That's not really the point nor the problem, because some people choose to listen to very stupid or malicious people and others are (by chance or by skill) more susceptible to being steered by more credible people.
Half the country is in thrall with a uniquely malicious and moronic force, and the other half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus (even though it's sometimes wrong!). These are not at all the same, even if they both are technically "believing what people told them to."
Their beliefs are driven by a different set of oligarchs and imperial mandarins who have their own set of self serving reality distortion fields.
The companies which donate to both sides and the countries which collect enough komptomat are often able to set up bipartisan reality distortion fields.
In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.
Large scale democracies only work when people are willing to live together. If you play democracy as a winner-take-all game, it's going to fail sooner or later.
I'm not convinced that anything works at the national scale, at least not over the long term. I suspect that the US, as one of the oldest-and-largest democracies, is demonstrating a path that others will eventually follow.
The American founding fathers were mostly of the opinion that political parties are bad and should be avoided if republic is to stand. Yet they found themselves organizing into parties before the ink was dry.
So the best we can do in practice is engineer the political system such that the damage from party groupthink is minimal.
I'm not sure as to solutions but I don't think they're impossible - something like an inoculation of the entire political class against the memeset that prioritizes winning over serving the constituents. Then if an unofficial party tries to seize power in a system that officially disallows them, the majority is already primed to respond in an organized way.
Fixed that for you.
There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.
I'd really like to give PR systems a try, if for no other reason than to do a reset on the current coalitions. I fear that they will eventually settle down into a pair of coalitions very similar to the current parties, but that leaves us no worse off.
It need not; you can have more proportional representative in a district based system (and still also have vote-for-person), using multimember districts with a system like Single-Transferrable Vote.
You can also get finer grained proportionality with Mixed Member Proportional which combines a district-based system (either single-member or a multimember proportional system described above) with top-up representation from party lists.
MMP would require Constitutional change in the US; but multimember districts with STV (in states with more than one seat, as well as increasing the size of the House so more states would have more than one seat) can be done by Congress without Constitutional amendment.
No, Keystone XL was not the same level of pettiness as offshore wind. Find me the IPCC report equivalent that makes the case for wind farms doing whatever social damage Trump says they do. I'll wait.
stupid + stupid = consistent -> wins
and the left wing version is
smart + stupid = inconsistent -> loses
The craft of "rationalist cover stories" as a class of band-aids!
Remember how you failed to help "black people"? The people who make the dems what they are today seem to more than 2 steps removed from that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727418
The emotional concerns that underly this ineffective (akratic) behaviour seem to come from uh "rationalist suffering" (the modern day version of white man's burden?)
Piketty 2022 section on Educational Justice (page 1007) thinks that its because dems are the overeducated children of the "Brahmin left".
So I think you've got the right diagnosis- reps are the undereducated children of the "Merchant Right", so their rationalist* cover stories are naturally more convincing :)
*Pecuniary===rational as in the "Legitimation Crisis"
Ps: somewhat better (=less overtly social-darwinist) handwringing, but not quite a bandaid