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The US seems to have fallen into a game-theoretic local minimum where each party lets their crazy cousin go throw dumb rocks at the opposition because it seems

The US seems to have fallen into a game-theoretic local minimum where each party lets their crazy cousin go throw dumb rocks at the opposition because it seems to be the optimal way to drum up fanatic support for their side, all the while whistling as if in ignorance of what's going on. At least that's how it seemed to start, now it's just devolved to outright scat slinging that's co-opted our system of government into a soap opera. It would almost be funny if the poo slingers weren't the very people that make and enforce the laws that we all have to live by. Our political parties need to clean their damn houses. It's not the right's job to deal with the radical left, and it's not the left's job to deal with the radical right. Both sides need to take out their trash so we can actually get something done. We need a way to argue against a steelman opposing argument instead of always a strawman. We need to be capable of updating our opinions without risking career suicide. We need something that allows us to deal with the meta problems like fallacies and trolls and half-refutations paraded around as victories. We need to be able to hold arguments with depth and nuance.

JPKab 6y ago
Extremely well said.
postpawl 6y ago
That’s assuming both political parties actually want “something done”.
- wmeredith 6y ago
  Correct. And they definitely do not. The Democrats are not “left”. They’d barely pass for center across the pond. They are just another flavor of The Party of oligarchy and cronyism in control of this country. There are some significant differences in the platforms, but it’s mostly around wedge issues by design.
  - stefantalpalaru 6y ago
    > The Democrats are not “left”. They’d barely pass for center across the pond. Centre-right to right: https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020
    - refurb 6y ago
      Everything looks "center-right to right" when you're on the extreme left.
      - fragmede 6y ago
        So there's no such thing as the center-left?
        iso947 6y ago
        Of course there is, you see it in many european countries
      - spats1990 6y ago
        Hard to parse what you mean here. The link is indirectly about the Overton window in US politics wherein views and policies considered centrist or center-left at most in other Western democracies appear "extreme left" in the context of US politics. Conversely, mainstream right-wing views in the US appear extremely right-wing in the context of other Western democracies. The linked page attempts to demonstrate through comparison to other Western democracies that the views or proposed policies of "left" or "extreme left" US politicians are contextually leftist, not objectively. (edit: I get that "objectively" is probably not the correct word to use there, but I hope you get my meaning; it would be nice if someone could suggest a better one. Probably better to just have written "the views or proposed policies of 'left' or 'extreme left' US politicians are only contextually leftist"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
  - JPKab 6y ago
    I share your opinion. My own theory (without any real evidence) is that the oligarchs use race to divide the white working class from the non-white working class. A specific example is the video on systemic racism going around. It correctly points out redlining (a truly horrific practice), but also talks about black students having to attend underfunded schools. I attended predominantly black, underfunded, public schools my entire childhood. By this logic, I was at the same schools and was a "victim" of systemic racism. Which immediately implies that it was actually systemic classism at play against the working poor, rather than being purely race-based. If a party chose to ignore the corporate overlords and focus on issues that working class people of all ethnicities cared about, they would get a lot of votes, and very few super PAC donations.
    - v64 6y ago
      > My own theory (without any real evidence) Many philosophers and others have written about how the powerful divide the lower classes in this way. I don't have any explicit citations offhand, but your observations have merit amongst those who study these issues.
    - scruple 6y ago
      Civil Rights era leaders were killed for attempting to unite black and white labor. Your theory has evidence, as far as I'm concerned.
    - zipwitch 6y ago
      Using race to divide labor is a time-proven capitalist tactic. Go back to Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, where the system was made explicit after the mixed-race uprising again the oligarchs of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion
      - JPKab 6y ago
        "The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (many enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class. The ruling class responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705." Fascinating. I grew up in rural Virginia. A little Known fact is that the vast majority of white settlers there were indentured and/or bonded, often convicts. The first Africans in 1619 were indentured as well. Horrifically, in the 1650s when the first African slaves were brought over, the elites pushed further changes in social norms that resulted in a significant worsening of treatment of the African indentured servants who had long since become free landowners and farmers. A formerly indentured, free black man had a prosperous farm a few miles from where I grew up. The courthouse there dates to the 1600s, and the records are there that show jealous white neighbors gradually stealing his land with impunity, starting at the time that slaves started becoming common. It is chilling looking at those documents standing in that building.
epx 6y ago
Same in Brazil... I like two say there is no left and right, there are two right-wing parties, each one defending its slice of the status quo (left is pro-privileges of public servants here, which are already majority in top earners)
- andrenth 6y ago
  This seems to imply left = good, right = bad, so when a leftist party does something bad it’s reframed as right wing.
  - epx 6y ago
    Not at all, and I don't think right-wing people are bad; they just think the status quo is optimum, is a global maxima. For example, the 'vanilla' right in Brazil in XIX century managed to delay the end of slavery by 6 decades. They thought the country would collapse without slave labor to sustain the agribusiness at the time. Were they inherently bad? Of course not; they thought they couldn't do any better (and of course their opinion was tainted by the fact they owned plantations. It is only human to like the status quo when you are benefited by it. And they were plain wrong, after all. Agribusiness only grew stronger after abolition.) I classify most 'lefties' here as disguised right-wing people because they also think the public sector is perfect as it is, among other things I don't agree with. The society needs left/progressive views to go forward, as it needs righties to pay the current bills. But there are much more productive ways to be a lefty. I respect the Green Party here, as well as politicians that have been proposing UBI for 20 years or more, way before it was on vogue.
    - andrenth 6y ago
      > they just think the status quo is optimum, is a global maxima. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of right wing thought, either in general or specifically in Brazil. In general the conservative view is to improve the status quo without throwing away the good things that have been achieved. It’s an understanding that it’s much easier to destroy things (even if unintentionally) then it is to build them. I’ll agree the left sometimes good at identifying problems, but the proposed cures are often worse than the disease, as seen with the recent abolish/defund the police idea that had quickly gained traction in the left. To give a more concrete example: Brazil is under a right wing government after 16 years of left wing ones. The current administration seems to want to reduce the size of the public sector, which has massively increased in the last decades, and decentralize government structure (one of its campaign slogans was “less Brasilia, more Brazil”, referring to a reduction of the influence of the federal government in state or city issues). So one can argue that this is a right wing administration that wants to change the status quo built along the current past decades. On the other hand, a left wing administration would probably try to increase the size of the public sector even more, or at least increase the benefits public workers have over private sector ones, so you could say they wouldn’t be happy with the status quo either. In either case, no side would seem to ever consider the status quo as a global maxima. Therefore I don’t think this definition is valid or useful to define what is right or left wing. In fact, you said it yourself, when you mentioned that everyone likes the status quo when it benefits them. It seems to me every one would be happy with at least some aspect of the status quo, and unhappy with others. Is everyone simultaneously right and left wing? If so, isn’t that classification somewhat useless? I think the status quo issue is more about corporatism than it is about left and right. For example, I know people who describe themselves as right wing/conservatives, but they are public sector workers, and therefore angry at any mention of possible reductions of their privileges. I will also dispute that progressive views are what makes society go forward. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. You don’t have to look much further than the issues of cancel culture, online shaming and censorship against people who fail to use the right words or publicly defend the right causes, which are undoubtedly a result of modern left/progressive thought. I think we’re definitely going backwards in this case. Anyway, sorry if this was too much rambling, it’s a bit late here. Good night :)
humanrebar 6y ago
You overestimate how powerful American political parties are. The leadership ride waves. They don't make them.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  That’s a fairly new phenomenon; parties used to be extremely powerful.
  - RNCTX 6y ago
    The internet has killed that notion, I think. It's not possible to maintain a farce anymore like they could in the days when the only media that needed influencing was TV, radio, and newspapers. Since the internet is a great equalizer in terms of reaching a large audience for relatively little money, political parties in the US have gotten more much factional internally in my lifetime.
IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
Its not this simple. The internet has opened the disfunction of every institution and and elites (i say this word in the positive light, the George Washington/MLK/Rosa Parks meaning, not the karl rove/donna brazile kind of way, ie leaders with great responsibility, at a significany personal risk ) Institutions used to control the message fairly effectively, now they cant due to citizen journalism. Its not republicans or démocrats. Its literally every institution of centralized power. Thats why opinion polls rate so low for everything, congress, NYT, Fox & all networks, FBI, DoJ, etc. The people at the top of these institutions have looted americans for their own benefit, and never really had the people as their top of mind concern. (R)s and (D)s wont reform themselves, any more than institutions will let go of power. You need to take power forecefully from them, unless you want someone to literally set them on fire.
alexashka 6y ago
The naïveté here is assuming the people responsible for all this, don't know it. Let me give you an example that's closer to home: you know how Facebook hires a bunch of people and pays them to collect more and more and more data on everyone? Do you think a single person within Facebook doesn't know it? They all know it and they all like their paycheque more than they like having a conscience. They buried that conscience long ago, in the name of 'providing for my family' or some other straw-man. Some never had much of a conscience to begin with. That's most people, most of the time. They want what they want for them first, everybody else is everybody else's problem. It's really that simple. There are many ways this attitude is being enabled but really, being a selfish monkey comes natural to most people, it's overcoming that selfishness in the name of something bigger that takes a great deal of work. If that work goes unappreciated, what you get is a fake democracy or a real tyranny - all other options require citizens that aren't infantile, self-centered brats. The way to see this most clearly is to ask 1000 educated, not random people, what critical theory [0] is. Maybe one will be familiar with it? We've had people thinking about the problem you're describing for nearly 100 years and hardly anyone knows about it. Now why would that be? Critical theory and philosophy more broadly has something to say about it :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
- noch 6y ago
  > The way to see this most clearly is to ask 1000 educated, not random people, what critical theory [0] is. Maybe one will be familiar with it? We've had people thinking about the problem you're describing for nearly 100 years and hardly anyone knows about it. Now why would that be? Critical theory and philosophy more broadly has something to say about it : If you have a social problem, then you employ postmodernism in the form of critical theory, then you now have two problems. Critical theory does not employ the scientific method and therefore does not provide a reliable means for falsifying claims. We should dismiss the entire field and only retain the parts of it, if any, that can be subjected to rigorous hypothesis testing. A theory is usually attended by a reproducible proof. As a "theory" what is the proof of "critical theory"? No. Postmodernism got us into this mess. Consider, for instance, the ascendancy and prevalence of "Grievance Studies", grounded, as it is, in critical theory: https://medium.com/@heyingh/grievance-studies-goes-after-the-scientific-method-63b6cfd9c913 https://medium.com/@heyingh/grievance-studies-goes-after-the...
beams_of_light 6y ago
First, this is conservative propaganda masquerading as intellectual analysis, and I'm surprised it's made it this far on HN. Where this prescription falls short of the cure: the most extreme are also the most vocal, and are the ones creating change. Regardless of which side we're on, we're letting them speak for us and pull as hard as they can in the direction we want the needle to move. As a moderate liberal, if someone I know says they're allowing their child to choose their gender or that they want to shut down police departments, I try to keep an open mind, but don't really feel the same way they do. I imagine moderate conservatives probably grin and bear a lot of racism, misogyny, and toxic nationalism by the same token.
DenisM 6y ago
Well said. infogulch for senate!..?

JPKab 6y ago

Extremely well said.

postpawl 6y ago

That’s assuming both political parties actually want “something done”.

wmeredith 6y ago
Correct. And they definitely do not. The Democrats are not “left”. They’d barely pass for center across the pond. They are just another flavor of The Party of oligarchy and cronyism in control of this country. There are some significant differences in the platforms, but it’s mostly around wedge issues by design.
- stefantalpalaru 6y ago
  > The Democrats are not “left”. They’d barely pass for center across the pond. Centre-right to right: https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020
  - refurb 6y ago
    Everything looks "center-right to right" when you're on the extreme left.
    - fragmede 6y ago
      So there's no such thing as the center-left?
      - iso947 6y ago
        Of course there is, you see it in many european countries
    - spats1990 6y ago
      Hard to parse what you mean here. The link is indirectly about the Overton window in US politics wherein views and policies considered centrist or center-left at most in other Western democracies appear "extreme left" in the context of US politics. Conversely, mainstream right-wing views in the US appear extremely right-wing in the context of other Western democracies. The linked page attempts to demonstrate through comparison to other Western democracies that the views or proposed policies of "left" or "extreme left" US politicians are contextually leftist, not objectively. (edit: I get that "objectively" is probably not the correct word to use there, but I hope you get my meaning; it would be nice if someone could suggest a better one. Probably better to just have written "the views or proposed policies of 'left' or 'extreme left' US politicians are only contextually leftist"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- JPKab 6y ago
  I share your opinion. My own theory (without any real evidence) is that the oligarchs use race to divide the white working class from the non-white working class. A specific example is the video on systemic racism going around. It correctly points out redlining (a truly horrific practice), but also talks about black students having to attend underfunded schools. I attended predominantly black, underfunded, public schools my entire childhood. By this logic, I was at the same schools and was a "victim" of systemic racism. Which immediately implies that it was actually systemic classism at play against the working poor, rather than being purely race-based. If a party chose to ignore the corporate overlords and focus on issues that working class people of all ethnicities cared about, they would get a lot of votes, and very few super PAC donations.
  - v64 6y ago
    > My own theory (without any real evidence) Many philosophers and others have written about how the powerful divide the lower classes in this way. I don't have any explicit citations offhand, but your observations have merit amongst those who study these issues.
  - scruple 6y ago
    Civil Rights era leaders were killed for attempting to unite black and white labor. Your theory has evidence, as far as I'm concerned.
  - zipwitch 6y ago
    Using race to divide labor is a time-proven capitalist tactic. Go back to Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, where the system was made explicit after the mixed-race uprising again the oligarchs of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion
    - JPKab 6y ago
      "The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (many enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class. The ruling class responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705." Fascinating. I grew up in rural Virginia. A little Known fact is that the vast majority of white settlers there were indentured and/or bonded, often convicts. The first Africans in 1619 were indentured as well. Horrifically, in the 1650s when the first African slaves were brought over, the elites pushed further changes in social norms that resulted in a significant worsening of treatment of the African indentured servants who had long since become free landowners and farmers. A formerly indentured, free black man had a prosperous farm a few miles from where I grew up. The courthouse there dates to the 1600s, and the records are there that show jealous white neighbors gradually stealing his land with impunity, starting at the time that slaves started becoming common. It is chilling looking at those documents standing in that building.

epx 6y ago

Same in Brazil... I like two say there is no left and right, there are two right-wing parties, each one defending its slice of the status quo (left is pro-privileges of public servants here, which are already majority in top earners)

andrenth 6y ago
This seems to imply left = good, right = bad, so when a leftist party does something bad it’s reframed as right wing.
- epx 6y ago
  Not at all, and I don't think right-wing people are bad; they just think the status quo is optimum, is a global maxima. For example, the 'vanilla' right in Brazil in XIX century managed to delay the end of slavery by 6 decades. They thought the country would collapse without slave labor to sustain the agribusiness at the time. Were they inherently bad? Of course not; they thought they couldn't do any better (and of course their opinion was tainted by the fact they owned plantations. It is only human to like the status quo when you are benefited by it. And they were plain wrong, after all. Agribusiness only grew stronger after abolition.) I classify most 'lefties' here as disguised right-wing people because they also think the public sector is perfect as it is, among other things I don't agree with. The society needs left/progressive views to go forward, as it needs righties to pay the current bills. But there are much more productive ways to be a lefty. I respect the Green Party here, as well as politicians that have been proposing UBI for 20 years or more, way before it was on vogue.
  - andrenth 6y ago
    > they just think the status quo is optimum, is a global maxima. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of right wing thought, either in general or specifically in Brazil. In general the conservative view is to improve the status quo without throwing away the good things that have been achieved. It’s an understanding that it’s much easier to destroy things (even if unintentionally) then it is to build them. I’ll agree the left sometimes good at identifying problems, but the proposed cures are often worse than the disease, as seen with the recent abolish/defund the police idea that had quickly gained traction in the left. To give a more concrete example: Brazil is under a right wing government after 16 years of left wing ones. The current administration seems to want to reduce the size of the public sector, which has massively increased in the last decades, and decentralize government structure (one of its campaign slogans was “less Brasilia, more Brazil”, referring to a reduction of the influence of the federal government in state or city issues). So one can argue that this is a right wing administration that wants to change the status quo built along the current past decades. On the other hand, a left wing administration would probably try to increase the size of the public sector even more, or at least increase the benefits public workers have over private sector ones, so you could say they wouldn’t be happy with the status quo either. In either case, no side would seem to ever consider the status quo as a global maxima. Therefore I don’t think this definition is valid or useful to define what is right or left wing. In fact, you said it yourself, when you mentioned that everyone likes the status quo when it benefits them. It seems to me every one would be happy with at least some aspect of the status quo, and unhappy with others. Is everyone simultaneously right and left wing? If so, isn’t that classification somewhat useless? I think the status quo issue is more about corporatism than it is about left and right. For example, I know people who describe themselves as right wing/conservatives, but they are public sector workers, and therefore angry at any mention of possible reductions of their privileges. I will also dispute that progressive views are what makes society go forward. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. You don’t have to look much further than the issues of cancel culture, online shaming and censorship against people who fail to use the right words or publicly defend the right causes, which are undoubtedly a result of modern left/progressive thought. I think we’re definitely going backwards in this case. Anyway, sorry if this was too much rambling, it’s a bit late here. Good night :)

humanrebar 6y ago

You overestimate how powerful American political parties are. The leadership ride waves. They don't make them.

ashtonkem 6y ago
That’s a fairly new phenomenon; parties used to be extremely powerful.
- RNCTX 6y ago
  The internet has killed that notion, I think. It's not possible to maintain a farce anymore like they could in the days when the only media that needed influencing was TV, radio, and newspapers. Since the internet is a great equalizer in terms of reaching a large audience for relatively little money, political parties in the US have gotten more much factional internally in my lifetime.

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago

Its not this simple. The internet has opened the disfunction of every institution and and elites (i say this word in the positive light, the George Washington/MLK/Rosa Parks meaning, not the karl rove/donna brazile kind of way, ie leaders with great responsibility, at a significany personal risk ) Institutions used to control the message fairly effectively, now they cant due to citizen journalism. Its not republicans or démocrats. Its literally every institution of centralized power. Thats why opinion polls rate so low for everything, congress, NYT, Fox & all networks, FBI, DoJ, etc. The people at the top of these institutions have looted americans for their own benefit, and never really had the people as their top of mind concern. (R)s and (D)s wont reform themselves, any more than institutions will let go of power. You need to take power forecefully from them, unless you want someone to literally set them on fire.

alexashka 6y ago

The naïveté here is assuming the people responsible for all this, don't know it. Let me give you an example that's closer to home: you know how Facebook hires a bunch of people and pays them to collect more and more and more data on everyone? Do you think a single person within Facebook doesn't know it? They all know it and they all like their paycheque more than they like having a conscience. They buried that conscience long ago, in the name of 'providing for my family' or some other straw-man. Some never had much of a conscience to begin with. That's most people, most of the time. They want what they want for them first, everybody else is everybody else's problem. It's really that simple. There are many ways this attitude is being enabled but really, being a selfish monkey comes natural to most people, it's overcoming that selfishness in the name of something bigger that takes a great deal of work. If that work goes unappreciated, what you get is a fake democracy or a real tyranny - all other options require citizens that aren't infantile, self-centered brats. The way to see this most clearly is to ask 1000 educated, not random people, what critical theory [0] is. Maybe one will be familiar with it? We've had people thinking about the problem you're describing for nearly 100 years and hardly anyone knows about it. Now why would that be? Critical theory and philosophy more broadly has something to say about it :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory

noch 6y ago
> The way to see this most clearly is to ask 1000 educated, not random people, what critical theory [0] is. Maybe one will be familiar with it? We've had people thinking about the problem you're describing for nearly 100 years and hardly anyone knows about it. Now why would that be? Critical theory and philosophy more broadly has something to say about it : If you have a social problem, then you employ postmodernism in the form of critical theory, then you now have two problems. Critical theory does not employ the scientific method and therefore does not provide a reliable means for falsifying claims. We should dismiss the entire field and only retain the parts of it, if any, that can be subjected to rigorous hypothesis testing. A theory is usually attended by a reproducible proof. As a "theory" what is the proof of "critical theory"? No. Postmodernism got us into this mess. Consider, for instance, the ascendancy and prevalence of "Grievance Studies", grounded, as it is, in critical theory: https://medium.com/@heyingh/grievance-studies-goes-after-the-scientific-method-63b6cfd9c913 https://medium.com/@heyingh/grievance-studies-goes-after-the...

beams_of_light 6y ago

First, this is conservative propaganda masquerading as intellectual analysis, and I'm surprised it's made it this far on HN. Where this prescription falls short of the cure: the most extreme are also the most vocal, and are the ones creating change. Regardless of which side we're on, we're letting them speak for us and pull as hard as they can in the direction we want the needle to move. As a moderate liberal, if someone I know says they're allowing their child to choose their gender or that they want to shut down police departments, I try to keep an open mind, but don't really feel the same way they do. I imagine moderate conservatives probably grin and bear a lot of racism, misogyny, and toxic nationalism by the same token.

DenisM 6y ago

Well said. infogulch for senate!..?