore any rational arguments and start harassing a group.

Witch-hunts (last conviction in Europe was 1944), jews, communists, americans, non-americans, all sorts of religious groups, ... history is full of that.

One thing that changed recently is that nowadays propaganda is very organized and well funded. I also think there was a pretty calm period for a few decades (but only in certain regions of the planet). In the cold war period the tribes were very fixed and the evil was always far away, so locally not much happened.

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