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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat

The term you're looking for is political coherence, i.e. the degree to which you can predict a person's views based on knowing their view on one issue. Political elites tend to be highly coherent. If you know a Congressperson's views on guns, you probably know them on abortion and corporate taxes.

In the real world, however, votes tend not to be politically coherent. Instead, what we see in a hyperpartisan polity, is that a diverse set of views collapses after an issue achieves partisan identity status. Talking about a thing through a partisan lens is what causes the partisan collapse. Hence the effects of mass and then social media on the quality of our discussions.

(And I agree with OP that the author's "I'm above politics" stance is naively immature.)

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> Political elites tend to be highly coherent

Coherence might not the word you're looking for. The policies of political parties and groups are born out of historical circumstances and the diverse coalitions they represent. Political elites are "coherent" in the sense that you can expect them to consistently follow the party line, and thus infer all of their views just by knowing one of their views.

The party line, i.e. platform of the Democratic and Republican parties, or any other large political party in the world, is, by itself, nothing coherent though. Many of their policies and claims do not make any more sense besides each other than they would make against each other. Realignments on issues are pretty common across the world. What is left-wing in one part of the world at one point of time might be rightist across space and time.

This is a difference in the subject of coherence.

Logical coherence refers to the variation and predictive power of the reasoning.

Coherence can also be used to describe the variability and predictability of positions or states themselves.

If you measure the characteristics of some photons in a coherent laser, you know what the other photons are doing. They are predictable using a model.

Logic is a poor predictive model for politics. Tribe identification is a strong predictive model for politics

> Coherence might not the word you're looking for

Ideological and political coherence are the terms of art [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8827732/

> In the real world, however, votes tend not to be politically coherent. Instead, what we see in a hyperpartisan polity, is that a diverse set of views collapses after an issue achieves partisan identity status. Talking about a thing through a partisan lens is what causes the partisan collapse. Hence the effects of mass and then social media on the quality of our discussions.

nailed it imo

not above politics, just think productive discussion can't happen if people don't know why they support things beyond "the tribe supports it"

or acknowledge when a belief is tribal vs reason-based

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