I remember seeing an animated graphic of survey results over time (Past ~20 years) that showed the left has been getting lefter at ~5x the rate that the right is getting righter.
Do you remember where this was? I'm interested because it feels like the exact opposite to me. We've got weakened labor unions and strengthened centralized control over resources, we've got stronger centralized government power over individuals (PATRIOT act et al), basically no world powers with an even nominally leftist government, yadda yadda.
In the wake of the financial crisis, a lot of Golden Dawn-esque nationalist parties have crept up and are finding more success than I'd initially expected.
It feels like we're moving more authoritarian right to me.
at the extremes, both left and right are totalitarian and are nightmarish w.r.t personal liberties. this is sometimes called the "horsheshoe political spectrum" [0] but personally I think that's a misunderstanding of political belief systems. left vs. right is meaningless. the real axis runs between liberation and domination. extreme domination parties (whether nominally capitalist, communist, fascist, or theocratic) are the scary ones that have that bloody track record of holocausts and genocides.
You're absolutely right. There is only one side organizing at grassroots level (indicating that these are not isolated occurrences, but rather are coming from the groups shared ideals) across the country to shut down the political speech of the other, violently in many cases, and that is the left.
Thanks for posting, as this one event by the far, far right with a couple dozen people stands in sharp contrast to dozens and dozens of examples involving as many as hundreds of people from the left, and really shows how unequatable they are.
censorship is favored by any kind of authoritarian extremist group and is independent of left/right (which I perceive as an increasingly meaningless distinction).
organized censorship is practiced, historically, by organizations as diverse as the Ayatollah of Iran, the Chinese Communist Party, the NAZI party, and by some microscopic evangelical Church in Arkansas that you've never heard of. Now a certain kind of deranged college professor (and the students they influence) are doing it too.
So what is the left and what is the right? the categories we're accustomed to reading about have broken down. it's something else now and its time to acknowledge it.
> I think this is actually totalitarian left - the right is more about personal liberties etc.
Both the left anf the right talk a lot about personal liberties (though they focus on different specific liberties). Both the left and the right have domains where they generally favor government control. And both the left and the right have factions which are more libertarian (focussing more on the areas of personal liberty favored by their respective side) and factions that are more authoritarian (focussing more on the areas of central control favored by their respective side.)
Historically, the left is generally the side favoring, on balance, democratization of power and greater liberty, but that's focussed on breaking power down from wherever it is centralized which isn't always formal government.
It's more obvious if you use the alternate names "progressive" and "conservative" to describe the left and right. The left is in favour of change, the right is anti-change. So as things change, what the left wants changes, but the right doesn't.
It seems to me that part of the solution might be working to develop solutions that don't prevent the other side from achieving their desires. My ideal vision of how America works (e.g. the American dream as I see it) is that everyone is free to live according to their own way of life and society works for win-win solutions. However, it seems to me that both sides are afraid that if the other side wins they will try to force their lifestyle on them; and I think they are probably right.
I want to live in such a way where I get to be a feudal lord, presiding over a large group of tenant farmers/sharecroppers/indentured servants. I want the freedom to employ the state's prisoners for my own gain, without paying them. I want the freedom to pollute, without being subjected to the tyranny of the EPA. In short, I want to be able to exercise power against those weaker, poorer, or less politically connected then me.
My desires are almost certainly incompatible with yours.
Politics is a process for distributing scarce resources. Brokering how, and when people can exert power to the detriment of others is an inescapable part of it. There are many bad actors who seek to do so - not as many as one might lead to believe, but they consistently find themselves at the top of the social food chain.
I agree that there are going to be situations where conflict between desires is unavoidable or where it is not possible to accommodate extreme desires; however that doesn't mean that finding compatible solutions is not the best approach in the vast majority of situations.
I'd also point out that those are strategies to achieve desires, not desires themselves. The associated desires might be something like financial security, a sense of importance, freedom etc.
Compatible solutions that are palatable to both parties - compromise - is very important.
Sometimes, though, compromise is impossible. If you say that 3+3=6, and I say that 3+3=10, you'd be a fool to compromise on 8. This is made all the more obvious when we consider which of us gets to frame the debate. If I really wanted 3+3 to be 10, I'd just demand that we make 3+3=14, and I'll get exactly what I want, once we split the difference.
Everyone wants freedom, and everyone wants agency, and everyone wants health and happiness. There's plenty of all of those things to go around. Many of us also want power, though, which is more likely to be a zero-sum game.
The problem is there are desires for which there are no compatible solutions. One group desires to oppress another; those are the common issues we're polarized on. The right desires to oppress minority groups and the left refuses, there is no solution to this problem the right will accept as oppression is their goal. Conversely, the new extreme regressive left wants to oppress all who simply disagree with them in word; they oppose free speech, there is no solution here either.
When two cultures cannot agree, the only real solution is to segregate them, the US is too big, it needs to break down into several smaller countries where different cultures can go their own direction.
Amusing (or not) historical note, that sounds almost exactly like the Cavaliers (Virginia aristocrats) when they arrived in America.
> The Cavaliers – the nobles who had fought and lost the English Civil War – fled to Virginia. Historians who cross-checking Virginian immigrant lists against English records find that of Virginians whose opinions on the War were known, 98% were royalists.
> These aristocrats didn’t want to do their own work, so they brought with them tens of thousands of indentured servants; more than 75% of all Virginian immigrants arrived in this position. Some of these people came willingly on a system where their master paid their passage over and they would be free after a certain number of years; others were sent by the courts as punishments; still others were just plain kidnapped. The gender ratio was 4:1 in favor of men, and there were entire English gangs dedicated to kidnapping women and sending them to Virginia, where they fetched a high price.
> The Virginians tried their best to oppress white people. Really, they did. The depths to which they sank in trying to oppress white people almost boggle the imagination. There was a rule that if a female indentured servant became pregnant, a few extra years were added on to their indenture, supposedly because they would be working less hard during their pregnancy and child-rearing so it wasn’t fair to the master. Virginian aristocrats would rape their own female servants, then add a penalty term on to their indenture for becoming pregnant. That is an impressive level of chutzpah. But despite these efforts, eventually all the white people either died, or became too sluggish to be useful, or worst of all just finished up their indentures and became legally free. The aristocrats started importing black slaves as per the model that had sprung up in the Caribbean, and so the stage was set for the antebellum South we read about in history classes.
> The Virginian Cavaliers had an obsession with liberty, but needless to say it was not exactly a sort of liberty of which the ACLU would approve. [...] No, they said, we wouldn’t be free if we had to work, therefore we insist upon not working. No, we wouldn’t be free if we were limited by poverty, therefore we insist upon being extremely rich. Needless to say, this conception of freedom required first indentured servitude and later slavery to make it work, but the Virginians never claimed that the servants or slaves were free. That wasn’t the point. Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank; nobles had as much as they wanted, the middle-class enough to get by on, and everyone else none at all. And a Virginian noble would have gone to his grave insisting that a civilization without slavery could never have citizens who were truly free.
I didn't exactly invent a feudal power structure from whole-cloth, here. It's also important to remember that this society operated upon a consistent legal framework - a framework of property rights and contracts.
Incidentally, the fact that we can't enter indentured servitude anymore is much maligned in some libertarian circles. (Mostly among people who think that they will be the masters, rather then the other way around.)
>I didn't exactly invent a feudal power structure from whole-cloth, here.
No doubt. You did posit it as the alternative, however. Mentioning the idea that some people are ok with indentured servitude (freedom to relinquish your freedom) and try to claim that liberty is the ultimate virtue of these same people seems quite odd.
No, he posted it as a snarky example of why you simply can't always find compatible beliefs. His point had nothing to do with feudalism or indentured servitude. He was simply making the point that when one group wants to oppress another, there are no compatible compromises to make when the oppressed don't want to be oppressed.
Live and let live only works when you don't try and control others but most of our conflict comes from those trying to control others and those others resisting.
Abortion would not be an issue if those who didn't like them didn't get them and left everyone else alone. Religion wouldn't be a problem if the religious didn't continually try and impose their morals on the non-religious; don't like gays, don't be gay, but trying to cure other people from gayness is trying to control others. This could go on and on, trying to control others leads to conflict and that's mostly what politics is about, resolving those conflicts.
> It seems to me that part of the solution might be working to develop solutions that don't prevent the other side from achieving their desires.
This would work well if the two sides lived on different planets on the opposite sides of the galaxy, each one outside of the other's light cone and causal domain.
> it seems to me that both sides are afraid that if the other side wins they will try to force their lifestyle on them; and I think they are probably right.
...it's not really that simple, though. It's not like you're picking two discrete options. Let's take a viewpoint like pro-choice/pro-life. A society that permits abortions doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to have one. A woman who thinks abortion is immoral is free to hold and practice that belief herself...the "lifestyle" of being pro-choice is not forced upon her. Contrast that with a society that bans abortion.
> A society that permits abortions doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to have one.
Yes, but the objecting individual is not fighting for his or her own rights. Pro-lifers consider themselves to be fighting for the rights of the unborn child.
Similarly, a society that permits slavery doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to own slaves.
The society is not forcing its lifestyle on the objecting individual, per se, but it's forcing its lifestyle on the slaves, whom the objecting individual is concerned about.
These abortion rights opponents derive their arguments from the bible (for the most part). The same bible says that judgement is the domain of god, not humans. In other words, cherry-picking the ideas that serve their own goals.
There are important cases where it is that simple. For example, people have different ideas about who should control certain resources. All sides can't get what they want.
How do you do that with abortion? (Just picking a controversial topic) there is _literally_ no common ground and it is simply not possible for one group to live under, to them, acceptable rules that are also acceptable to the other group. You cannot have one group that demands the right to terminate a pregnancy and one group that believes it is literally murder ever coexist on friendly terms.
You cannot ban guns and still make them freely available to people who want them.
You cannot combat global warming and still enable people to drive as they desire.
You cannot simultaneously allow trans people to use their preferred gender's bathroom while allowing the people who so desires to only have cis people of the same gender in the room.
You cannot simultaneously allow drugs and ban them.
The conflicts you list are all conflicts based on disagreements over the solutions to problems rather than based on what people want.
To pick an example: Why is gun control even an issue? It didn't used to be - therefore something has changed that makes people want to ban guns. What is that? Is banning guns the only solution?
> How do you do that with abortion? (Just picking a controversial topic)
> there is _literally_ no common ground
I don't think that's true. Ignoring fringe lunatics, everyone agrees that after a baby is born, they should not be allowed to be "aborted". Likewise, virtually everyone agrees that sperm and unfertilized eggs do not have rights as humans. Those two endpoints on the continuum are common ground.
The question then is where do people stake their claims on the line between those endpoints. Some people think if the fetus is old enough to be viable if born that early, then it should be illegal to abort it. Others, if the fetus has a developed enough brain and heart to conceivably feel pain. Others, if its implanted. Others if it's fertilized.
And, of course, it's not a straight line, but more like a space. Some fetuses, regardless of age, are not viable because of genetic deformities and people pick different regions in that space where they are comfortable with terminating. There is another axis in the space related to how the pregnancy occurred—rape, incest, etc.
Within this space, you can find regions and boundaries where many people do have agreement. This is how governing works. There are no perfect solutions or black and white problems. It's about finding consensus and compromise, and picking something that is the most acceptable to the most people.
The real problem, I believe, is that there are powerful people who want to deliberately sabotage that process to their own ends. They want to convince us that there is no common ground, and that those who have a different preference are evil people who cannot be tolerated, much less worked with. They've found that if you create an enemy for people, you can get them to show up for polls and keep people in power. That's the real goal. They don't give a shit about abortion. They care about tax law and gerrymandering and other legislation that keeps the powerful in power. But abortion gets them to the polls.
This seems like a weird and hardly surprising piece.
The idea that one of two political ideas is 'right' or that that even matters is utterly absurd.
The whole point of politics is to find solutions that resolve conflicting desires.
Polarization happens when the solutions simply don't do that.
The problem should not be framed as 'how to get people to change their desires and beliefs' to match a political ideology. The challenge is to come up with some new ways of looking at things that resolve the differences.
What exactly do you mean by 'resolve'? If you mean to harmonize or reconcile the desires, that's not how politics usually works. Often resolution happens by means of one side marginalising the other.
Politics used to work by kings beheading nobles deemed traitorous.
More recently, as you say, it often works by having 'sides' that marginalize each other.
I'm assuming that it's not going to be like that for the rest of human history, and suggesting that the polarization might not be a necessary outcome of people's desires, but rather an artifact of a politicians who don't know how to resolve them.
I agree with this simple analysis as well, for whatever reason it became accepted to not reach consensus as just a political strategy. It's hard to tell if this is an expected outcome of the churn and burn design of the US political system's natural drift: popular candidates will stick while unpopular candidates will be replaced by popular ones and eventually the group consensus shifts one way or the other. At a certain point that's totally fine, but recently it just seems to be a consensus shift against reaching consensus which leaves us in this weird flux where there is an obvious majority and we are still frozen stiff.
It potentially could just be the outcome of the two-party system needing referendum itself where the coalition democracy designs at least naturally require some level of consensus making from top to bottom.
One idea is to do everything we can to support minor political parties, because they bring diversity to political discourse that doesn't necessarily fit into a two-party system.
Probably the most important change along these lines would be to replace first-past-the-post voting with a system that allows people to express more complex preferences, such as approval voting, ranked choice voting, or range voting.
Other ideas include publicly funded elections, mixed-member proportional representation, redistricting via the shortest splitline algorithm, and compulsory voting.
Far be it from me to suggest we should not support small parties (I lean heavily libertarian) but be very careful what you wish for: Donald Trump was likely as close to a political outside the US will see as a leader for many years.
Change the voting system to allow more parties so that more interests can be represented. Consider weakening the federal government and moving power back to the states so that each person has more control over their own lives (one major part of this is shifting federal taxes to state taxes). Problem is that none of the solutions will be achievable because they consist of weakening the power of those who currently have power, and few people are willing to give up such power unless there is a real and significant threat of them losing even greater power if they don't compromise. For a more discrete example, why would either major party approve a change that gives a strong voice to weaker parties? Just look at how hard they work to keep weaker parties out of any major election debates.
If we don't face a significant external threat, I wonder if there are any options other than for political polarization to continue to grow until... well I'm not sure what happens. I suspect it won't be pleasant.
Madison discusses factionalism in Federalist No. 10, and as I read it, basically concludes that all these competing desires/interests and/or beliefs would be best served by a federal republic where locals would be able to solve their problems in the appropriate way for their constituents. So, decentralizing power away from Washington D.C. and putting it in the hands people more directly. Some people cannot accept this and would like to exert control over people living +1000 miles away. There is just too much diversity to manage 300M people from a central authority without sacrificing liberty. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and authoritarian ideas of governance must be vigilantly opposed.
I feel like this made sense for the 1700s United States because everyone there was a recent immigrant—which is to say, people with both the desire and the proven ability to pick up and move to find a place that better suits them.
When you have communities of mostly that type of person, you can just make each community into its own little experiment, and tell everyone to go on a Gulliver's Travels-esque journey to find the right community for them, then settle down.
When your communities, on the other hand, are full of "entrenched" families/clans—groups of people who, for reasons of proximity or tradition, just won't move no matter how bad things get where they're currently living—then the Great Republic Experiment breaks down a little.
Specifically, it breaks because you'll get people who just really don't fit in a place, and would be better suited to some other system of laws available in some other state or municipality... but want to stay where they are anyway, despite suffering strong disutilities. You'll get large numbers of such people, in fact. (See: Detroit.)
A large part of the reason for federalization comes down to helping those people by guaranteeing certain minimum quality-of-life benefits in all those communities, whether the majority there support them or not. Which results in communities that need to share more laws than not, and rapidly lose much of the benefits of separation.
If everyone had kept the "immigrant mentality"—of being willing to drop your existing life to find personal liberty somewhere else—then the US wouldn't much need a federal government (beyond a sort of inverted border-police, working to ensure that people aren't being inhibited by local laws from crossing state lines—a "non-underground" railroad.)
But Americans haven't kept that mentality, and I'm not sure there's a way to re-instill it. It's just, as far as I know, a personality trait—one that happened to have 100% representation in the 18th century US, but then reverted to the mean in their descendants.
>When your communities...are full of "entrenched" families/clans—groups of people who, for reasons of proximity or tradition, just won't move no matter how bad things get
This is a really great point, and I am admittedly biased as someone that grew up moving 4 times across state lines. Meeting new people and figuring out the local 'vibe' was part of my upbringing.
Moving is hard, but it's doable. I write this as a much less ambitious person than most seem on HN (and older).
I have a pretty big problem with the idea that if people won't do what's in their best interest, then we ought to make sure the system doesn't suck too much, even though it's guaranteed to suck because of those people's decisions (per your contextualization).
Why couldn't a government incentivize these people to move (say by offering subventions for moving out of some given place) instead of of incentivizing staying (as I understand your description to be)?
I'm fully ready to believe that government just can't be trusted with such far-reaching and non-obvious schemes, but I'm curious to know if someone can think of a way such a scheme would fail in practice (in other words: how is it like communism)?
I like the idea but unfortunately almost nothing about modern society involve choices that only affect the people right around you. You can't build a modern car without spanning many miles of people. When you shit, it goes into everyone's water supply, when you burn stuff for energy, it goes into all of our air. When you drink water, it comes from finite reserves that are all connected and we all share.
So you are right, I cannot accept this because it isn't compatible with reality.
> almost nothing about modern society involve choices that only affect the people right around you
Please visit a city council meeting.
> When you shit, it goes into everyone's water supply
When I take a shit it most certainly affects no one outside of Texas. There isn't a river in the country flowing fast enough to make my assertion false.
You're being disingenuous by ignoring that which you can't refute; his point is true regardless of his bad example of shit. When you pollute the the air, you pollute it for everyone, when you harm the environment, the effects aren't only local.
>nothing about modern society involve choices that only affect the people right around you
This is covered by tort law. If you can prove damages, you can have your grievances addressed.
If we adopt nationalized health care, your argument is that you should be able to dictate my dietary choices? Even if my goal is to do it like my grandfather that never once visited a doctor (died at 68, which is plenty for me)?
Edit: To be clear, the basic premise of yours that I quoted could be used to justify just about anything. That is a power I refuse to grant to any entity, no matter how good their intentions.
Two thousand years ago people were at each other's throats over "homoousion". One thousand years ago over "filioque". Four hundred years ago it was predestination. The idea that large-scale conflict over ideology is some kind of aberration to be explained by "biases" is just a figment of the modern ideology of "rationality". In five hundred years they will study this time period and ask, how could they have been so worked up over these minor and obscure points, hardly even comprehensible any more, that they tore their society apart? And the answer will be the same as always - human nature: superstitious, tribal, dogmatic, and violent.
Don't forget that this extreme polarization is an American thing. At least Germany doesn't have it to that degree. The parties have differences but they don't demonize each other.
Wait so you're saying political polarization isn't because all southerners are racist idiots? You mean they might actually have reasonable desires of their own? Mind blown. /s
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadI'm curious what would explain this.
In the wake of the financial crisis, a lot of Golden Dawn-esque nationalist parties have crept up and are finding more success than I'd initially expected.
It feels like we're moving more authoritarian right to me.
Not trolling – I might be wrong –people more knowledgeable about the left/right dichotomy are welcome to shed some light onto this.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
You're absolutely right. There is only one side organizing at grassroots level (indicating that these are not isolated occurrences, but rather are coming from the groups shared ideals) across the country to shut down the political speech of the other, violently in many cases, and that is the left.
http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/05/15/white-supremacist-ric...
I even linked to an left-wing incident that happened over the weekend, with an order of magnitude more people.
http://college.usatoday.com/2017/05/30/protests-erupt-over-r...
http://ktla.com/2017/05/30/portland-man-accused-of-stabbing-...
organized censorship is practiced, historically, by organizations as diverse as the Ayatollah of Iran, the Chinese Communist Party, the NAZI party, and by some microscopic evangelical Church in Arkansas that you've never heard of. Now a certain kind of deranged college professor (and the students they influence) are doing it too.
So what is the left and what is the right? the categories we're accustomed to reading about have broken down. it's something else now and its time to acknowledge it.
Just yesterday a mob of left-wing students tried to assault a professor over a social issue.
http://college.usatoday.com/2017/05/30/protests-erupt-over-r...
Both the left anf the right talk a lot about personal liberties (though they focus on different specific liberties). Both the left and the right have domains where they generally favor government control. And both the left and the right have factions which are more libertarian (focussing more on the areas of personal liberty favored by their respective side) and factions that are more authoritarian (focussing more on the areas of central control favored by their respective side.)
Historically, the left is generally the side favoring, on balance, democratization of power and greater liberty, but that's focussed on breaking power down from wherever it is centralized which isn't always formal government.
And then you factor in the the original Progressive Party came out of the Republicans (i.e. Roosevelt).
My desires are almost certainly incompatible with yours.
Politics is a process for distributing scarce resources. Brokering how, and when people can exert power to the detriment of others is an inescapable part of it. There are many bad actors who seek to do so - not as many as one might lead to believe, but they consistently find themselves at the top of the social food chain.
I'd also point out that those are strategies to achieve desires, not desires themselves. The associated desires might be something like financial security, a sense of importance, freedom etc.
Sometimes, though, compromise is impossible. If you say that 3+3=6, and I say that 3+3=10, you'd be a fool to compromise on 8. This is made all the more obvious when we consider which of us gets to frame the debate. If I really wanted 3+3 to be 10, I'd just demand that we make 3+3=14, and I'll get exactly what I want, once we split the difference.
Everyone wants freedom, and everyone wants agency, and everyone wants health and happiness. There's plenty of all of those things to go around. Many of us also want power, though, which is more likely to be a zero-sum game.
There's a lot of that happening...
When two cultures cannot agree, the only real solution is to segregate them, the US is too big, it needs to break down into several smaller countries where different cultures can go their own direction.
> The Cavaliers – the nobles who had fought and lost the English Civil War – fled to Virginia. Historians who cross-checking Virginian immigrant lists against English records find that of Virginians whose opinions on the War were known, 98% were royalists.
> These aristocrats didn’t want to do their own work, so they brought with them tens of thousands of indentured servants; more than 75% of all Virginian immigrants arrived in this position. Some of these people came willingly on a system where their master paid their passage over and they would be free after a certain number of years; others were sent by the courts as punishments; still others were just plain kidnapped. The gender ratio was 4:1 in favor of men, and there were entire English gangs dedicated to kidnapping women and sending them to Virginia, where they fetched a high price.
> The Virginians tried their best to oppress white people. Really, they did. The depths to which they sank in trying to oppress white people almost boggle the imagination. There was a rule that if a female indentured servant became pregnant, a few extra years were added on to their indenture, supposedly because they would be working less hard during their pregnancy and child-rearing so it wasn’t fair to the master. Virginian aristocrats would rape their own female servants, then add a penalty term on to their indenture for becoming pregnant. That is an impressive level of chutzpah. But despite these efforts, eventually all the white people either died, or became too sluggish to be useful, or worst of all just finished up their indentures and became legally free. The aristocrats started importing black slaves as per the model that had sprung up in the Caribbean, and so the stage was set for the antebellum South we read about in history classes.
> The Virginian Cavaliers had an obsession with liberty, but needless to say it was not exactly a sort of liberty of which the ACLU would approve. [...] No, they said, we wouldn’t be free if we had to work, therefore we insist upon not working. No, we wouldn’t be free if we were limited by poverty, therefore we insist upon being extremely rich. Needless to say, this conception of freedom required first indentured servitude and later slavery to make it work, but the Virginians never claimed that the servants or slaves were free. That wasn’t the point. Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank; nobles had as much as they wanted, the middle-class enough to get by on, and everyone else none at all. And a Virginian noble would have gone to his grave insisting that a civilization without slavery could never have citizens who were truly free.
From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...
Incidentally, the fact that we can't enter indentured servitude anymore is much maligned in some libertarian circles. (Mostly among people who think that they will be the masters, rather then the other way around.)
No doubt. You did posit it as the alternative, however. Mentioning the idea that some people are ok with indentured servitude (freedom to relinquish your freedom) and try to claim that liberty is the ultimate virtue of these same people seems quite odd.
No, he posted it as a snarky example of why you simply can't always find compatible beliefs. His point had nothing to do with feudalism or indentured servitude. He was simply making the point that when one group wants to oppress another, there are no compatible compromises to make when the oppressed don't want to be oppressed.
Live and let live only works when you don't try and control others but most of our conflict comes from those trying to control others and those others resisting.
Abortion would not be an issue if those who didn't like them didn't get them and left everyone else alone. Religion wouldn't be a problem if the religious didn't continually try and impose their morals on the non-religious; don't like gays, don't be gay, but trying to cure other people from gayness is trying to control others. This could go on and on, trying to control others leads to conflict and that's mostly what politics is about, resolving those conflicts.
This would work well if the two sides lived on different planets on the opposite sides of the galaxy, each one outside of the other's light cone and causal domain.
...it's not really that simple, though. It's not like you're picking two discrete options. Let's take a viewpoint like pro-choice/pro-life. A society that permits abortions doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to have one. A woman who thinks abortion is immoral is free to hold and practice that belief herself...the "lifestyle" of being pro-choice is not forced upon her. Contrast that with a society that bans abortion.
Yes, but the objecting individual is not fighting for his or her own rights. Pro-lifers consider themselves to be fighting for the rights of the unborn child.
Similarly, a society that permits slavery doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to own slaves.
The society is not forcing its lifestyle on the objecting individual, per se, but it's forcing its lifestyle on the slaves, whom the objecting individual is concerned about.
You cannot ban guns and still make them freely available to people who want them.
You cannot combat global warming and still enable people to drive as they desire.
You cannot simultaneously allow trans people to use their preferred gender's bathroom while allowing the people who so desires to only have cis people of the same gender in the room.
You cannot simultaneously allow drugs and ban them.
Indeed, as the days go by I am becoming more and more convinced that the only solution is the one outlined in this essay: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...
To pick an example: Why is gun control even an issue? It didn't used to be - therefore something has changed that makes people want to ban guns. What is that? Is banning guns the only solution?
You can use the same logic with most of these.
The question then is where do people stake their claims on the line between those endpoints. Some people think if the fetus is old enough to be viable if born that early, then it should be illegal to abort it. Others, if the fetus has a developed enough brain and heart to conceivably feel pain. Others, if its implanted. Others if it's fertilized.
And, of course, it's not a straight line, but more like a space. Some fetuses, regardless of age, are not viable because of genetic deformities and people pick different regions in that space where they are comfortable with terminating. There is another axis in the space related to how the pregnancy occurred—rape, incest, etc.
Within this space, you can find regions and boundaries where many people do have agreement. This is how governing works. There are no perfect solutions or black and white problems. It's about finding consensus and compromise, and picking something that is the most acceptable to the most people.
The real problem, I believe, is that there are powerful people who want to deliberately sabotage that process to their own ends. They want to convince us that there is no common ground, and that those who have a different preference are evil people who cannot be tolerated, much less worked with. They've found that if you create an enemy for people, you can get them to show up for polls and keep people in power. That's the real goal. They don't give a shit about abortion. They care about tax law and gerrymandering and other legislation that keeps the powerful in power. But abortion gets them to the polls.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority
The idea that one of two political ideas is 'right' or that that even matters is utterly absurd.
The whole point of politics is to find solutions that resolve conflicting desires.
Polarization happens when the solutions simply don't do that.
The problem should not be framed as 'how to get people to change their desires and beliefs' to match a political ideology. The challenge is to come up with some new ways of looking at things that resolve the differences.
More recently, as you say, it often works by having 'sides' that marginalize each other.
I'm assuming that it's not going to be like that for the rest of human history, and suggesting that the polarization might not be a necessary outcome of people's desires, but rather an artifact of a politicians who don't know how to resolve them.
It potentially could just be the outcome of the two-party system needing referendum itself where the coalition democracy designs at least naturally require some level of consensus making from top to bottom.
Probably the most important change along these lines would be to replace first-past-the-post voting with a system that allows people to express more complex preferences, such as approval voting, ranked choice voting, or range voting.
Other ideas include publicly funded elections, mixed-member proportional representation, redistricting via the shortest splitline algorithm, and compulsory voting.
If we don't face a significant external threat, I wonder if there are any options other than for political polarization to continue to grow until... well I'm not sure what happens. I suspect it won't be pleasant.
Would be more interesting if conducted around desires and beliefs about deeper outcomes than who wins an election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10#Madison.27s_...
When you have communities of mostly that type of person, you can just make each community into its own little experiment, and tell everyone to go on a Gulliver's Travels-esque journey to find the right community for them, then settle down.
When your communities, on the other hand, are full of "entrenched" families/clans—groups of people who, for reasons of proximity or tradition, just won't move no matter how bad things get where they're currently living—then the Great Republic Experiment breaks down a little.
Specifically, it breaks because you'll get people who just really don't fit in a place, and would be better suited to some other system of laws available in some other state or municipality... but want to stay where they are anyway, despite suffering strong disutilities. You'll get large numbers of such people, in fact. (See: Detroit.)
A large part of the reason for federalization comes down to helping those people by guaranteeing certain minimum quality-of-life benefits in all those communities, whether the majority there support them or not. Which results in communities that need to share more laws than not, and rapidly lose much of the benefits of separation.
If everyone had kept the "immigrant mentality"—of being willing to drop your existing life to find personal liberty somewhere else—then the US wouldn't much need a federal government (beyond a sort of inverted border-police, working to ensure that people aren't being inhibited by local laws from crossing state lines—a "non-underground" railroad.)
But Americans haven't kept that mentality, and I'm not sure there's a way to re-instill it. It's just, as far as I know, a personality trait—one that happened to have 100% representation in the 18th century US, but then reverted to the mean in their descendants.
This is a really great point, and I am admittedly biased as someone that grew up moving 4 times across state lines. Meeting new people and figuring out the local 'vibe' was part of my upbringing.
Moving is hard, but it's doable. I write this as a much less ambitious person than most seem on HN (and older).
Why couldn't a government incentivize these people to move (say by offering subventions for moving out of some given place) instead of of incentivizing staying (as I understand your description to be)?
I'm fully ready to believe that government just can't be trusted with such far-reaching and non-obvious schemes, but I'm curious to know if someone can think of a way such a scheme would fail in practice (in other words: how is it like communism)?
So you are right, I cannot accept this because it isn't compatible with reality.
Please visit a city council meeting.
> When you shit, it goes into everyone's water supply
When I take a shit it most certainly affects no one outside of Texas. There isn't a river in the country flowing fast enough to make my assertion false.
This is covered by tort law. If you can prove damages, you can have your grievances addressed.
If we adopt nationalized health care, your argument is that you should be able to dictate my dietary choices? Even if my goal is to do it like my grandfather that never once visited a doctor (died at 68, which is plenty for me)?
Edit: To be clear, the basic premise of yours that I quoted could be used to justify just about anything. That is a power I refuse to grant to any entity, no matter how good their intentions.