(Which is bad, because red team under Trump has no actual talent for boring, effective governance at a time when it is sorely needed. Near inarguably, they're actively bad at it.)
The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.
There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.
Interesting times indeed.
Have you seen the midterms polling?
> It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.
People have different beliefs because they're being fed different information, and the media promotes different salience of those beliefs. The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK), for example.
Well that’s an unjustifiably negative view of the population’s capacity for agency and downplays local social dynamics, and also I’d suggest you are overstating how much influence the media has on personal beliefs.
> The question of whether it matters more that a few trans kids play sports (and it really is less than a dozen nationally!) than large areas of the world running out of petrol (_not_ the US, but former US ally Pakistan is really not doing OK).
Yes, to conservatives boys playing girls sports (whether it’s one or a thousand examples) is a bigger deal than Pakistan’s domestic situation because to them it is Exhibit A of America’s cultural decline and if you can’t at least understand how and why they think that (nobody said you have to agree with it) then you’ve just proven the point of the person you were replying to. Perceived cultural and societal decline is far more important to the citizen of any particular country compared to something happening on the actual opposite side of the world to a society that is nothing like, and has no connection to, their own. What happens in his own society to its values, customs, and beliefs will definitely directly affect a citizen of that society and his children. What’s happening to the Pakistanis won’t.
Yes, but the key word here is percieved. Almost any form of change can be sold as decline under that rubric. People who objected to Loving v Virginia legalizing interracial marriage probably called it "societal decline". Certainly we got that with legalization of gay marriage. Both of those continued to become more popular after the legal change. People hate change. A lot of people hate those who are different from them. That does not mean we should respect those particular beliefs.
Anyway, as gasoline prices continue to tick up we shall see what price people put on the culture war.
From an evolutionary perspective it makes a lot more sense to, at least prima facie, prefer an established and longstanding custom than to embrace the brand new. Not saying we should all become Luddites, but in any culture long-standing and deeply held beliefs have served some purpose, logically, that contributed to a society's continued stability.
And sure, people will pay attention to gasoline price increases that directly affect them, as opposed to increases in gas prices on the other side of the globe, obviously.
Americans are particularly susceptible to taking comfort in this idea, simply because America is big enough that they can. But even Americans are ill served by ignoring large scale trends: urbanization, cosmopolitanism, the rise of women in elite positions and broadly as more educated in the population in general, etc.
These trends are bigger and operate unopposed on a global scale. If you think in terms of red and blue teams sloshing back-and-forth, you're going to get blindsided.
Actually this is isolated to Europe. Russia, Africa, Asia (particularly China), the Middle East, America, and South America don’t subscribe to this nonsense, particularly in the business (not necessarily political) arena.
And last I checked Europeans can’t even fill their girl quotas because it turns out most girls have no interest in leading or sitting on the board of a company. So don’t pretend like whatever this is is inexorably taking over the world. As a pretty funny aside, in Australia the biggest corporate fuckups of the past 10 years have been overseen by women (Optus, Auspost). So inexorable. When impostor syndrome comes true, you might say.
This is a bit like the female STEM problem. In the west there is all this crying about how STEM fields are dominated by males, but even when there are initiatives to push young girls into math and science at an early age, it turns out that most aren’t interested in STEM subjects or as good at them as males are. And instead of accepting the obvious (that males and females have population level preference differences), many people choose to see the eventual result (more male doctors, scientists, and engineers) as evidence of sexism. lol.
Hence why I said this. And naming the handful of exceptions you can think of doesn’t invalidate my point, which was that there is no inexorable wave of female leadership in the global business sector. Even where it is legislatively mandated (Europe), businesses can’t hit the targets.
Again, if a society has been around for awhile they (specifically their leadership) are doing something right in terms of their culture, societal organisation etc, yeah?
Also, electorally the difference was small. The real big problem was the "they go low we go high" ideology, in allowing supreme court be biased so much to the right, reacting too late to gerrymandering, forever trying to be accommodating to republicans.
I'm not sure what this means, other than failing to recognize the role and extent of "red team" media, as well as failing to address the gerontocracy problem internally? You can see how absurdly tilted the playing field was when Biden was ruled too old and incoherent but the same standards don't apply to Trump.