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Comment by techpineapple | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if politics is a top line issue or a bottom line issue. Teenagers never seriously paid attention to politics when I was a kid, now everyone does. So are people really getting dumber or are dumber people getting into politics.

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That goes in cycles. Some generations are more politically active than others, as young people tend to find their own things to do. The late 60s and most of the 70s were politically pretty active, as there were a lot of young people and the society was changing rapidly. 1968 was probably the year of peak youth activism, both in the Western and the Soviet blocks.

I wanted to say something about the youth vote back then and how they've changed since but it doesn't sound like they have at all. In 1972 Nixon won their votes and they're the boomers voting for the same dumb politics as today, reading and phones/internet be damned:

https://archive.ph/qW2iE

The latter. Because it's better to not know something and know that you don't, than to confidently misunderstand something. And Teenagers have alot of ego that admitting being wrong or misled can be hard for them, even internally.

We certainly did when I was a kid towards the end of the Cold War, but it was moderated by the major players serving broad audiences so they tended not to knowingly repeat falsehoods and the biases were more subtle such as selecting which stories got more coverage. It certainly wasn’t perfect but things like keeping advertisers happy tended to cut against putting conspiracy theorists and fabulists on prime time.

Talk radio and then cable news really ushered in the political entertainment era where what matters most is whether a story feels right for a narrow audience, and then the internet provided the amped up version. I wouldn’t say dumber as much as provocative but once the ad-tech engines started rewarding hot takes they became predominant.

well dumber people are getting into politics because gerrymandering is getting worse. the case where politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around leads to worse overall outcomes because the seats are "safe" from the other party and competition. without competition quality falls

Gerrymandering is only possible to such an extent now because everyone now has such strong partisan affiliation that their voting patterns are easily predictable. 95% of the population as soon as they see R or D by the name look no further. That’s also why we don’t have many centrist candidates anymore, they lost the ability to pull from the other side and they have a disadvantage within their own party.

The entire mainline democratic party is the centrist party

Por que no los dos? (why not both)

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