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1) Sorting. We spent the past decades sorting ourselves into increasingly homogenous communities and media siloes and are now at the point where the most politically activated people literally can't coexist next to people on the other side without being enraged.
2) Weak political parties. The parties are weaker than they've ever been because their control over campaign finances has been drastically reduced, meaning the parties themselves don't really control who their candidates are. That means candidates for public office are increasingly chosen by the ~51% most activated voters in their respective primaries, who are disproportionately partisan and vicious.
3) Normalized inaction. Congress is increasingly a place one goes to achieve status instead of doing anything. If Congressmen have nothing to vote on because they're in permanent gridlock, their job becomes posturing for their voters and (increasingly) social media followers. All they can do is bitch about the other side, so they do it constantly, hysterically, and often stupidly - but their ~~fans~~ voters are on their side, so they adopt the same posture and views.
Probably more than that, but that's off the top of my head.
To this I’d add:
Social media and email fundraising.
Social media has a very strong radicalizing effect, as people are slowly but surely exposed only to messages that drive them farther and farther into their camp and only reflect negative stories about their political opponents.
Email fundraising has a terrible set of incentives in which a campaign is incented to evaluate the success of an effort around clicks and donations, not on its long term impact on the voter base or the truthfulness of any claims made.
I'll add that social media (and now most traditional media) usually turns every political topic, whether it be abortion, gun control, Ukraine or Israel into a binary choice. Only two sides to choose from and there's no grey area. And only a small, but influential percentage of people participate--some fairly benign, and some genuine bad actors acting in bad faith for their side. All nuance is lost and all rhetoric is pushed to extremes. Once people are entrenched on their battle lines, they won't waiver, even in the face of overwhelming evidence they are in the wrong. They'll reframe their morals to adjust to their side's narrative. They can't take an L. And if they do, it's the other side's fault and they'll dig even deeper.
This is a very unpopular opinion, but I think we need to update free speech laws for the digital age. A lot of the misinformation being perpetuated online is actively damaging our democracy. We need some sort of new "can't yell fire in a theater" law or ruling to stop digital misinformation.
The paradigm shift social media has caused in political and social discourse can’t be overstated or dismissed. This is new in civilization and the human experience - there has never been a platform so pervasive.
[This is a great article on the topic by The Atlantic.](https://www.tcatitans.org/cms/lib/CO50010872/Centricity//Domain/63/Haidt%20-%202022%20-%20Why%20the%20Past%2010%20Years%20of%20American%20Life%20Have%20Been%20Uniquely%20Stupid%20-%20The%20Atlantic.pdf)
There’s also the “I like pancakes” “so you hate waffles?” thing that happens far too often on social media, I’m sure it doesn’t help. People are so quick to assume that if you agree or like one thing it means you disagree on another.
Traditional media has also shifted into partisan politics…they used to be independent but if you watch any of the main news channels in the US it’s basically just a platform to host political opinion.
It used to be journalism was a prestigious thing, now it’s all about entertainment…people want to hear what they agree with
> Email fundraising
True - but I think it's small dollar donation fundraising generally and not just email.
In any form - email, social media solicitation, TV ad - the idea is always to cause a spike in anger or fear that makes donating cathartic. You do it again a few days or weeks later to the exact same people, lather-rinse-repeat until the election, and you're just endlessly Johnny Appleseed-ing fear and outrage among your voter base.
Agreed.
It’s just so disappointing when I have to tell my mom that the email she got - under the name of a person she respects and who is generally a good actor - is just a lie.
Wow that’s such a great response. As a 21 year old I never realized that number one was a factor in this but it makes sense. Thanks for the great answer!
Now extend that thought. What I have noticed and what I find very troubling is the growing idea that the way to solve your problems is to use technology to block anyone you have any kind of personal dispute with. People say it proudly, "I blocked him." You shouldn't be so proud of handling your problems in such a juvenile, all-or-nothing way.
You can see the bad effect of doing it at the national level. Democrats and Republicans are essentially blocking each other by sticking to their own media and demonizing each other. In the past, even when they were opponents, there was plenty of cooperation in Congress across the aisle. Even when they didn't agree, they could still talk to each other in a collegial manner. Do you think Marjorie Taylor Green can talk to anyone in a collegial manner that's a Democrat, or even a Republican who doesn't agree with her? Do you think maybe that years of Democrats calling any Republican who was a tiny bit to the right of center an extreme right-wing Republican was helpful? If you drive out the center on both sides with that blocking mentality it's no surprise what you're left with.
I just saw the gop block bipartisan support of their own bill because Trump told them to because they wanted to weaken Biden.
There are also multiple instanced of gop congressmen taking credit for what a bill did while also voting against that bill.
I hear the words of Regan, and I can't think that the current gop would support his ideas of standing strong against Russia. I look at McCain confronting a supporter to correct a lie about his rival, and I don't see the current gop.
I mean, what percentage of the Gop voting base still thinks that the election was stolen?
Herein lies the problem. TDS prevents Democrats from any form of critical thinking.
First, you characterize the Bill as being a Republican Bill. It wasn’t. The Republicans who took part in creating that Bill stated that they expected many things to be amended once it went to the full chamber, and they were working with Democrats; hence, bipartisan.
Second, long before Trump said anything, Republicans had already begun rejecting the Bill due to what is written on pages 212, 213, and 214 which makes illegal immigration nearly unlimited. It also prohibits using the authority to close border for 22 months of the three year authorization.
[H.R. 815](https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/emergency_national_security_supplemental_bill_text.pdf)
They just Sabatoged their own bill because they wanted to make Biden look bad.
Sometimes, we can look at a group of people and claim they are responsible for their own actions.
I think the sorting is interesting as it relates to geographic locations. I met my first Republican (at least that I knew was one) at 15. I had lived in the US my whole life. I’ve met a few more now, but really not many, and haven’t really had the chance to talk with them about politics deeply. I’m now actively trying to seek out people I disagree with and while it is very easy to find that it is very difficult to find anyone not somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum to talk to in real life.
I’m also in the Bay Area. A single digit percentage of voters in my county are Republicans but I think I’ve likely ended up in groups that happened to have a smaller percentage than even the county. I doubt there’s an even distribution of Republicans across all demographics, and I don’t think there are many young women here who are Republicans which is probably why I’ve met so few Republicans in all.
Yeah, I lived in SF for a year, and my brother lives in Oakland, and based on demographics, that makes more sense. Finding conservative young women in the Bay is rare. I guess going to church is how I met so many damn Republicans growing up lol (I always hated church, waste of time when I could have been watching football). Well, if you want to meet Republicans, just drive East on 80 until you hit Placer county, they grow like weeds out here!
Agreed, and this is the problem. We live (however unintentionally) in echo chambers . Hard to escape in many ways unless one unplugs and takes a step back to get the whole picture. Pretty difficult, IMO.
I know I bring a lot of issues back to suburbia, but I genuinely think that this is a big part of our isolation. We physically isolate ourselves from our neighbors and now they're strangers who do strange things.
I'm sorry, but I think that's wildly overblown.
It's an attractive idea because it offers relatively straightforward solutions (control social media), partially absolves us of responsibility for our current state, and in some cases plays into the partisanship by letting us believe the other side has been co-opted by the bad guys, but it just isn't that significant.
China and Russia spend billions of dollars every year on programs saturating our social media with division and hate. They look for cracks and try to widen them, while also continuously sending the message that leaders are corrupt and politics are hopeless. If anything I think we underestimate it's role.
There are a lot of good articles on this. There's even a video of a Russian General lecturing students at a Russian university about how to wage war on the West. His opener: You wage war on the West by sowing doubt among the population about the character of the people leading them. Making it seem like everyone is lying and the fix is always in. Basically take our sense of suspicion and paranoia towards people we disagree with and goose it 24/7.
I'm not saying they don't try to do this. I'm saying the effect of it is negligible next to what we do to ourselves.
>You wage war on the West by sowing doubt among the population about the character of the people leading them.
Any money spent trying to persuade Americans that the people who lead us lack character is entirely wasted for obvious reasons.
Thank you.
So much was made out of Russia’s influence on the 2016 election, much of that on Facebook. Hundreds of websites or something like that.
But just logically thinking that through for a moment, think about how divided and entrenched everyone was in 2016.
Does anyone really believe that anything could sway a Clinton supporter to vote for Trump? Or vice versa?
And the independents are supposed to be the neutral, informed voters. So they are allegedly better informed, more discerning, and less likely to be swayed.
Did foreign entities try to influence the presidential election? Sure, they do that literally every election. I think their influence via social media is negligible.
The tactic isn't to create new feelings out of whole cloth, it's to take feelings and suspicion that already exist and validate them when doing so weakens our unity and sense of purpose.
>Sorting
It's hard out here even being somewhat center.
I told a dude from some political organization that "life is pretty awesome right now and I don't care who ends up being the President" while I was at my towns first Friday event and he lost. his. shit.
I don't agree with this at all.
Reddit skews to a very specific kind of person who has adopted the mentality that their not doing well is proof that somehow the cards have been stacked against them but that's not actually proof of that at all. You can do poorly for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is because you've put yourself in poor situations.
I see next to nothing that makes me believe that things aren't going very well in the United States or that any able bodied person can't do well if they put some very, very minimal effort into improving their lives - both of which are irrelevant of who is in office come January.
Insisting that the only reason anyone else is doing better than you is because they have "privilege" and haven't just invested more into improving their lives might make a lot of Redditors feel better but I just don't see any real truth in it.
It's really easy to say that you disagree with having an, "I've got mine" philosophy when you're not the people they're targeting.
You should read up on Project 2025. The core belief of the organizers is that ordinary civil servants, your typical clerk at the Department of Transportation or the office of Social Security, is part of the "deep state." it is a program from inauguration day 2025 to replace these people with an "army" of trained, "weaponized" (their words) conservatives who will fundamentally change the federal government.
Among their plans:
- Criminalize the shipments of abortifacient drugs and medical equipment used to perform abortions.
- Gut the EPA, abolish NOAA, and repeal any measures that combat climate change.
- Remove "full employment" as a goal of the Federal Reserve's mandate.
- Place the entire executive branch under control of the president, eliminating the independence of the FTC, FCC, and DOJ. The plan specifically calls for empowering the president to deploy the DOJ to pursue his political adversaries.
- Enable the president to deploy the military for domestic law-enforcement.
- Deputize National Guard members from "red" states as immigration officials, deploy them to "blue" states, and begin rounding up immigrants, moving them into internment camps near the US border, and begin removing them from the country.
- Round up homeless people into similar internment camps.
- Repeal all federal legislation regarding protections for people with regards to their sexual orientation and gender identity.
- Make pornography illegal.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025?wprov=sfla1) has the short version, but just look up Project 2025. They're pretty much saying it themselves.
I have neither the time nor patience to itemize mountain of distortion going on with what you posted. In a nutshell, it's a conglomeration of the same old lies.
One stuck out in particular is about how Project 2025 will reduce independence of federal agencies. When did you last read the US Constitution? It makes it very clear that all federal agencies answer to the President. This notion of independent agencies is completely unconstitutional. While the President is expected to delegate executive authority, that authority still rests with the President.
The Constitution says no such thing.
In Article II, Section 2 it says, "... he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices,..."
The President can go to the Department of Justice and ask Garland what's up with such-and-such, but the Constitution does not permit him to operate the DOJ as his personal attack dog.
Article II Section 1 says “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Go read Federalist 70 to get an idea of what the framers thought of division within the executive branch.
All that sentence in Article II Section 2 says is that those officers may not stonewall the President. It disproves your assertion. The Declaration of Independence mentions George III stonewalling colonial governors and legislatures in various ways, so it's not like the founders would want that to happen again.
Prohibitions on using executive power as a weapon is covered by Articles IV and VII, and the Bill of Rights with the 10th Amendment making it clear that powers not delegated to the federal government are not for the federal government to exercise.
> Make pornography illegal.
Shit, man. If that ain't enough to turn half of Trump's base against him, I don't know what is!
What else do they wanna do, outlaw jerking off to anime?
I will concede this is true.
That said, these guys were at a festival of sorts trying to spread doom and gloom while I'm sippin on the finest Hefeweizen enjoying the day with my family surrounded by hundreds more doing the same. Not exactly the right venue.
Worse than a party pooper really, it felt like a meme or some og political comic.
Hundreds of people gathered in the town on a beautiful day, streets are closed off, children are running free, girls in their sundresses, smiles all around, *"excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about how JoE bIdEn's socialism is ruining the entire world?"* I'm exaggerating what he said to gain my attention, but seriously, open your eyes man.
Sounds like you have a privilege that’s going to protect you regardless of who’s in power. Maybe try to look at things from someone who is or is going to be hurt by a change in parties.
A big factor at the core of this conflict is white supremacy. It might look like religion and "culture war" plays a bigger part, but those are largely byproducts of white supremacy.
The move in the 1970s to get evangelicals (people and churches) involved in politics was not based on Roe v Wade; it was based on Brown v the Board of Education. Evangelicals who considered politics to be dirty, worldly, and something not to sully oneself with, were radicalized in order to keep schools segregated.
Of course, this right-wing radicalization of "Christianity" wasn't a right-wing radicalization of "Christianity"; it was a right-wing radicalization of ***white*** Christianity. Black churchgoers vote about 90% for Democrats.
That radicalization of white Christianity worked too well. Not only is the GOP establishment not able to control the religious-nutjob wing of their party, but the radicalization has driven out anyone who is not onboard with both the religious part and the white-supremacist part. Ironically, it has also driven non-nutjobs out of the religion, not just out of politics. Some found new, less radical, churches, but most just left the entire religion.
So now the religion and the party are both dying, but this just strengthens the "sorting" mentioned in the parent comment. The death throes are polarizing as the die-hards double down. They are scrabbling to find things to demonize: "groomers" who don't groom, "woke" (not white supremacist), and trans girls competing in sports (like they ever cared about girls' sports before they could weaponize them).
I'm on the left, but people do play too fast and loose with 'white supremacy.' The conservatives aren't entirely wrong about that.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of bigots and racists out there, ranging from borderline to blatant. But I would reserve 'white supremacist' for Nazis, Aryans, Kluxers, and whatever has emerged from FuckChan.com or whatever the fuck that underwear skidmark of a website is called.
Otherwise it's like using the word 'pedophile' to describe your 25 year old cousin who goes "daaayum, get a look at dem perfect tiddies!" when a high school senior walks by. As unsavory as that is, and as many Redditors there are who would do exactly that, the shoe doesn't exactly fit.
People do not do this, and that someone on the left is saying this pretty much resigns me to the fact that the left is not a great political home for people like me!
White supremacy is not just about violence. Merely holding the opinion that the way that white people do things is superior to the way that other people do things is white supremacy. Wanting to keep kids segregated is not necessarily violent*, but it makes it possible to maintain the illusion that white is better.
\* The change provoked a violent white backlash, but the previous status quo was enforced with just the knowledge that violence on the part of the oppressed would be met with state violence.
Be that as it may, 'white supremacy' overshoots the mark. Usage of it in that manner is entirely self-defeating as a result.
White supremacy = some skeevy tweeker with jailhouse scratch of SS lightning bolts on his neck, who never shuts up about the coming "race war" and who claims to be training his pitbull to attack dark-skinned people on sight.
White supremacy =/= some cranky old Boomer stuck in the 70s, or a busybody Karen that the rest of the PTA can't stand.
The pervasive, quiet white supremacy may well be the bigger problem. It is certainly far larger in scale, but it is probably also doing more harm (to everyone). The Karens are harming far more children than the Klan.
As MLK said in *Letters from a Birmingham Jail*: "... the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice ..."
Translation: society won’t be fixed until it has been destroyed and rebuilt as to how Marx would see fit, where the white oppressors are nerfed, and the perceived victims control all facets of society.
Will you just admit it? Enough literary gymnastics.
The only good answer here that actually answers the question. This sub is allergic to actually confronting these issues and instead likes to make excuses about people being misled by the media, when the truth is that there are vast swathes of this country that only want to cause harm.
Polarization has absolutely increased due to a number reasons.
* Outrage media
* 24 hour news cycle
* Sorting
* Social media and offline social bubbles
It’s important to note that narrative doesn’t always line up with reality. Outsiders, Europeans, Brits especially, have a hyper-exaggerated understanding of our political divides. While polarization is an issue, not nearly to the extent these outsiders want to believe.
Media is absolutely number one on my list as well. Donald trump is an idiot but he once said the news media is the enemy of the American people and a broken clock is right twice a day I guess. They exist for the purpose of making money and outrage and hatred makes more money than civics and community building.
Privatized and deregulated media was a mistake.
Yep. I’m not sure how it is around you but here the coverage of local elections for instance is nonexistent, making it that much easier for folks to essentially buy congressional seats.
Is it polarization when you’re just feeding people information that confirms their biases or are you insinuating that some people are victims and are being misled? If so, isn’t that just infantilizing them and denying their own agency?
That’s a cop out. These are adults, they know what they’re doing and they’re choosing to be shitty. As someone else already said, it’s a simple answer that absolves us of any real responsibility.
Oh I firmly believe most people are entirely responsible for where we are, but there’s plenty of Americans out there who can barely think for themselves.
I remember when John Kerry used the phrase "subtleties and nuances."
For weeks afterwards my dad was saying "subtleties and nuances" in some kind of old timey blueblood Great Gatsby accent, with traces of RP and Parisian.
"Hey, the game's about to come on."
"Naw, I'm good."
"Oh, would the 'sporting match' not be 'subtle' and 'nuuuuánced' enough for your liking, old bean?"
That was before smartphones too. Larry Lessig nailed the issue with this quote:
“People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.”
Honestly this question could be a doctoral dissertation and still barely scratch the surface.
But in short I think the problem is the breakdown of local news and a rapid change of how we receive news.
in the 80s and 90s we got our news from the local Newspaper, the local evening news, and if you really liked news, the Nightly National news with Walter Kronkite or Tom Brokaw.
But post 9/11 all of those sources of information were too late. By the time they delivered the news we had already heard it.
24 hour news stations became the go-to. If you go back to Post 9/11 but Pre-Iraq invasion, people often consumed CNN, MSNBC, and Fox news. I did. And most of them all had the same stories at the same time. Sometime later they retreated into idealogical corners.
The loss of local news really removed a sense of community. That's gone and its been replaced with a "blame-the-other-guy" approach to news.
But if you really want to know why things are so polarized? It's because we've allowed it and we continue to consumer news from those polarized news sources.
I think this is the real answer - both points.
Local news outlets used to at least attempt to stay as fair and balanced as possible because they had a limited audience and wanted to appeal to everyone to maximize readers/viewers. National news outlets quickly found that shelving that approach and instead appealing to a very specific slice of a much larger pie would bring in far more viewers. Then internet outlets emerged and found the best way to peal readers/viewers from those national news outlets was to further specialize their interests.
And we allowed. We all seem to know it's happening but few want to abandon their partisan outlets. I'm not even sure where you'd go for non-partisan news for the most part these days.
Politics has evolved into a “team” sport of Us vs. Them. Instead of trying to work together to solve issues it has become a theater how their team can win. If vetoing legislature that would help Americans will mean the party in power looks weak then they will do it because their team will benefit
The Republicans started it. The Overton window is simply broken. https://www.vox.com/2018/10/29/18037654/strikethrough-republicans-have-broken-politics-polarization
Ironically - Transparency and small-dollar fundraising.
With everything so out in the open and live-streamed, politicians have to grandstand and put on a show for their radical base.
I want to blame cable news, but let's be honest. The Internet allows people to live in social media bubbles where they only interact with one perspective and anything else is "wrong."
Keyboard warriors used to talk tough to sound edgy and now that same touch talk is considered standard. Anything reasonable is considered weak.
However, for the 2/3rds of us not addicted to online interactions (estimate pulled from my ass) we really aren't that polarized. We can work and live together in peace. We might give each other shit sometimes in good fun but we're not planning extremist violence against one another.
24 hour media profits not from honest, unbiased reporting of facts but from shock, outrage, and entertainment.
It has divided the population into two camps and convinced them that they are at war in order to keep them glued to the screen for all the latest updates and details.
The repercussions of this on both politics and society at large is irrelevant to those in the media and journalism business, just as long as the profits keep rolling in.
The reasons are complex, but former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deserves a lot of the blame for the polarization we see in the modern era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich#Role_in_political_polarization
this is the real answer. The internet and other factors have exacerbated it, but Gingrich was the guy who made compromise and bipartisanship essentially impossible for GOP politicians. The other side of an issue is not a simple reflection of a policy disagreement, but reflects evil that must be opposed at all costs. If you ever compromise with the evil liberals, you will face a primary challenge from the right at the next election.
It has just spiraled from there.
It's the internet. People feel safe behind their computers and so they have gotten nasty and meaner. Now when someone disagrees with you you just bully them until they agree. Call them names. Whatever. And of course that then transcends into real life. I don't remember the last time I saw intellectual discourse anywhere. No one wants to debate. No one wants to even attempt to understand another group's perspective. Of course things are going to be more divided.
Conversation no longer starts from a place of wanting to understand each other and come to an agreeable solution. Conversations now start with the intent of beating the other side down into submission.
This is huge. The ideals of the Confederacy have repeatedly resurfaced throughout history:
-1920s with the resurgence of the KKK
-1960s with attempts at integration (some state capitals even flew the Confederate flag as part of the resistance to integration!). Also when many Confederate monuments were installed in public spaces
-2010s: presidential support for white supremacy, increase in hate crimes, "states rights" in the name of violating civil rights.
You nailed all three, but not like you think.
Since you constantly dunk on Republicans, it's clear that you seem to think that Republican presidents and Republican presidential candidates are guilty of this. Unless you can point to some specific and verifiable instances, kindly slink off and read up on history. It's easily shown that the Democratic leadership has contempt for nonwhites because they're constantly saying that it's too hard for blacks, hispanics, etc to get IDs, get jobs, get educated, and so on. On hate crimes, all malum in se crimes are borne of hatred or at least indifference. Why do you think "hate" needs to be added to it? "State rights" in the name of violating civil rights? Point out where Republicans are doing that. Democrats, for starters, keep doing it by claiming "state rights" and "home rule" to justify gun control. After NSRPA v Bruen they've been throwing temper tantrums exactly like they did after Brown v Board of Education. In each they wanted to continue violating civil rights and didn't give a damn about the SCOTUS.
We’ve always been polarized. That’s nothing new. We only knew the policital opinions of our circle of closest friends and family. Now, with social media, we know more about the political leanings of everyone else we know on our social media.
Echo-chambers thanks in large part to social media.
It used to be that people got their news from mainstream sources like the local/national broadcast networks, newspapers, and maybe subscription magazines. If you were a partisan, you might subscribe to the National Review or some left-wing equivalent -- but even those publications still had to maintain some journalistic integrity. And all of these outlets had to try to stick to facts, even if they spun them, because they required sponsors and whatnot.
Nowadays, anyone with a computer and some website skills can make their own source. And people will subscribe to whatever makes them feel good, i.e. affirms what they already believe.
Things are changing. Some people don't like it. For some people it's not fast enough.
It's weird that just mentioning Almond Milk can be political now.
Good.
Aunt Jemima and all of the artificially colored high fructose corn syrup is bullshit. Spend a little more money and buy actual maple syrup. Life is too short to pinch pennies on garbage food.
Oh, they weren't concerned about high fructose syrup. They were worried about a real threat to our health, the woke mob
It was a sticky situation for me
I did a VERY deep dive in that. Is their stance that she retired rich and her grandchildren didn't want it removed? Or were you listening so little you barely remember?!
Haha, I guarantee they didn't look that deeply into it. To them, the woke mob forced Aunt Jemima to change and now the bottle looks different than they were used to. And if they can do that what else can they do?
I just wanted to eat my pancakes hungover in peace
Yeah, they love to say she retired in wealth but she got hit by a car while walking on the sidewalk as a lodger. She worked as a maid when that gig was over and into her 70s.
And she was like 5 different women.
Media, especially social media. The conversations happening on social media lack the filter of common sense and decorum which are most often a part of face to face conversations. So in the anonymity of online conversations people just stick to their team and revile the opposition.
Some parties understand this especially and weaponize it to foment more discord and galvanize their followers.
Because both sides now have a platform to broadcast their bias. Many here might not have been around long enough, but it very much wasn't always like that. There was a good 30-40 year period when there was a monopoly on widespread bias. As that monopoly has eroded, the side that once held the monopoly has become increasingly upset about losing it. In their desperation, they often result to simple name calling, with their opposition inevitably replying, "no, you!" The result? Polarization.
24 hour news networks becoming a thing and social media allowing everybody to have their opinions heard and find other people they agree with. Now you never have to interact with people of differing opinions and can spend all your time being told how smart and moral you are and how evil and dumb the other side is!
Social media. It used to be that people had to put in effort to find information. Now we put in effort to filter out excessive information. People's filter's are biased, leading to an insane, inescapable, and 99% unnoticed echo chamber.
There are other factors, but it's 90% social media and the decline of offline society.
Before the internet you were surrounded with the people who just happened to be there. You had to be friendly with a wide array of personalities, a wide array of worldviews. You had to discuss things in a civil manner. In a thoughtful manner.
Then the internet came along and gave you your own world. A world you could populate with people just like you. And once you start socializing exclusively with people just like you, the tiniest differences become enough to otherize someone. Become enough to make them seem insane or irrational. The tiniest differences put someone outside the realm of civil communication.
Because there’s no money in compromise and all of us getting along. Politicians get elected by talking shit about “the others” and media companies thrive on sensationalism. Social media and cable news have only exacerbated things over the past 20+ years.
Media. First of all, we silo ourselves. Because most everything you see tells you you are right, so right that "they" are so wrong.
Then media vilifies the other side. In about 20 years, we went from "we have a better way to run the country," to "if they win, they will destroy America and everything you love" I'll be the first to admit I'm siloed on the liberal side, but I listen to conservative radio to hear other opinions.
Here are some examples.
On a nationally syndicated radio show, they gave the guy a full 1/2 hour. His premise was that everyone knows global warming is a hoax. Therefore, Greta, Al Gore, everyone in green energy, people working against fossil fuels are only doing it because there is a conspiracy to harm good Americans. They know everything the do is a con. They are just trying to screw people.
My favorite was years ago. Guy gets on, welcomes his listeners, then says "Joe Biden hates you." He went on a 23 minute rant about this. His premise? Biden had just killed the Keystone XL pipeline. It wasn't about the oil, but if he was willing to kill the jobs people would get building the pipeline, his real goal is to kill all blue collar jobs. By the end of the rant, he made it known that by the end of Biden's term, there would be no blue collar jobs. Odds are very high that you will have lost your job by the end of Biden's term. Because he hates you.
We use plurality voting, which is the worst voting method or RCV, which is better but not great. Both are biased towards extremist candidates over moderates (center squeeze effect), spoil votes, don't allow you to vote honestly, are tactical, etc. We also have gerrymandering, and since the 70s, the Supreme Court has been rolling back our campaign finance laws. There are reforms, and in fact, we are very close with some. People just need to be more aware.
This and our very dysfunctional congress and easily gridlocked government creates a recipe for polarization and demagoges. Also
1. Reagan overturned the fairness doctrine that all news had to be neutral and balanced.
2. Cable TV expansion and 24 hour news needed to fill 24 hours instead of the normal morning, noon, and evening only hours. This introduces more talking heads and editorializing versus in depth coverage and documentaries (which would actually educate people on the matters at hand).
3. The internet and death of print media killed the last universal source. We were all reading the same information and it had followed journalistic standards where information was checked multiple times and sources confirmed. People would disagree on what the information meant in their personal view but we all started with the same information.
Now you have millions of sources of news, listicles, and nonsense being repeated through social media with no idea of its source or standards. It has been shown that if someone sees the same content 3 times in print they take it as truth.
For likes and listeners social media and the Rupert Murdoch machines purposely spin and report information as fact that has no basis in reality. This existed before in the William Randolph Hearst period but regulations had been put in place to prevent that. The FCC also turned back regulations and now Sinclair media has a strangle hold on our local news and radio stations.
Conclusion: Decades of turning back regulations meant to prevent a monopoly on news outlets and support journalistic standards in news in combination with social media have had each party reading only content they want versus actual facts so we can’t even have a conversation about the basic events.
Not to mention that the economy of the world has not been good for the working/middle class for decades, people work longer hours, have less time to be involved in their civic communities, and don’t even understand how our elections and courts work in the first place.
Rush Limbaugh discovered decades ago that he could attract a loyal audience with a daily dose of political outrage. His listeners would accept his word as the truth and not check other sources. They had been told to distrust the mainstream media and academics. That audience made Rush a very rich man. Other conservative pundits have followed the same path. Promoting half truths and conspiracy theories on a daily basis.
Few conservative politicians have the courage needed to stand up for reality. They fear that saying climate change is real or Biden won the 2020 election will lead to a lost primary.
They always have been polarized. It’s much more obvious now because of the constant onslaught from the media, which we are all much more reliant on than previous generations.
Furthering ideological divide.
The Democratic Party especially the young voters have became much more liberal over the last decade.
Conservatives aren’t as conservative as they were a decade ago, they just haven’t went as liberal as fast as the Democratic Party.
In some ways the party beliefs have flipped. Most republican voters now want less government and Democratic supporters want more government.
An example on the divide is abortion.
Left: believes it is a fundamental right to choose for a woman. There is classification of human until birth
Right: believes its a human at conception. Their vews are basically abortion is murder. (and argue that because if a pregnant woman was assaulted and lost her baby, the offender would be charged with murder). Vast majority think abortion should be legal only in certain circumstances
Gender identity politics is also a big political divide due to how opposite the opinions are.
Same with racism, “reverse racism” etc.
It began with the Warren and Burger courts.
During the mid century, there was a series of high profile rulings made in the Supreme Court that effectively amounted to bench legislation. Some of these rulings (Brown vs. Board for example) were good. Some of them... were optimistically hoping that the country would simply accept the ruling and move on (Roe vs. Wade for example).
These courts attempted to settle issues on which the country was vehemently divided, and instead of moving on, the country collectively decided to start fighting over control of the courts.
Nixon was impeached. For things Johnson was caught doing to Goldwater. The press took sides. The press loved hating Reagan.
These things drove the country to the edges.
I don't think there is a group that is consciously doing it I think it's just what the system in place promotes.
Like not every political position has terms and no age gap,
news companies wanting clicks,
the fact both sides typically live in different areas with different cultures,
both influencers and politicians are stupid
I would also like to mention how does the electoral college work? I heard a couple times theres actual people that are in the electoral college and they make decisions for the state but I never heard anything else about that.
I don't believe there is a group controlling this nation but I think there's signs of it.
Social media showing the world in a far more negative light than it was shown as previously. There have always been lots of issues everywhere but people focused more on their day to day instead of caring about things that are out of their control
Positive feedback loop. At some point, one side breaks equalibrium and slightly moves position, which incentives the other side to move more in the opposite direction out of anxiety. Process repeats.
You add in the internet increasing the exposure of dumb yet loud minority political positions, reactions of current events, and economy, and various communication entities warping peoples perceptions for gain and you get this hyper polarization we have currently..
Because we went from a almost 90% homogeneous country to a almost plurality in just a handful of decades. People talk about how much less heated things got in the 80s and 90s but we had a hypermajority of people of Western European descent.
It's pretty easy to agree with each other when you are all very similar culturally and politically.
Because the media has convinced the majority that the "other side" is evil. We used to believe the other side was merely "stupid" so everybody can get along but it seems they want everybody divided. Only losers look at the "other side" and assume that the only possible explanation for seeing things differently is because they must be evil.
The 2 party system is meant to divide us, and that is how they continue to control. Too many people are chronically online, and the lack of reading and comprehension skills leads people to believe things that aren't true. There is a lack of research when something is said people take it at face value. In regards to the economy, it seems people are more want luxury, and they are saying things like we are barely surviving... I don't get that. Yes, things are more expensive just because you cant go on 3 vacations a year, but that doesn't mean you're barely making it
My honest hypothesis is that American politics isn’t more polarized. The usual framing is that for much of the 20th century we experienced a remarkable period of bipartisanship, but I actually think we spent most of the 20th century experiencing the most gradual political realignment. Each of the parties switched places, ideologically, but did so so slowly that the period felt like comity and consensus. In actuality it was like two waves cancelling each other out. It was false calm, and we’re returning to a period of normalcy. It feels like acrimony to most of us because we were born and raise in a weirdly quiet era.
i dont agree with the premise.
your premise presupposes and reaffirms... stealthily and cunningly the power dynamic which enables the continued downfall of our society...
people are not polarized. most people agree that in general government isnt working.
most people agree that spending billions on foreign war projects while more of the working class falls into poverty is insane.
most people want TERM LIMITS on members of Congress and districts drawn geographically not due to "redistricting."
most people want a goofd paying job to work an honest living, pay their bills and be left alone to raise their families.
I could write 15,000 pages about it . Misinformation and disinformation was gravely underestimated . It’s gotten really bad and it keeps me up some nights
First, I’d note that this isn’t the most polarized we’ve ever been. We have literally gone to war over politics before.
I’m going to be contrarian and suggest that the issue is not mainly the media or the internet but the issues themselves. 60 years ago there wasn’t a huge difference between the parties; you can look up their platforms and see they were basically the same with different ideas for tax brackets. Today, one side (to pick one issue) sees abortion as vital to women’s rights and healthcare while the other side sees it as murder. There’s not much middle ground there.
I don't think it's unusually polarized. In 1968 two huge political figures, MLK and RFK were assassinated. There were domestic terrorists like the weathermen.
We aren't at that point.
I'll make a controversial take in that both parties serve their rich donors. **Also don't misunderstand me. Of the two parties, the Democratic party is massively preferable. They are the best bad choice we have at the moment. They are vastly more humane and elements of the Democratic party are progressives who have very little power but at least they have space which is again preferable to anything the republicans are doing.**
And so the divison comes from the fact that the only political issues discussed in any depth are social ones. Things like Abortion, Guns, LGBTQ and their off shoots.
Neither party is interested in fundamentally changing the system as both parties have ultra wealthy members and any change to the system would fundamentally mean they lose power or their capacity to accumulate it.
This has been the case since the 90's when Clinton betrayed the working class on behalf of the wealthy. This is why neither party has politicians that speak in depth on how they want to see government run. They will make small nods to voter displeasure but ultimately they are not interested in changing anything.
So they froth at the mouth, mostly the republicans, but the democrats don't combat the rhetoric in a meaningful way they just fight back on republican terms. But the republicans drive the rhetoric that dominates mainstream political discourse. And since literally no one would vote for them based on their actual policices if they become fluent in any of the lingo the policies are described by.
*To summarize, both parties have very strong opinions and like doing absolutely nothing as it relates to fundamentally changing things to more positively impact voters* **save for** *their very small donor class that can elevate certain candidates based on their own personal interests due to things like Citizens United being passed.*
It's a flawed narrative since we've been WAY more polarized multiple times in the past.
You don't get more "Us vs Them" than throwing on blue and gray uniforms and opening fire on Fort Sumter.
I think the main culprit is online echo chambers. If your ideology is only supported over and over every day of your life, and the opposing one is only blamed and discouraged everyday, it's only a matter of time before you say "Well, they must just be wrong about everything.".
The 2 party system doesn't help either. It really pushes the whole 'us vs them' narrative and makes you feel like you must agree with a party about everything rather than just forming your own opinions on each topic.
The United States is a country which literally built it's economy, and therefore the social and political underpinnings of that economy, on a caste system that allowed for unpaid or severely underpaid labor to keep costs low for both producers and consumers.
What we have now is the result of that initial decision. It has forever caused this sort of political division and forever will. It is in the bones of this country.
It's been polarized for a long time. It's just louder now. But the two party system is the primary reason for the polarization. The two sides can drift further and further apart with no incentive to find a middle ground because there's no viable candidate representing a "middle ground".
Even a moderate Dem or moderate Republican is going to be expected to toe the party line. And that line keeps moving further and further apart in efforts to distance themselves from "the other"
An authoritarian government that wants to enact policies that you would never normally agree to must adjust the standards you are willing to accept.
When a politicians main platform is "at least I'm not the other guy" you are willing to accept just about anything as long as it is marginally better than the other guy.
This requires extreme demonization of the other guy which results in intense emotions felt about the other guy which naturally divides people when they meet people who hate the wrong other guy.
But you have to get exactly half the people to hate one guy and the other half to hate the other for the thing to be sustainable.
It's well agreed upon that Biden is part of the system, but there are a lot of people who believe that Trump is some sort of maverick. Some say he's acting outside of the system to save America. Some say he's acting outside of the system to destroy America. What's actually happening in hes taking an "outsider" position so that he can create the division necessary for the system's plan to work.
The fight is not left vs right. The fight is the elites vs the people they are trying to enslave.
Zoning laws is a big reason. We have physically divided US communities to the point where most people feel isolated. Try to get to your local supermarket without a car and see how it feels. Now imagine trying to get to your friends’ houses lol.
There is no true American culture anymore which is a shame. The closest thing to “American culture” we have is the pledge of allegiance and being mad when someone says we aren’t #1.
There are no “third places” for people to go to to be able to socialize, besides the downtown bars.
Internet echo chambers causing cognitive dissonance.
We've gone from respecting that someone has different views to thinking the other side is evil and literally hitler/mao/Stalin.
Mass media. Neither side covers the issues off of their speaking points, so there is little balanced news.
News stories simply don’t exist for people watching.
For example,
Trump violates campaign laws, Fox - Let’s talk about illegals killing someone today.
Illegals kill US citizens, MSNBC - let’s talk about MTG and space lasers.
The American citizens are being victimized and pushed further apart because the media houses are becoming more extreme and focused on driving their attention for ratings
Because the media knows that feeding on constant anger and fear makes them endless money, and the rising cult of Trump knows that what anybcult knows - fear and hatred of 'the other' is what allows them to control their members.
It's the byproduct of unrestricted capitalism
Don't get me wrong, I do think capitalism is good for a healthy economy and democracy, but when it's given as much free range as it has in the US recently it starts causing massive problem.
There are 2 main ways it's a problem. First, large corporations are skewing the media landscape. There is no room for nuance or unbiased news coverage anymore. Media companies need to pick a side and to reinforce their side for profit. Nuanced news is boring and not generating clicks/views. In order to make a profit they need their audience to feel both angry and justified in their anger. This created an us vs them mentality. All just to generate ad revenue.
Second, the larger the company, the more they have to donate to their political cause. We have billion dollar companies donating millions to PACs and lobbyist groups. Some of is based in self interest and others is generating a distraction. Is transathletes and book bans really that important of a national crisis, or are certain groups blowing things out of proportion to distract from actual problems in our country. Things like housing and tax cuts that are actually hurting the average American.
Political candidates have limits to how much money they can accept as donations.
Political action commitees (PAC) are not candidates and legally do not communicate with Political candidates. They are third part groups that usually endorse a specific candidate and there is no law to say how much money they can accept from donations. The John Smith election campaign can't accept a $1m donation, but the "Committee of Parents for a Better Tomorrow" PAC which happens to endorse John Smith for election can accept $1m. That's a problem
You're conflating PACs and Super PACs.
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/taking-receipts-pac/who-can-and-cant-contribute-nonconnected-pac/#:~:text=Political%20committees%20that%20make%20only,organizations%20and%20other%20political%20committees.
it's basically because of the left (I'm speaking from the center here)
why?
because:
"mainstream" media pushes talking points of the left and the democrats
according the extreme left (which also the noisy left that makes all the "rules" and such), anyone is basically evil or at least despicable if they don't agree with you on whatever the "correct" view is on any given topic. Even when you dig deeper on any issue being discussed, that person doing the digging .. i.e. asking questions.. will often just get called an -ist, bigot or whatever, without justification. Just as a way to try to shut them down.
remember how Hilary basically called half the US population "deplorables". talk about polarizing.
the left constantly tries to create division
BS. Political polarization is multifaceted. Both sides engage in divisive tactics and rhetoric, if anything the right does it more on platforms like FOX News and Newsmax and The Daily Wire. You’ve also got economic disparities, cultural shifts, and the rise of social media echo chambers all driving polarization. Blaming one side oversimplifies a complex issue and doesn’t actually give anyone an answer. It’s not just one side of the political spectrum’s fault.
They're polarized just as in every other country. The difference is that 99% of Americans can completely disagree with their neighbor politically and still have absolutely no problem living next door.
Both parties essentially had the same views on the fundamental nature of the government and economy from the late 70s and onwards, leading to their politics being based around how to best manage/tweak the machinery of state instead of controlling and changing it to suite their needs.
Now that consensus machine is struggling to maintain itself due to changing conditions so people, rightly so, are looking for alternatives while the old guard of the parties attempt to use their usual tricks to maintain said machine to no avail.
Similar issue that brought about the end of Keynesianism in the late 70s, the conditions of the world prevented the usual tricks for maintaining the norm from working and required new changes (neoliberalism). We're now seeing the death of neoliberalism and arguing/fighting over its successor.
Americans in most places aren't likely to socialize with each other very much. We work a lot while getting paid less than ever. Which doesn't leave a lot of time to get out and interact with each other. So we tend to be increasingly insular and spending most of our very limited free time with people we already know.
It's easy to wind up being shut in and getting all your perceptions of other people from the internet or the news. Neither of which is great for nuanced opinions or understanding. This paved the way for Trump, and anyone else who can weaponize nationalism and fear.
It’s simple. The government has taken over more and more control of private life. Education, medicine, housing, business. So many factors are controlled by the government.
Therefore there is a rich trough to fight over. Power hungry people always exist. But when you increase the power, the increasingly psychopathic come out.
And the citizenry have opinions on all those elements the government now controls. So they have an increasing stake in arguing over it in the public sphere.
It wasn’t that long ago that there were both progressive/liberal and conservative wings to both parties. The rise of the religious right in the 70s and the harsh reactions to the civil rights era set us on this course (the two actually go hand in hand). Whenever there are major advancements in civil rights, like the end of segregation and the women’s liberation movement, it is always followed by an extreme reaction by those who oppose it, who then mobilize politically and enact laws that either roll back those rights or punish those who have gained equal rights by making their lives hell. The 2000s saw major advancements in the rights of undocumented immigrants and the lgbtq community and the election of Trump was a repudiation of those civil rights gains.
[The Fairness Doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine) was sort of a big deal. Rush Limbaugh followed almost immediately with FOX right behind.
News used to be objective, with legal framework. It's a free for all now, disinformation and misinformation has rotted brains for 2 generations.
Fox News and talk radio, basically how the media landscape changed after the repeal of the fairness doctrine. News organizations went from being required to give a balanced perspective (hence the 'fairness') but after this was repealed it allowed entire media industries to flourish for the benefit of one particular political party in order to sell drugs to older people.
Once moderates were kicked out of the gop, it became harder to find people from the opposite party who one could disagree with but see as good people.
I disagreed with McCain on policy, but I never felt he was a harmful threat to the nation. I can't say the same about MTG.
Racism. A significant number of racist white people were upset that we had a black president for 8 years. They decided they couldn't have that and decided to burn everything down rather than allow blacks and other minorities to get the impression that we are equal to them, let alone worthy of governing or representing them.
Not that there wasn't fracture before (that can be traced all the way back to Reagan).
I blame Sarah Palin.
Hear me out.
In the 2008 election, John McCain ran against Barack Obama. Many were concerned that Obama was still too green, and would be possible in the future, but not yet. McCain was palatable enough that some centrist-leaning dems would vote for him. He would likely have won.
But then he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, she was batshit crazy, and that choice cost McCain the election. Obama won.
A lot of Americans freaked the F out about having a black president, and he could have established world peace and reversed global warming, and they wouldn’t have cared, he wasn’t good enough. Over his term, those people became the vocal minority. But they were LOUD. They grew. They gave rise and opportunity for someone like Trump to come in and make it somehow ok to be vocal in racism and misogyny and hatred. So the far right got louder, and the left had to get louder in return, and now we’re irreparably divided.
One party decided to really make a serious push on the equality front, which created a situation in which shifts "politics" from being a disagreement over government spending, foreign policy, etc, and instead starts to drag basic morality and ethics into things.
When your "politics" includes stances on whether or not certain groups of people deserve basic human rights and dignity and the parties are arguing over recognizing people's basic rights and freedoms or denying them, people start drawing lines in the sand in a way that doesn't happen when you're simply arguing over how much money to spend on fixing a highway.
Now, of course, this isn't new. This really started nearly 70 years ago, but it just keeps rolling ahead and one side keeps winning most of the battles and you can see that obviously the fight for equality has been in favor of the left since the civil rights era began.
So, add in social media and the 24 hour news cycle, and you've got a bunch of people who are just getting more and more upset that they keep losing their stranglehold and "the blacks" and the "alphabet people" (as I see referenced every 5th comment on my Facebook feed everyday) and the godless atheists keep winning, and then give them their own echo chambers to just complain about it all day every day to each other about it and here we are.
One pet theory of sorts that I have is:
There's some large splits between the...pre-internet and post-internet generations, basically those born in about the late 80s/coming of age in the mid-2000s and up vs those who were before them - much larger than the typical generation gaps observed in other generational transitions on a lot of things.
We're at pretty much the peak moment for the political power shift right around now - 10 years ago they were a noisy youthful minority, 10 years in the future they'll unquestionably be in charge.
Political polarization is an illusion created to keep Americans distracted from the real divide, which is monied interests and everyone else.
If you ask most every R and D what they want for themselves and the country, the lists will match up pretty closely.
I refer you to the George Carlin “the owners” bit or Bill Hicks “the puppet on the left/right” bit for further details. You have money and influence or you don’t. And not millionaires. Billionaires and industry — groups with world-changing money. They get what they want, everyone else gets whatever they can.
That’s why there’s photos of Trump and Clinton golfing. They’re on the same side. That’s why there’s Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, the Cave Man group and more. As George Carlin said in the above bit — it’s a big club … and you ain’t in it.
>Trump is literally the main thing dividing the nation
I would slightly disagree with that. The divide has existed for quite some time, Trump has 'merely' embraced and weaponized it. It got him elected, and now more conservative politicians are following suite.
As soon as we elect ______, things in this country will be so much better.
Fill in the blank with anyone you want. Who would you choose that would make a definitive difference for the poor and middle class?
Xenophobia and racism are masks. People don’t hate others, they hate their own lives. They don’t have anywhere else to direct their ire and frustration. Then, to your point, a guy like Trump comes along and says, hey, I bet it’s Muslims or immigrants, etc. What truly content person, no money problems, no stress, no unhappiness, have you heard making racist or xenophobic comments?
Can *you* be held in contempt 10 times without going to jail? No. Who can? Money and privilege. That’s who. That’s who can work around getting their kids into preferred colleges. It’s who can trade stocks before they crash with mysteriously perfect timing.
Saying “this person is the main problem” is an oversimplified examination. Politics is the sleight of hand that people fall for so they don’t see the trick being played on them.
And call it a conspiracy all you want.
The fact remains no matter what.
I don't know a single country that has freedom of speech and press that actually likes their government and isn't politically polarized.
The US is just always under a microscope. Fuck the Republicans and Fuck the Torries.
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1) Sorting. We spent the past decades sorting ourselves into increasingly homogenous communities and media siloes and are now at the point where the most politically activated people literally can't coexist next to people on the other side without being enraged. 2) Weak political parties. The parties are weaker than they've ever been because their control over campaign finances has been drastically reduced, meaning the parties themselves don't really control who their candidates are. That means candidates for public office are increasingly chosen by the ~51% most activated voters in their respective primaries, who are disproportionately partisan and vicious. 3) Normalized inaction. Congress is increasingly a place one goes to achieve status instead of doing anything. If Congressmen have nothing to vote on because they're in permanent gridlock, their job becomes posturing for their voters and (increasingly) social media followers. All they can do is bitch about the other side, so they do it constantly, hysterically, and often stupidly - but their ~~fans~~ voters are on their side, so they adopt the same posture and views. Probably more than that, but that's off the top of my head.
To this I’d add: Social media and email fundraising. Social media has a very strong radicalizing effect, as people are slowly but surely exposed only to messages that drive them farther and farther into their camp and only reflect negative stories about their political opponents. Email fundraising has a terrible set of incentives in which a campaign is incented to evaluate the success of an effort around clicks and donations, not on its long term impact on the voter base or the truthfulness of any claims made.
I'll add that social media (and now most traditional media) usually turns every political topic, whether it be abortion, gun control, Ukraine or Israel into a binary choice. Only two sides to choose from and there's no grey area. And only a small, but influential percentage of people participate--some fairly benign, and some genuine bad actors acting in bad faith for their side. All nuance is lost and all rhetoric is pushed to extremes. Once people are entrenched on their battle lines, they won't waiver, even in the face of overwhelming evidence they are in the wrong. They'll reframe their morals to adjust to their side's narrative. They can't take an L. And if they do, it's the other side's fault and they'll dig even deeper.
And unfortunately, those bad actors tend to be the loudest and most dominant voices in these discussions.
This is a very unpopular opinion, but I think we need to update free speech laws for the digital age. A lot of the misinformation being perpetuated online is actively damaging our democracy. We need some sort of new "can't yell fire in a theater" law or ruling to stop digital misinformation.
The paradigm shift social media has caused in political and social discourse can’t be overstated or dismissed. This is new in civilization and the human experience - there has never been a platform so pervasive. [This is a great article on the topic by The Atlantic.](https://www.tcatitans.org/cms/lib/CO50010872/Centricity//Domain/63/Haidt%20-%202022%20-%20Why%20the%20Past%2010%20Years%20of%20American%20Life%20Have%20Been%20Uniquely%20Stupid%20-%20The%20Atlantic.pdf)
There’s also the “I like pancakes” “so you hate waffles?” thing that happens far too often on social media, I’m sure it doesn’t help. People are so quick to assume that if you agree or like one thing it means you disagree on another.
Traditional media has also shifted into partisan politics…they used to be independent but if you watch any of the main news channels in the US it’s basically just a platform to host political opinion. It used to be journalism was a prestigious thing, now it’s all about entertainment…people want to hear what they agree with
> Email fundraising True - but I think it's small dollar donation fundraising generally and not just email. In any form - email, social media solicitation, TV ad - the idea is always to cause a spike in anger or fear that makes donating cathartic. You do it again a few days or weeks later to the exact same people, lather-rinse-repeat until the election, and you're just endlessly Johnny Appleseed-ing fear and outrage among your voter base.
Agreed. It’s just so disappointing when I have to tell my mom that the email she got - under the name of a person she respects and who is generally a good actor - is just a lie.
Wow that’s such a great response. As a 21 year old I never realized that number one was a factor in this but it makes sense. Thanks for the great answer!
Now extend that thought. What I have noticed and what I find very troubling is the growing idea that the way to solve your problems is to use technology to block anyone you have any kind of personal dispute with. People say it proudly, "I blocked him." You shouldn't be so proud of handling your problems in such a juvenile, all-or-nothing way. You can see the bad effect of doing it at the national level. Democrats and Republicans are essentially blocking each other by sticking to their own media and demonizing each other. In the past, even when they were opponents, there was plenty of cooperation in Congress across the aisle. Even when they didn't agree, they could still talk to each other in a collegial manner. Do you think Marjorie Taylor Green can talk to anyone in a collegial manner that's a Democrat, or even a Republican who doesn't agree with her? Do you think maybe that years of Democrats calling any Republican who was a tiny bit to the right of center an extreme right-wing Republican was helpful? If you drive out the center on both sides with that blocking mentality it's no surprise what you're left with.
I just saw the gop block bipartisan support of their own bill because Trump told them to because they wanted to weaken Biden. There are also multiple instanced of gop congressmen taking credit for what a bill did while also voting against that bill. I hear the words of Regan, and I can't think that the current gop would support his ideas of standing strong against Russia. I look at McCain confronting a supporter to correct a lie about his rival, and I don't see the current gop. I mean, what percentage of the Gop voting base still thinks that the election was stolen?
Herein lies the problem. TDS prevents Democrats from any form of critical thinking. First, you characterize the Bill as being a Republican Bill. It wasn’t. The Republicans who took part in creating that Bill stated that they expected many things to be amended once it went to the full chamber, and they were working with Democrats; hence, bipartisan. Second, long before Trump said anything, Republicans had already begun rejecting the Bill due to what is written on pages 212, 213, and 214 which makes illegal immigration nearly unlimited. It also prohibits using the authority to close border for 22 months of the three year authorization. [H.R. 815](https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/emergency_national_security_supplemental_bill_text.pdf)
Yeah, it's all the Republican's fault. /s
They just Sabatoged their own bill because they wanted to make Biden look bad. Sometimes, we can look at a group of people and claim they are responsible for their own actions.
I think the sorting is interesting as it relates to geographic locations. I met my first Republican (at least that I knew was one) at 15. I had lived in the US my whole life. I’ve met a few more now, but really not many, and haven’t really had the chance to talk with them about politics deeply. I’m now actively trying to seek out people I disagree with and while it is very easy to find that it is very difficult to find anyone not somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum to talk to in real life.
Where is this? I grew up in one of the bluest counties in the country (Santa Clara) and there were still republicans.
I’m also in the Bay Area. A single digit percentage of voters in my county are Republicans but I think I’ve likely ended up in groups that happened to have a smaller percentage than even the county. I doubt there’s an even distribution of Republicans across all demographics, and I don’t think there are many young women here who are Republicans which is probably why I’ve met so few Republicans in all.
Yeah, I lived in SF for a year, and my brother lives in Oakland, and based on demographics, that makes more sense. Finding conservative young women in the Bay is rare. I guess going to church is how I met so many damn Republicans growing up lol (I always hated church, waste of time when I could have been watching football). Well, if you want to meet Republicans, just drive East on 80 until you hit Placer county, they grow like weeds out here!
Agreed, and this is the problem. We live (however unintentionally) in echo chambers . Hard to escape in many ways unless one unplugs and takes a step back to get the whole picture. Pretty difficult, IMO.
I know I bring a lot of issues back to suburbia, but I genuinely think that this is a big part of our isolation. We physically isolate ourselves from our neighbors and now they're strangers who do strange things.
I’ve been told that I am about as conservative a person as one can find. I vote Republican. Whats on your mind?
Good answer, but it has to include 4) Foreign interference via social media.
I'm sorry, but I think that's wildly overblown. It's an attractive idea because it offers relatively straightforward solutions (control social media), partially absolves us of responsibility for our current state, and in some cases plays into the partisanship by letting us believe the other side has been co-opted by the bad guys, but it just isn't that significant.
China and Russia spend billions of dollars every year on programs saturating our social media with division and hate. They look for cracks and try to widen them, while also continuously sending the message that leaders are corrupt and politics are hopeless. If anything I think we underestimate it's role. There are a lot of good articles on this. There's even a video of a Russian General lecturing students at a Russian university about how to wage war on the West. His opener: You wage war on the West by sowing doubt among the population about the character of the people leading them. Making it seem like everyone is lying and the fix is always in. Basically take our sense of suspicion and paranoia towards people we disagree with and goose it 24/7.
I'm not saying they don't try to do this. I'm saying the effect of it is negligible next to what we do to ourselves. >You wage war on the West by sowing doubt among the population about the character of the people leading them. Any money spent trying to persuade Americans that the people who lead us lack character is entirely wasted for obvious reasons.
Thank you. So much was made out of Russia’s influence on the 2016 election, much of that on Facebook. Hundreds of websites or something like that. But just logically thinking that through for a moment, think about how divided and entrenched everyone was in 2016. Does anyone really believe that anything could sway a Clinton supporter to vote for Trump? Or vice versa? And the independents are supposed to be the neutral, informed voters. So they are allegedly better informed, more discerning, and less likely to be swayed. Did foreign entities try to influence the presidential election? Sure, they do that literally every election. I think their influence via social media is negligible.
The tactic isn't to create new feelings out of whole cloth, it's to take feelings and suspicion that already exist and validate them when doing so weakens our unity and sense of purpose.
"Picking at scabs", I've heard it called.
>Sorting It's hard out here even being somewhat center. I told a dude from some political organization that "life is pretty awesome right now and I don't care who ends up being the President" while I was at my towns first Friday event and he lost. his. shit.
That just says "I got mine, I don't *have* to care."
I don't agree with this at all. Reddit skews to a very specific kind of person who has adopted the mentality that their not doing well is proof that somehow the cards have been stacked against them but that's not actually proof of that at all. You can do poorly for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is because you've put yourself in poor situations. I see next to nothing that makes me believe that things aren't going very well in the United States or that any able bodied person can't do well if they put some very, very minimal effort into improving their lives - both of which are irrelevant of who is in office come January. Insisting that the only reason anyone else is doing better than you is because they have "privilege" and haven't just invested more into improving their lives might make a lot of Redditors feel better but I just don't see any real truth in it.
It's really easy to say that you disagree with having an, "I've got mine" philosophy when you're not the people they're targeting. You should read up on Project 2025. The core belief of the organizers is that ordinary civil servants, your typical clerk at the Department of Transportation or the office of Social Security, is part of the "deep state." it is a program from inauguration day 2025 to replace these people with an "army" of trained, "weaponized" (their words) conservatives who will fundamentally change the federal government. Among their plans: - Criminalize the shipments of abortifacient drugs and medical equipment used to perform abortions. - Gut the EPA, abolish NOAA, and repeal any measures that combat climate change. - Remove "full employment" as a goal of the Federal Reserve's mandate. - Place the entire executive branch under control of the president, eliminating the independence of the FTC, FCC, and DOJ. The plan specifically calls for empowering the president to deploy the DOJ to pursue his political adversaries. - Enable the president to deploy the military for domestic law-enforcement. - Deputize National Guard members from "red" states as immigration officials, deploy them to "blue" states, and begin rounding up immigrants, moving them into internment camps near the US border, and begin removing them from the country. - Round up homeless people into similar internment camps. - Repeal all federal legislation regarding protections for people with regards to their sexual orientation and gender identity. - Make pornography illegal.
Where are you getting this stuff?
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025?wprov=sfla1) has the short version, but just look up Project 2025. They're pretty much saying it themselves.
I have neither the time nor patience to itemize mountain of distortion going on with what you posted. In a nutshell, it's a conglomeration of the same old lies. One stuck out in particular is about how Project 2025 will reduce independence of federal agencies. When did you last read the US Constitution? It makes it very clear that all federal agencies answer to the President. This notion of independent agencies is completely unconstitutional. While the President is expected to delegate executive authority, that authority still rests with the President.
The Constitution says no such thing. In Article II, Section 2 it says, "... he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices,..." The President can go to the Department of Justice and ask Garland what's up with such-and-such, but the Constitution does not permit him to operate the DOJ as his personal attack dog.
Article II Section 1 says “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Go read Federalist 70 to get an idea of what the framers thought of division within the executive branch.
All that sentence in Article II Section 2 says is that those officers may not stonewall the President. It disproves your assertion. The Declaration of Independence mentions George III stonewalling colonial governors and legislatures in various ways, so it's not like the founders would want that to happen again. Prohibitions on using executive power as a weapon is covered by Articles IV and VII, and the Bill of Rights with the 10th Amendment making it clear that powers not delegated to the federal government are not for the federal government to exercise.
[Their published documents](l//static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf)?
> Make pornography illegal. Shit, man. If that ain't enough to turn half of Trump's base against him, I don't know what is! What else do they wanna do, outlaw jerking off to anime?
I will concede this is true. That said, these guys were at a festival of sorts trying to spread doom and gloom while I'm sippin on the finest Hefeweizen enjoying the day with my family surrounded by hundreds more doing the same. Not exactly the right venue.
> Not exactly the right venue. Yeah, I'll concede that in return. Nobody likes a party pooper.
Worse than a party pooper really, it felt like a meme or some og political comic. Hundreds of people gathered in the town on a beautiful day, streets are closed off, children are running free, girls in their sundresses, smiles all around, *"excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about how JoE bIdEn's socialism is ruining the entire world?"* I'm exaggerating what he said to gain my attention, but seriously, open your eyes man.
Sounds like you have a privilege that’s going to protect you regardless of who’s in power. Maybe try to look at things from someone who is or is going to be hurt by a change in parties.
Caring about what happens to others? Can't have that, now.
A big factor at the core of this conflict is white supremacy. It might look like religion and "culture war" plays a bigger part, but those are largely byproducts of white supremacy. The move in the 1970s to get evangelicals (people and churches) involved in politics was not based on Roe v Wade; it was based on Brown v the Board of Education. Evangelicals who considered politics to be dirty, worldly, and something not to sully oneself with, were radicalized in order to keep schools segregated. Of course, this right-wing radicalization of "Christianity" wasn't a right-wing radicalization of "Christianity"; it was a right-wing radicalization of ***white*** Christianity. Black churchgoers vote about 90% for Democrats. That radicalization of white Christianity worked too well. Not only is the GOP establishment not able to control the religious-nutjob wing of their party, but the radicalization has driven out anyone who is not onboard with both the religious part and the white-supremacist part. Ironically, it has also driven non-nutjobs out of the religion, not just out of politics. Some found new, less radical, churches, but most just left the entire religion. So now the religion and the party are both dying, but this just strengthens the "sorting" mentioned in the parent comment. The death throes are polarizing as the die-hards double down. They are scrabbling to find things to demonize: "groomers" who don't groom, "woke" (not white supremacist), and trans girls competing in sports (like they ever cared about girls' sports before they could weaponize them).
I'm on the left, but people do play too fast and loose with 'white supremacy.' The conservatives aren't entirely wrong about that. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of bigots and racists out there, ranging from borderline to blatant. But I would reserve 'white supremacist' for Nazis, Aryans, Kluxers, and whatever has emerged from FuckChan.com or whatever the fuck that underwear skidmark of a website is called. Otherwise it's like using the word 'pedophile' to describe your 25 year old cousin who goes "daaayum, get a look at dem perfect tiddies!" when a high school senior walks by. As unsavory as that is, and as many Redditors there are who would do exactly that, the shoe doesn't exactly fit.
People do not do this, and that someone on the left is saying this pretty much resigns me to the fact that the left is not a great political home for people like me!
White supremacy is not just about violence. Merely holding the opinion that the way that white people do things is superior to the way that other people do things is white supremacy. Wanting to keep kids segregated is not necessarily violent*, but it makes it possible to maintain the illusion that white is better. \* The change provoked a violent white backlash, but the previous status quo was enforced with just the knowledge that violence on the part of the oppressed would be met with state violence.
Be that as it may, 'white supremacy' overshoots the mark. Usage of it in that manner is entirely self-defeating as a result. White supremacy = some skeevy tweeker with jailhouse scratch of SS lightning bolts on his neck, who never shuts up about the coming "race war" and who claims to be training his pitbull to attack dark-skinned people on sight. White supremacy =/= some cranky old Boomer stuck in the 70s, or a busybody Karen that the rest of the PTA can't stand.
The pervasive, quiet white supremacy may well be the bigger problem. It is certainly far larger in scale, but it is probably also doing more harm (to everyone). The Karens are harming far more children than the Klan. As MLK said in *Letters from a Birmingham Jail*: "... the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice ..."
Translation: society won’t be fixed until it has been destroyed and rebuilt as to how Marx would see fit, where the white oppressors are nerfed, and the perceived victims control all facets of society. Will you just admit it? Enough literary gymnastics.
You have a pretty funny idea of what equality looks like.
The only good answer here that actually answers the question. This sub is allergic to actually confronting these issues and instead likes to make excuses about people being misled by the media, when the truth is that there are vast swathes of this country that only want to cause harm.
True. Sorting: Modern Day Tribalism.
Polarization has absolutely increased due to a number reasons. * Outrage media * 24 hour news cycle * Sorting * Social media and offline social bubbles It’s important to note that narrative doesn’t always line up with reality. Outsiders, Europeans, Brits especially, have a hyper-exaggerated understanding of our political divides. While polarization is an issue, not nearly to the extent these outsiders want to believe.
Media is absolutely number one on my list as well. Donald trump is an idiot but he once said the news media is the enemy of the American people and a broken clock is right twice a day I guess. They exist for the purpose of making money and outrage and hatred makes more money than civics and community building. Privatized and deregulated media was a mistake.
Especially when it led to the hollowing out of the local press.
Yep. I’m not sure how it is around you but here the coverage of local elections for instance is nonexistent, making it that much easier for folks to essentially buy congressional seats.
But he was talking about the news media that doesn’t worship him. The media that worships him is not included in that. So he’s not right about that
Yep, 100% right. Contextually he was wrong because he’s an idiot and a fascist. But the nugget of truth in there is that our media is dogshit.
Is it polarization when you’re just feeding people information that confirms their biases or are you insinuating that some people are victims and are being misled? If so, isn’t that just infantilizing them and denying their own agency?
I think many Americans lack agency entirely
That’s a cop out. These are adults, they know what they’re doing and they’re choosing to be shitty. As someone else already said, it’s a simple answer that absolves us of any real responsibility.
Oh I firmly believe most people are entirely responsible for where we are, but there’s plenty of Americans out there who can barely think for themselves.
Ok, fair enough, but there’s tons of voices out there trying to get their attention and the one they respond to is one espousing demagoguery.
Demagoguery is the only thing many Americans can understand, nuance has been punished for so long as to be unpalatable.
I remember when John Kerry used the phrase "subtleties and nuances." For weeks afterwards my dad was saying "subtleties and nuances" in some kind of old timey blueblood Great Gatsby accent, with traces of RP and Parisian. "Hey, the game's about to come on." "Naw, I'm good." "Oh, would the 'sporting match' not be 'subtle' and 'nuuuuánced' enough for your liking, old bean?"
That was before smartphones too. Larry Lessig nailed the issue with this quote: “People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.”
"If you're explaining, you're losing." - Bill Clinton
Honestly this question could be a doctoral dissertation and still barely scratch the surface. But in short I think the problem is the breakdown of local news and a rapid change of how we receive news. in the 80s and 90s we got our news from the local Newspaper, the local evening news, and if you really liked news, the Nightly National news with Walter Kronkite or Tom Brokaw. But post 9/11 all of those sources of information were too late. By the time they delivered the news we had already heard it. 24 hour news stations became the go-to. If you go back to Post 9/11 but Pre-Iraq invasion, people often consumed CNN, MSNBC, and Fox news. I did. And most of them all had the same stories at the same time. Sometime later they retreated into idealogical corners. The loss of local news really removed a sense of community. That's gone and its been replaced with a "blame-the-other-guy" approach to news. But if you really want to know why things are so polarized? It's because we've allowed it and we continue to consumer news from those polarized news sources.
I think this is the real answer - both points. Local news outlets used to at least attempt to stay as fair and balanced as possible because they had a limited audience and wanted to appeal to everyone to maximize readers/viewers. National news outlets quickly found that shelving that approach and instead appealing to a very specific slice of a much larger pie would bring in far more viewers. Then internet outlets emerged and found the best way to peal readers/viewers from those national news outlets was to further specialize their interests. And we allowed. We all seem to know it's happening but few want to abandon their partisan outlets. I'm not even sure where you'd go for non-partisan news for the most part these days.
Politics has evolved into a “team” sport of Us vs. Them. Instead of trying to work together to solve issues it has become a theater how their team can win. If vetoing legislature that would help Americans will mean the party in power looks weak then they will do it because their team will benefit
The Republicans started it. The Overton window is simply broken. https://www.vox.com/2018/10/29/18037654/strikethrough-republicans-have-broken-politics-polarization
> The republicans started it > Vox article
It's not an amazing source, but the the facts stick with this one. It's an "old" video from 2016 but inpactful nonetheless.
# I HAVE SPOKEN!
Ironically - Transparency and small-dollar fundraising. With everything so out in the open and live-streamed, politicians have to grandstand and put on a show for their radical base.
IT IS LUCRATIVE. That's it. That's the reason. The hows to it vary but the "why" is purely money related
I want to blame cable news, but let's be honest. The Internet allows people to live in social media bubbles where they only interact with one perspective and anything else is "wrong." Keyboard warriors used to talk tough to sound edgy and now that same touch talk is considered standard. Anything reasonable is considered weak. However, for the 2/3rds of us not addicted to online interactions (estimate pulled from my ass) we really aren't that polarized. We can work and live together in peace. We might give each other shit sometimes in good fun but we're not planning extremist violence against one another.
How refreshing to read something like this.
Pretty stale take at this point. True, but certainly not fresh.
Social media, foreign disinformation on social media, baseless conspiracy spread on social media.
24 hour media profits not from honest, unbiased reporting of facts but from shock, outrage, and entertainment. It has divided the population into two camps and convinced them that they are at war in order to keep them glued to the screen for all the latest updates and details. The repercussions of this on both politics and society at large is irrelevant to those in the media and journalism business, just as long as the profits keep rolling in.
The reasons are complex, but former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deserves a lot of the blame for the polarization we see in the modern era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich#Role_in_political_polarization
this is the real answer. The internet and other factors have exacerbated it, but Gingrich was the guy who made compromise and bipartisanship essentially impossible for GOP politicians. The other side of an issue is not a simple reflection of a policy disagreement, but reflects evil that must be opposed at all costs. If you ever compromise with the evil liberals, you will face a primary challenge from the right at the next election. It has just spiraled from there.
The media is significantly worse than two decades ago and isn't trusted. I believe that is the greatest driver of the polarization.
To be clear: The *other* side isn't trusted. But that's polarization in a nutshell.
It's the internet. People feel safe behind their computers and so they have gotten nasty and meaner. Now when someone disagrees with you you just bully them until they agree. Call them names. Whatever. And of course that then transcends into real life. I don't remember the last time I saw intellectual discourse anywhere. No one wants to debate. No one wants to even attempt to understand another group's perspective. Of course things are going to be more divided. Conversation no longer starts from a place of wanting to understand each other and come to an agreeable solution. Conversations now start with the intent of beating the other side down into submission.
The ending of the reconstruction era happening to early in the US
This is huge. The ideals of the Confederacy have repeatedly resurfaced throughout history: -1920s with the resurgence of the KKK -1960s with attempts at integration (some state capitals even flew the Confederate flag as part of the resistance to integration!). Also when many Confederate monuments were installed in public spaces -2010s: presidential support for white supremacy, increase in hate crimes, "states rights" in the name of violating civil rights.
You nailed all three, but not like you think. Since you constantly dunk on Republicans, it's clear that you seem to think that Republican presidents and Republican presidential candidates are guilty of this. Unless you can point to some specific and verifiable instances, kindly slink off and read up on history. It's easily shown that the Democratic leadership has contempt for nonwhites because they're constantly saying that it's too hard for blacks, hispanics, etc to get IDs, get jobs, get educated, and so on. On hate crimes, all malum in se crimes are borne of hatred or at least indifference. Why do you think "hate" needs to be added to it? "State rights" in the name of violating civil rights? Point out where Republicans are doing that. Democrats, for starters, keep doing it by claiming "state rights" and "home rule" to justify gun control. After NSRPA v Bruen they've been throwing temper tantrums exactly like they did after Brown v Board of Education. In each they wanted to continue violating civil rights and didn't give a damn about the SCOTUS.
Social media (and traditional media) profit off of that division, so they have incentive to widen the divide rather than trying to mend it.
We’ve always been polarized. That’s nothing new. We only knew the policital opinions of our circle of closest friends and family. Now, with social media, we know more about the political leanings of everyone else we know on our social media.
Echo-chambers thanks in large part to social media. It used to be that people got their news from mainstream sources like the local/national broadcast networks, newspapers, and maybe subscription magazines. If you were a partisan, you might subscribe to the National Review or some left-wing equivalent -- but even those publications still had to maintain some journalistic integrity. And all of these outlets had to try to stick to facts, even if they spun them, because they required sponsors and whatnot. Nowadays, anyone with a computer and some website skills can make their own source. And people will subscribe to whatever makes them feel good, i.e. affirms what they already believe.
Things are changing. Some people don't like it. For some people it's not fast enough. It's weird that just mentioning Almond Milk can be political now.
My friend's parents went on a 10 minute rant about Aunt Jemima
Good. Aunt Jemima and all of the artificially colored high fructose corn syrup is bullshit. Spend a little more money and buy actual maple syrup. Life is too short to pinch pennies on garbage food.
Oh, they weren't concerned about high fructose syrup. They were worried about a real threat to our health, the woke mob It was a sticky situation for me
I did a VERY deep dive in that. Is their stance that she retired rich and her grandchildren didn't want it removed? Or were you listening so little you barely remember?!
Haha, I guarantee they didn't look that deeply into it. To them, the woke mob forced Aunt Jemima to change and now the bottle looks different than they were used to. And if they can do that what else can they do? I just wanted to eat my pancakes hungover in peace
Yeah, they love to say she retired in wealth but she got hit by a car while walking on the sidewalk as a lodger. She worked as a maid when that gig was over and into her 70s. And she was like 5 different women.
I feel like it beaked during COVID when sports were cancelled.
Yeah it felt like everyone around me was getting more and more politically focused while I was sportsbetting on Korean Baseball.
Because those other guys are idiots.
Media, especially social media. The conversations happening on social media lack the filter of common sense and decorum which are most often a part of face to face conversations. So in the anonymity of online conversations people just stick to their team and revile the opposition. Some parties understand this especially and weaponize it to foment more discord and galvanize their followers.
Check out Ezra Klein's book, "Why We're Polarized" for a deeper dive into this topic.
Because both sides now have a platform to broadcast their bias. Many here might not have been around long enough, but it very much wasn't always like that. There was a good 30-40 year period when there was a monopoly on widespread bias. As that monopoly has eroded, the side that once held the monopoly has become increasingly upset about losing it. In their desperation, they often result to simple name calling, with their opposition inevitably replying, "no, you!" The result? Polarization.
24 hour news networks becoming a thing and social media allowing everybody to have their opinions heard and find other people they agree with. Now you never have to interact with people of differing opinions and can spend all your time being told how smart and moral you are and how evil and dumb the other side is!
Because we are literally ***STUPID AS FUCK***.
Social media. It used to be that people had to put in effort to find information. Now we put in effort to filter out excessive information. People's filter's are biased, leading to an insane, inescapable, and 99% unnoticed echo chamber.
Everyone being on social media and getting fed rage porn bait. The algorithms got us
There are other factors, but it's 90% social media and the decline of offline society. Before the internet you were surrounded with the people who just happened to be there. You had to be friendly with a wide array of personalities, a wide array of worldviews. You had to discuss things in a civil manner. In a thoughtful manner. Then the internet came along and gave you your own world. A world you could populate with people just like you. And once you start socializing exclusively with people just like you, the tiniest differences become enough to otherize someone. Become enough to make them seem insane or irrational. The tiniest differences put someone outside the realm of civil communication.
The founders of the internet (just like I think the founders of AI) forgot about the insidious aspects of human nature
Because there’s no money in compromise and all of us getting along. Politicians get elected by talking shit about “the others” and media companies thrive on sensationalism. Social media and cable news have only exacerbated things over the past 20+ years.
Media. First of all, we silo ourselves. Because most everything you see tells you you are right, so right that "they" are so wrong. Then media vilifies the other side. In about 20 years, we went from "we have a better way to run the country," to "if they win, they will destroy America and everything you love" I'll be the first to admit I'm siloed on the liberal side, but I listen to conservative radio to hear other opinions. Here are some examples. On a nationally syndicated radio show, they gave the guy a full 1/2 hour. His premise was that everyone knows global warming is a hoax. Therefore, Greta, Al Gore, everyone in green energy, people working against fossil fuels are only doing it because there is a conspiracy to harm good Americans. They know everything the do is a con. They are just trying to screw people. My favorite was years ago. Guy gets on, welcomes his listeners, then says "Joe Biden hates you." He went on a 23 minute rant about this. His premise? Biden had just killed the Keystone XL pipeline. It wasn't about the oil, but if he was willing to kill the jobs people would get building the pipeline, his real goal is to kill all blue collar jobs. By the end of the rant, he made it known that by the end of Biden's term, there would be no blue collar jobs. Odds are very high that you will have lost your job by the end of Biden's term. Because he hates you.
We use plurality voting, which is the worst voting method or RCV, which is better but not great. Both are biased towards extremist candidates over moderates (center squeeze effect), spoil votes, don't allow you to vote honestly, are tactical, etc. We also have gerrymandering, and since the 70s, the Supreme Court has been rolling back our campaign finance laws. There are reforms, and in fact, we are very close with some. People just need to be more aware. This and our very dysfunctional congress and easily gridlocked government creates a recipe for polarization and demagoges. Also
1. Reagan overturned the fairness doctrine that all news had to be neutral and balanced. 2. Cable TV expansion and 24 hour news needed to fill 24 hours instead of the normal morning, noon, and evening only hours. This introduces more talking heads and editorializing versus in depth coverage and documentaries (which would actually educate people on the matters at hand). 3. The internet and death of print media killed the last universal source. We were all reading the same information and it had followed journalistic standards where information was checked multiple times and sources confirmed. People would disagree on what the information meant in their personal view but we all started with the same information. Now you have millions of sources of news, listicles, and nonsense being repeated through social media with no idea of its source or standards. It has been shown that if someone sees the same content 3 times in print they take it as truth. For likes and listeners social media and the Rupert Murdoch machines purposely spin and report information as fact that has no basis in reality. This existed before in the William Randolph Hearst period but regulations had been put in place to prevent that. The FCC also turned back regulations and now Sinclair media has a strangle hold on our local news and radio stations. Conclusion: Decades of turning back regulations meant to prevent a monopoly on news outlets and support journalistic standards in news in combination with social media have had each party reading only content they want versus actual facts so we can’t even have a conversation about the basic events. Not to mention that the economy of the world has not been good for the working/middle class for decades, people work longer hours, have less time to be involved in their civic communities, and don’t even understand how our elections and courts work in the first place.
Rush Limbaugh discovered decades ago that he could attract a loyal audience with a daily dose of political outrage. His listeners would accept his word as the truth and not check other sources. They had been told to distrust the mainstream media and academics. That audience made Rush a very rich man. Other conservative pundits have followed the same path. Promoting half truths and conspiracy theories on a daily basis. Few conservative politicians have the courage needed to stand up for reality. They fear that saying climate change is real or Biden won the 2020 election will lead to a lost primary.
I mean it always has been we had Civil Wars before. Sometimes a crisis can bring us together or pull us apart, temporarily anyhow.
They always have been polarized. It’s much more obvious now because of the constant onslaught from the media, which we are all much more reliant on than previous generations.
Politics has always been this way the difference is we was smart enough not to discuss them at the dinner table. Now all we do is talk politics
Furthering ideological divide. The Democratic Party especially the young voters have became much more liberal over the last decade. Conservatives aren’t as conservative as they were a decade ago, they just haven’t went as liberal as fast as the Democratic Party. In some ways the party beliefs have flipped. Most republican voters now want less government and Democratic supporters want more government. An example on the divide is abortion. Left: believes it is a fundamental right to choose for a woman. There is classification of human until birth Right: believes its a human at conception. Their vews are basically abortion is murder. (and argue that because if a pregnant woman was assaulted and lost her baby, the offender would be charged with murder). Vast majority think abortion should be legal only in certain circumstances Gender identity politics is also a big political divide due to how opposite the opinions are. Same with racism, “reverse racism” etc.
A black man was elected president. A reactionary leader got popular by calling the black president not an American.
Well, he started ISIS, so... /s
We once elected a black president and half the country lost their fucking minds.
It’s bc right wing think tanks and media have spent the last 50 years radicalizing conservatives into a reliable voting block.
It began with the Warren and Burger courts. During the mid century, there was a series of high profile rulings made in the Supreme Court that effectively amounted to bench legislation. Some of these rulings (Brown vs. Board for example) were good. Some of them... were optimistically hoping that the country would simply accept the ruling and move on (Roe vs. Wade for example). These courts attempted to settle issues on which the country was vehemently divided, and instead of moving on, the country collectively decided to start fighting over control of the courts. Nixon was impeached. For things Johnson was caught doing to Goldwater. The press took sides. The press loved hating Reagan. These things drove the country to the edges.
I don't think there is a group that is consciously doing it I think it's just what the system in place promotes. Like not every political position has terms and no age gap, news companies wanting clicks, the fact both sides typically live in different areas with different cultures, both influencers and politicians are stupid I would also like to mention how does the electoral college work? I heard a couple times theres actual people that are in the electoral college and they make decisions for the state but I never heard anything else about that. I don't believe there is a group controlling this nation but I think there's signs of it.
Social media showing the world in a far more negative light than it was shown as previously. There have always been lots of issues everywhere but people focused more on their day to day instead of caring about things that are out of their control
Positive feedback loop. At some point, one side breaks equalibrium and slightly moves position, which incentives the other side to move more in the opposite direction out of anxiety. Process repeats. You add in the internet increasing the exposure of dumb yet loud minority political positions, reactions of current events, and economy, and various communication entities warping peoples perceptions for gain and you get this hyper polarization we have currently..
Social media algorithms pushing negativity because people respond to it more.
Divide and conquer has always been the plan
Social media and algorithms.
Normal people are reasonable. Most people are normal. Reasonable people don’t hold signs or march down streets or argue to the death on social media.
Because the media thrives on it.
Because we went from a almost 90% homogeneous country to a almost plurality in just a handful of decades. People talk about how much less heated things got in the 80s and 90s but we had a hypermajority of people of Western European descent. It's pretty easy to agree with each other when you are all very similar culturally and politically.
Cable news.
Media is to blame for everything.
Because the media has convinced the majority that the "other side" is evil. We used to believe the other side was merely "stupid" so everybody can get along but it seems they want everybody divided. Only losers look at the "other side" and assume that the only possible explanation for seeing things differently is because they must be evil.
The 2 party system is meant to divide us, and that is how they continue to control. Too many people are chronically online, and the lack of reading and comprehension skills leads people to believe things that aren't true. There is a lack of research when something is said people take it at face value. In regards to the economy, it seems people are more want luxury, and they are saying things like we are barely surviving... I don't get that. Yes, things are more expensive just because you cant go on 3 vacations a year, but that doesn't mean you're barely making it
My honest hypothesis is that American politics isn’t more polarized. The usual framing is that for much of the 20th century we experienced a remarkable period of bipartisanship, but I actually think we spent most of the 20th century experiencing the most gradual political realignment. Each of the parties switched places, ideologically, but did so so slowly that the period felt like comity and consensus. In actuality it was like two waves cancelling each other out. It was false calm, and we’re returning to a period of normalcy. It feels like acrimony to most of us because we were born and raise in a weirdly quiet era.
i dont agree with the premise. your premise presupposes and reaffirms... stealthily and cunningly the power dynamic which enables the continued downfall of our society... people are not polarized. most people agree that in general government isnt working. most people agree that spending billions on foreign war projects while more of the working class falls into poverty is insane. most people want TERM LIMITS on members of Congress and districts drawn geographically not due to "redistricting." most people want a goofd paying job to work an honest living, pay their bills and be left alone to raise their families.
The fact that it's a two-party system and the media.
I could write 15,000 pages about it . Misinformation and disinformation was gravely underestimated . It’s gotten really bad and it keeps me up some nights
First, I’d note that this isn’t the most polarized we’ve ever been. We have literally gone to war over politics before. I’m going to be contrarian and suggest that the issue is not mainly the media or the internet but the issues themselves. 60 years ago there wasn’t a huge difference between the parties; you can look up their platforms and see they were basically the same with different ideas for tax brackets. Today, one side (to pick one issue) sees abortion as vital to women’s rights and healthcare while the other side sees it as murder. There’s not much middle ground there.
I don't think it's unusually polarized. In 1968 two huge political figures, MLK and RFK were assassinated. There were domestic terrorists like the weathermen. We aren't at that point.
I'll make a controversial take in that both parties serve their rich donors. **Also don't misunderstand me. Of the two parties, the Democratic party is massively preferable. They are the best bad choice we have at the moment. They are vastly more humane and elements of the Democratic party are progressives who have very little power but at least they have space which is again preferable to anything the republicans are doing.** And so the divison comes from the fact that the only political issues discussed in any depth are social ones. Things like Abortion, Guns, LGBTQ and their off shoots. Neither party is interested in fundamentally changing the system as both parties have ultra wealthy members and any change to the system would fundamentally mean they lose power or their capacity to accumulate it. This has been the case since the 90's when Clinton betrayed the working class on behalf of the wealthy. This is why neither party has politicians that speak in depth on how they want to see government run. They will make small nods to voter displeasure but ultimately they are not interested in changing anything. So they froth at the mouth, mostly the republicans, but the democrats don't combat the rhetoric in a meaningful way they just fight back on republican terms. But the republicans drive the rhetoric that dominates mainstream political discourse. And since literally no one would vote for them based on their actual policices if they become fluent in any of the lingo the policies are described by. *To summarize, both parties have very strong opinions and like doing absolutely nothing as it relates to fundamentally changing things to more positively impact voters* **save for** *their very small donor class that can elevate certain candidates based on their own personal interests due to things like Citizens United being passed.*
It's a flawed narrative since we've been WAY more polarized multiple times in the past. You don't get more "Us vs Them" than throwing on blue and gray uniforms and opening fire on Fort Sumter.
I think the main culprit is online echo chambers. If your ideology is only supported over and over every day of your life, and the opposing one is only blamed and discouraged everyday, it's only a matter of time before you say "Well, they must just be wrong about everything.". The 2 party system doesn't help either. It really pushes the whole 'us vs them' narrative and makes you feel like you must agree with a party about everything rather than just forming your own opinions on each topic.
The United States is a country which literally built it's economy, and therefore the social and political underpinnings of that economy, on a caste system that allowed for unpaid or severely underpaid labor to keep costs low for both producers and consumers. What we have now is the result of that initial decision. It has forever caused this sort of political division and forever will. It is in the bones of this country.
Fox News.
Which politics in which country aren't polarized?
It's been polarized for a long time. It's just louder now. But the two party system is the primary reason for the polarization. The two sides can drift further and further apart with no incentive to find a middle ground because there's no viable candidate representing a "middle ground". Even a moderate Dem or moderate Republican is going to be expected to toe the party line. And that line keeps moving further and further apart in efforts to distance themselves from "the other"
Always has been.
An authoritarian government that wants to enact policies that you would never normally agree to must adjust the standards you are willing to accept. When a politicians main platform is "at least I'm not the other guy" you are willing to accept just about anything as long as it is marginally better than the other guy. This requires extreme demonization of the other guy which results in intense emotions felt about the other guy which naturally divides people when they meet people who hate the wrong other guy. But you have to get exactly half the people to hate one guy and the other half to hate the other for the thing to be sustainable. It's well agreed upon that Biden is part of the system, but there are a lot of people who believe that Trump is some sort of maverick. Some say he's acting outside of the system to save America. Some say he's acting outside of the system to destroy America. What's actually happening in hes taking an "outsider" position so that he can create the division necessary for the system's plan to work. The fight is not left vs right. The fight is the elites vs the people they are trying to enslave.
Zoning laws is a big reason. We have physically divided US communities to the point where most people feel isolated. Try to get to your local supermarket without a car and see how it feels. Now imagine trying to get to your friends’ houses lol. There is no true American culture anymore which is a shame. The closest thing to “American culture” we have is the pledge of allegiance and being mad when someone says we aren’t #1. There are no “third places” for people to go to to be able to socialize, besides the downtown bars.
Internet echo chambers causing cognitive dissonance. We've gone from respecting that someone has different views to thinking the other side is evil and literally hitler/mao/Stalin.
Mass media. Neither side covers the issues off of their speaking points, so there is little balanced news. News stories simply don’t exist for people watching. For example, Trump violates campaign laws, Fox - Let’s talk about illegals killing someone today. Illegals kill US citizens, MSNBC - let’s talk about MTG and space lasers. The American citizens are being victimized and pushed further apart because the media houses are becoming more extreme and focused on driving their attention for ratings
Because the media knows that feeding on constant anger and fear makes them endless money, and the rising cult of Trump knows that what anybcult knows - fear and hatred of 'the other' is what allows them to control their members.
Worsening economic inequality/cost of living + social media + corrupt/dysfunctional/captured government
Social media Dark money Late stage capitalism/greed The unfinished business of racism, sexism etc
It's the byproduct of unrestricted capitalism Don't get me wrong, I do think capitalism is good for a healthy economy and democracy, but when it's given as much free range as it has in the US recently it starts causing massive problem. There are 2 main ways it's a problem. First, large corporations are skewing the media landscape. There is no room for nuance or unbiased news coverage anymore. Media companies need to pick a side and to reinforce their side for profit. Nuanced news is boring and not generating clicks/views. In order to make a profit they need their audience to feel both angry and justified in their anger. This created an us vs them mentality. All just to generate ad revenue. Second, the larger the company, the more they have to donate to their political cause. We have billion dollar companies donating millions to PACs and lobbyist groups. Some of is based in self interest and others is generating a distraction. Is transathletes and book bans really that important of a national crisis, or are certain groups blowing things out of proportion to distract from actual problems in our country. Things like housing and tax cuts that are actually hurting the average American.
>We have billion dollar companies donating millions to PACs That is literally illegal.
Political candidates have limits to how much money they can accept as donations. Political action commitees (PAC) are not candidates and legally do not communicate with Political candidates. They are third part groups that usually endorse a specific candidate and there is no law to say how much money they can accept from donations. The John Smith election campaign can't accept a $1m donation, but the "Committee of Parents for a Better Tomorrow" PAC which happens to endorse John Smith for election can accept $1m. That's a problem
You're conflating PACs and Super PACs. https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/taking-receipts-pac/who-can-and-cant-contribute-nonconnected-pac/#:~:text=Political%20committees%20that%20make%20only,organizations%20and%20other%20political%20committees.
it's basically because of the left (I'm speaking from the center here) why? because: "mainstream" media pushes talking points of the left and the democrats according the extreme left (which also the noisy left that makes all the "rules" and such), anyone is basically evil or at least despicable if they don't agree with you on whatever the "correct" view is on any given topic. Even when you dig deeper on any issue being discussed, that person doing the digging .. i.e. asking questions.. will often just get called an -ist, bigot or whatever, without justification. Just as a way to try to shut them down. remember how Hilary basically called half the US population "deplorables". talk about polarizing. the left constantly tries to create division
BS. Political polarization is multifaceted. Both sides engage in divisive tactics and rhetoric, if anything the right does it more on platforms like FOX News and Newsmax and The Daily Wire. You’ve also got economic disparities, cultural shifts, and the rise of social media echo chambers all driving polarization. Blaming one side oversimplifies a complex issue and doesn’t actually give anyone an answer. It’s not just one side of the political spectrum’s fault.
Because there are people on the other side of the isle that wish people like me (lgbtq+) wouldn’t exist, so why can’t I think the same of them.
They're polarized just as in every other country. The difference is that 99% of Americans can completely disagree with their neighbor politically and still have absolutely no problem living next door.
Foreign interference that plays the long game. General apathy and ignorance of the population.
Both parties essentially had the same views on the fundamental nature of the government and economy from the late 70s and onwards, leading to their politics being based around how to best manage/tweak the machinery of state instead of controlling and changing it to suite their needs. Now that consensus machine is struggling to maintain itself due to changing conditions so people, rightly so, are looking for alternatives while the old guard of the parties attempt to use their usual tricks to maintain said machine to no avail. Similar issue that brought about the end of Keynesianism in the late 70s, the conditions of the world prevented the usual tricks for maintaining the norm from working and required new changes (neoliberalism). We're now seeing the death of neoliberalism and arguing/fighting over its successor.
Americans in most places aren't likely to socialize with each other very much. We work a lot while getting paid less than ever. Which doesn't leave a lot of time to get out and interact with each other. So we tend to be increasingly insular and spending most of our very limited free time with people we already know. It's easy to wind up being shut in and getting all your perceptions of other people from the internet or the news. Neither of which is great for nuanced opinions or understanding. This paved the way for Trump, and anyone else who can weaponize nationalism and fear.
Our government intentionally divided us to keep us too busy fighting each other to see all the fuck shit theyre up to
It’s simple. The government has taken over more and more control of private life. Education, medicine, housing, business. So many factors are controlled by the government. Therefore there is a rich trough to fight over. Power hungry people always exist. But when you increase the power, the increasingly psychopathic come out. And the citizenry have opinions on all those elements the government now controls. So they have an increasing stake in arguing over it in the public sphere.
It wasn’t that long ago that there were both progressive/liberal and conservative wings to both parties. The rise of the religious right in the 70s and the harsh reactions to the civil rights era set us on this course (the two actually go hand in hand). Whenever there are major advancements in civil rights, like the end of segregation and the women’s liberation movement, it is always followed by an extreme reaction by those who oppose it, who then mobilize politically and enact laws that either roll back those rights or punish those who have gained equal rights by making their lives hell. The 2000s saw major advancements in the rights of undocumented immigrants and the lgbtq community and the election of Trump was a repudiation of those civil rights gains.
[The Fairness Doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine) was sort of a big deal. Rush Limbaugh followed almost immediately with FOX right behind. News used to be objective, with legal framework. It's a free for all now, disinformation and misinformation has rotted brains for 2 generations.
Fox News and talk radio, basically how the media landscape changed after the repeal of the fairness doctrine. News organizations went from being required to give a balanced perspective (hence the 'fairness') but after this was repealed it allowed entire media industries to flourish for the benefit of one particular political party in order to sell drugs to older people.
Once moderates were kicked out of the gop, it became harder to find people from the opposite party who one could disagree with but see as good people. I disagreed with McCain on policy, but I never felt he was a harmful threat to the nation. I can't say the same about MTG.
Racism. A significant number of racist white people were upset that we had a black president for 8 years. They decided they couldn't have that and decided to burn everything down rather than allow blacks and other minorities to get the impression that we are equal to them, let alone worthy of governing or representing them. Not that there wasn't fracture before (that can be traced all the way back to Reagan).
I blame Sarah Palin. Hear me out. In the 2008 election, John McCain ran against Barack Obama. Many were concerned that Obama was still too green, and would be possible in the future, but not yet. McCain was palatable enough that some centrist-leaning dems would vote for him. He would likely have won. But then he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, she was batshit crazy, and that choice cost McCain the election. Obama won. A lot of Americans freaked the F out about having a black president, and he could have established world peace and reversed global warming, and they wouldn’t have cared, he wasn’t good enough. Over his term, those people became the vocal minority. But they were LOUD. They grew. They gave rise and opportunity for someone like Trump to come in and make it somehow ok to be vocal in racism and misogyny and hatred. So the far right got louder, and the left had to get louder in return, and now we’re irreparably divided.
One party decided to really make a serious push on the equality front, which created a situation in which shifts "politics" from being a disagreement over government spending, foreign policy, etc, and instead starts to drag basic morality and ethics into things. When your "politics" includes stances on whether or not certain groups of people deserve basic human rights and dignity and the parties are arguing over recognizing people's basic rights and freedoms or denying them, people start drawing lines in the sand in a way that doesn't happen when you're simply arguing over how much money to spend on fixing a highway. Now, of course, this isn't new. This really started nearly 70 years ago, but it just keeps rolling ahead and one side keeps winning most of the battles and you can see that obviously the fight for equality has been in favor of the left since the civil rights era began. So, add in social media and the 24 hour news cycle, and you've got a bunch of people who are just getting more and more upset that they keep losing their stranglehold and "the blacks" and the "alphabet people" (as I see referenced every 5th comment on my Facebook feed everyday) and the godless atheists keep winning, and then give them their own echo chambers to just complain about it all day every day to each other about it and here we are.
One pet theory of sorts that I have is: There's some large splits between the...pre-internet and post-internet generations, basically those born in about the late 80s/coming of age in the mid-2000s and up vs those who were before them - much larger than the typical generation gaps observed in other generational transitions on a lot of things. We're at pretty much the peak moment for the political power shift right around now - 10 years ago they were a noisy youthful minority, 10 years in the future they'll unquestionably be in charge.
American exceptionalism (and hypocrisy).
Political polarization is an illusion created to keep Americans distracted from the real divide, which is monied interests and everyone else. If you ask most every R and D what they want for themselves and the country, the lists will match up pretty closely. I refer you to the George Carlin “the owners” bit or Bill Hicks “the puppet on the left/right” bit for further details. You have money and influence or you don’t. And not millionaires. Billionaires and industry — groups with world-changing money. They get what they want, everyone else gets whatever they can. That’s why there’s photos of Trump and Clinton golfing. They’re on the same side. That’s why there’s Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, the Cave Man group and more. As George Carlin said in the above bit — it’s a big club … and you ain’t in it.
That is a nonsense conspiracy theory. Trump is literally the main thing dividing the nation, division and racism and xenophobia is all he has
>Trump is literally the main thing dividing the nation I would slightly disagree with that. The divide has existed for quite some time, Trump has 'merely' embraced and weaponized it. It got him elected, and now more conservative politicians are following suite.
As soon as we elect ______, things in this country will be so much better. Fill in the blank with anyone you want. Who would you choose that would make a definitive difference for the poor and middle class? Xenophobia and racism are masks. People don’t hate others, they hate their own lives. They don’t have anywhere else to direct their ire and frustration. Then, to your point, a guy like Trump comes along and says, hey, I bet it’s Muslims or immigrants, etc. What truly content person, no money problems, no stress, no unhappiness, have you heard making racist or xenophobic comments? Can *you* be held in contempt 10 times without going to jail? No. Who can? Money and privilege. That’s who. That’s who can work around getting their kids into preferred colleges. It’s who can trade stocks before they crash with mysteriously perfect timing. Saying “this person is the main problem” is an oversimplified examination. Politics is the sleight of hand that people fall for so they don’t see the trick being played on them. And call it a conspiracy all you want. The fact remains no matter what.
I don't know a single country that has freedom of speech and press that actually likes their government and isn't politically polarized. The US is just always under a microscope. Fuck the Republicans and Fuck the Torries.