12 ms·
Political polarization may emerge because of conflicting desires, not beliefs
- sharemywin 9y agoThat's depressing. No matter how right I am I'll never be able to convince others.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- randyrand 9y agoI remember seeing an animated graphic of survey results over time (Past ~20 years) that showed the left has been getting lefter at ~5x the rate that the right is getting righter. I'm curious what would explain this.
- WaxProlix 9y agoDo you remember where this was? I'm interested because it feels like the exact opposite to me. We've got weakened labor unions and strengthened centralized control over resources, we've got stronger centralized government power over individuals (PATRIOT act et al), basically no world powers with an even nominally leftist government, yadda yadda. In the wake of the financial crisis, a lot of Golden Dawn-esque nationalist parties have crept up and are finding more success than I'd initially expected. It feels like we're moving more authoritarian right to me.
- voidz 9y agoI think this is actually totalitarian left - the right is more about personal liberties etc. Not trolling – I might be wrong –people more knowledgeable about the left/right dichotomy are welcome to shed some light onto this.
- metaphorm 9y agoat the extremes, both left and right are totalitarian and are nightmarish w.r.t personal liberties. this is sometimes called the "horsheshoe political spectrum" [0] but personally I think that's a misunderstanding of political belief systems. left vs. right is meaningless. the real axis runs between liberation and domination. extreme domination parties (whether nominally capitalist, communist, fascist, or theocratic) are the scary ones that have that bloody track record of holocausts and genocides. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
- TheGirondin 9y ago>I think this is actually totalitarian left You're absolutely right. There is only one side organizing at grassroots level (indicating that these are not isolated occurrences, but rather are coming from the groups shared ideals) across the country to shut down the political speech of the other, violently in many cases, and that is the left.
- WaxProlix 9y agoSure thing buddy. http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/05/15/white-supremacist-richard-spencer-leads-march-charlottesville-va-reminiscent-kkk-gathering/ http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/05/15/white-supremacist-ric...
- TheGirondin 9y agoThanks for posting, as this one event by the far, far right with a couple dozen people stands in sharp contrast to dozens and dozens of examples involving as many as hundreds of people from the left, and really shows how unequatable they are.
- knowaveragejoe 9y agoThis is just the most high profile example in recent memory.
- voidz 9y agoMedia bias, perhaps?
- bryanlarsen 9y agoIt's more obvious if you use the alternate names "progressive" and "conservative" to describe the left and right. The left is in favour of change, the right is anti-change. So as things change, what the left wants changes, but the right doesn't.
- narrowrail 9y ago>It's more obvious And then you factor in the the original Progressive Party came out of the Republicans (i.e. Roosevelt).
- harimau777 9y agoIt seems to me that part of the solution might be working to develop solutions that don't prevent the other side from achieving their desires. My ideal vision of how America works (e.g. the American dream as I see it) is that everyone is free to live according to their own way of life and society works for win-win solutions. However, it seems to me that both sides are afraid that if the other side wins they will try to force their lifestyle on them; and I think they are probably right.
- vkou 9y agoI want to live in such a way where I get to be a feudal lord, presiding over a large group of tenant farmers/sharecroppers/indentured servants. I want the freedom to employ the state's prisoners for my own gain, without paying them. I want the freedom to pollute, without being subjected to the tyranny of the EPA. In short, I want to be able to exercise power against those weaker, poorer, or less politically connected then me. My desires are almost certainly incompatible with yours. Politics is a process for distributing scarce resources. Brokering how, and when people can exert power to the detriment of others is an inescapable part of it. There are many bad actors who seek to do so - not as many as one might lead to believe, but they consistently find themselves at the top of the social food chain.
- harimau777 9y agoI agree that there are going to be situations where conflict between desires is unavoidable or where it is not possible to accommodate extreme desires; however that doesn't mean that finding compatible solutions is not the best approach in the vast majority of situations. I'd also point out that those are strategies to achieve desires, not desires themselves. The associated desires might be something like financial security, a sense of importance, freedom etc.
- vkou 9y agoCompatible solutions that are palatable to both parties - compromise - is very important. Sometimes, though, compromise is impossible. If you say that 3+3=6, and I say that 3+3=10, you'd be a fool to compromise on 8. This is made all the more obvious when we consider which of us gets to frame the debate. If I really wanted 3+3 to be 10, I'd just demand that we make 3+3=14, and I'll get exactly what I want, once we split the difference. Everyone wants freedom, and everyone wants agency, and everyone wants health and happiness. There's plenty of all of those things to go around. Many of us also want power, though, which is more likely to be a zero-sum game.
- zepto 9y agoThis seems like a weird and hardly surprising piece. The idea that one of two political ideas is 'right' or that that even matters is utterly absurd. The whole point of politics is to find solutions that resolve conflicting desires. Polarization happens when the solutions simply don't do that. The problem should not be framed as 'how to get people to change their desires and beliefs' to match a political ideology. The challenge is to come up with some new ways of looking at things that resolve the differences.
- WaxProlix 9y agoOr: "How to come up with a political ideology that better matches peoples' desires and beliefs," maybe?
- gnode 9y agoWhat exactly do you mean by 'resolve'? If you mean to harmonize or reconcile the desires, that's not how politics usually works. Often resolution happens by means of one side marginalising the other.
- zepto 9y agoPolitics used to work by kings beheading nobles deemed traitorous. More recently, as you say, it often works by having 'sides' that marginalize each other. I'm assuming that it's not going to be like that for the rest of human history, and suggesting that the polarization might not be a necessary outcome of people's desires, but rather an artifact of a politicians who don't know how to resolve them.
- xemdetia 9y agoI agree with this simple analysis as well, for whatever reason it became accepted to not reach consensus as just a political strategy. It's hard to tell if this is an expected outcome of the churn and burn design of the US political system's natural drift: popular candidates will stick while unpopular candidates will be replaced by popular ones and eventually the group consensus shifts one way or the other. At a certain point that's totally fine, but recently it just seems to be a consensus shift against reaching consensus which leaves us in this weird flux where there is an obvious majority and we are still frozen stiff. It potentially could just be the outcome of the two-party system needing referendum itself where the coalition democracy designs at least naturally require some level of consensus making from top to bottom.
- kilroy123 9y agoSo what is the solution? I feel like the US is currently on a very unsustainable path right now with the political polarization.
- thescriptkiddie 9y agoOne idea is to do everything we can to support minor political parties, because they bring diversity to political discourse that doesn't necessarily fit into a two-party system. Probably the most important change along these lines would be to replace first-past-the-post voting with a system that allows people to express more complex preferences, such as approval voting, ranked choice voting, or range voting. Other ideas include publicly funded elections, mixed-member proportional representation, redistricting via the shortest splitline algorithm, and compulsory voting.
- tomjen3 9y agoFar be it from me to suggest we should not support small parties (I lean heavily libertarian) but be very careful what you wish for: Donald Trump was likely as close to a political outside the US will see as a leader for many years.
- sharemywin 9y agowithout something liked ranked choice though more parties usually means more radical parties getting power.
- BearGoesChirp 9y agoChange the voting system to allow more parties so that more interests can be represented. Consider weakening the federal government and moving power back to the states so that each person has more control over their own lives (one major part of this is shifting federal taxes to state taxes). Problem is that none of the solutions will be achievable because they consist of weakening the power of those who currently have power, and few people are willing to give up such power unless there is a real and significant threat of them losing even greater power if they don't compromise. For a more discrete example, why would either major party approve a change that gives a strong voice to weaker parties? Just look at how hard they work to keep weaker parties out of any major election debates. If we don't face a significant external threat, I wonder if there are any options other than for political polarization to continue to grow until... well I'm not sure what happens. I suspect it won't be pleasant.
- mlinksva 9y ago> Participants indicated who they desired to win, and who they believed would win, the election. Would be more interesting if conducted around desires and beliefs about deeper outcomes than who wins an election.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- narrowrail 9y agoMadison discusses factionalism in Federalist No. 10, and as I read it, basically concludes that all these competing desires/interests and/or beliefs would be best served by a federal republic where locals would be able to solve their problems in the appropriate way for their constituents. So, decentralizing power away from Washington D.C. and putting it in the hands people more directly. Some people cannot accept this and would like to exert control over people living +1000 miles away. There is just too much diversity to manage 300M people from a central authority without sacrificing liberty. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and authoritarian ideas of governance must be vigilantly opposed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10#Madison.27s_arguments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10#Madison.27s_...
- derefr 9y agoI feel like this made sense for the 1700s United States because everyone there was a recent immigrant—which is to say, people with both the desire and the proven ability to pick up and move to find a place that better suits them. When you have communities of mostly that type of person, you can just make each community into its own little experiment, and tell everyone to go on a Gulliver's Travels-esque journey to find the right community for them, then settle down. When your communities, on the other hand, are full of "entrenched" families/clans—groups of people who, for reasons of proximity or tradition, just won't move no matter how bad things get where they're currently living—then the Great Republic Experiment breaks down a little. Specifically, it breaks because you'll get people who just really don't fit in a place, and would be better suited to some other system of laws available in some other state or municipality... but want to stay where they are anyway, despite suffering strong disutilities. You'll get large numbers of such people, in fact. (See: Detroit.) A large part of the reason for federalization comes down to helping those people by guaranteeing certain minimum quality-of-life benefits in all those communities, whether the majority there support them or not. Which results in communities that need to share more laws than not, and rapidly lose much of the benefits of separation. If everyone had kept the "immigrant mentality"—of being willing to drop your existing life to find personal liberty somewhere else—then the US wouldn't much need a federal government (beyond a sort of inverted border-police, working to ensure that people aren't being inhibited by local laws from crossing state lines—a "non-underground" railroad.) But Americans haven't kept that mentality, and I'm not sure there's a way to re-instill it. It's just, as far as I know, a personality trait—one that happened to have 100% representation in the 18th century US, but then reverted to the mean in their descendants.
- jhpriestley 9y agoTwo thousand years ago people were at each other's throats over "homoousion". One thousand years ago over "filioque". Four hundred years ago it was predestination. The idea that large-scale conflict over ideology is some kind of aberration to be explained by "biases" is just a figment of the modern ideology of "rationality". In five hundred years they will study this time period and ask, how could they have been so worked up over these minor and obscure points, hardly even comprehensible any more, that they tore their society apart? And the answer will be the same as always - human nature: superstitious, tribal, dogmatic, and violent.
- maxxxxx 9y agoDon't forget that this extreme polarization is an American thing. At least Germany doesn't have it to that degree. The parties have differences but they don't demonize each other.
- ryanmarsh 9y agoWait so you're saying political polarization isn't because all southerners are racist idiots? You mean they might actually have reasonable desires of their own? Mind blown. /s