8 ms·

The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

mcphage 4y ago
> Some retort that everything is political, but I do not see how activities such as birdwatching, sex and optometry are political in a meaningful sense. If one insists on the contrary, we return to similarities with totalitarianism. But the author isn't talking about incidents in birdwatching or optometry—they're talking about large, expensive national celebrations. It may be hard to find the politics in birdwatching, but it's not hard to find the politics in holiday firework displays. (And if the author can't see how sex can be political, I'm not sure they read their list of controversial incidents, or have paid attention to modern politics)
TMWNN 4y ago
This first got really bad during the Trump presidency. One could be reading the least "political" article imaginable, and suddenly see something condemnatory about Trump that smugly assumes that everyone reading surely agrees. Nowhere was safe: Film reviews, book reviews, articles about cooking, travelogues, minor human-interest stories, you name it. During the aforementioned Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a subreddit for collecting articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Basically, a Lord's Prayer to preemptively avoid the devil's accusation of maybe possibly being a (shudder) Trump sympathizer in some small way. Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
Khelavaster 4y ago
[flagged]
- nathias 4y ago
  Yes, because they are liberal only by name not concept. Liberalism is based on tolerance and civil society as the space of freedom.
  - sobkas 4y ago
    > Yes, because they are liberal only by name not concept. Liberalism is based on tolerance and civil society as the space of freedom. Liberalism is no more. It was replaced by neoliberalism. Under it you have as many liberties as you can afford to buy and/or defend.
  - tharne 4y ago
    > Yes, because they are liberal only by name not concept. Liberalism is based on tolerance and civil society as the space of freedom. Exactly. We tend to conflate "left" with "liberalism" because historically in the West these two things have gone together. However, they don't have to, and in recent years they have decoupled. The left (at least in the U.S.) has became increasingly illiberal to the point where they now openly argue for censorship (e.g. anything not of or by the worldview is labelled as "dangerous misinformation"). The right does this too, but they don't seem to be as good as the left at couching it in altruistic language, so it tends not to gain as much traction.
    - nathias 4y ago
      In Europe, left was always more marxist so liberalism never really got batched with the left, it was more center/right. But in the US liberalism was as left as you got, so naturally all left will be 'liberalism' at least by name no matter how the content mutates.
tharne 4y ago
The sad part of all of this is that the folks pushing the polarization in the U.S., the Trumpy right, and the progressive left, represent an extreme minority of the population. If either of these two groups had an any level of self awareness, they'd realize that no one wants them around.
- kodyo 4y ago
  Beyond that, a growing number of us have realized that democracy is incompatible with freedom. Once you accept that, the absurdity of politicians claiming to speak for large swaths of your country is just comical. Downvoters are free to explain why unimpressive people have any say over how you think or how you should behave.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > Beyond that, a growing number of us have realized that democracy is incompatible with freedom. That's an interesting mindset, in theory, but not very grounded in reality. Being a democracy is no guarantee of freedom, but it has let more people live in more freedom than any other system. (The great danger is that tyrants convert democracies into pseudo-democracies, keeping the trappings while removing the freedom, and that makes democracies look bad to those who are unaware.) Seriously, if you've got a system that leads to more freedom, put in into practice somewhere, and show us how it works in the real world. If you can consistently deliver for several decades, we might start to listen. > Once you accept that, the absurdity of politicians claiming to speak for large swaths of your country is just comical. Politicians speak, not for the population, not even for everyone who voted for them, but for everyone who agrees with the politician on that particular point. > Downvoters are free to explain why unimpressive people have any say over how you think or how you should behave. I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say here. But it sounds like you're saying that, in a democracy, "unimpressive people" have a say because they get to vote. Well, I don't know anybody who lets voters decide how they think. How they behave? Well, votes lead to laws, so, yeah. But in a non-democracy, someone was still going to be making the laws, and almost certainly that would be someone who is not you. So it seems to me that you're always going to have other people having a say over how you should behave. (And, in a non-democracy, they can be a lot more serious having say over how you think, too.) The phrase "unimpressive people" I find a bit disturbing. It sounds like you're looking down on them, that there's some contempt there. Frankly, that does not make your position more persuasive.
1attice 4y ago
As a member of one of the minorities whose rights campaigns Prosser cites as ruining his footie, I'll say, apropos nothing, that it's much easier to talk about these issues with detached neutrality when you & your friends are not subject to monotonically increasing levels of stochastic domestic terrorism.
- rayiner 4y ago
  As a member of one of those minorities as well, I think that’s a lazy cop out and also in the long run bad for us. It drove me nuts during the Trump era when non-Muslims acted like banning refugees from Muslim countries with high levels of terrorist activity was the same as discussing how to round up brown people into internment camps. You can’t piss on people’s leg and tell them it’s raining. Those were conversations that people in Muslim countries had also. Shouting down that debate won’t make the concerns go away, and will only lead to problems down the road.
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    Banning refugees from those countries by itself wasn't perceived that way. Publicly promising that you're going to ban all Muslims from the US and then immediately afterwards banning travel from some predominately Muslim countries and telling your supporters that you fulfilled your promise was.
- Guthur 4y ago
  Sounds like you need to get new friends. We are all dealing with crap, we are all at the bottom of the pile getting the dregs from trickle down economic theory. It's not about one tiny fringe group, when we fight only for ever more specific fringe groups we ignore the injustice we are all subjected to.
  - mcphage 4y ago
    > Sounds like you need to get new friends. I don't think I understand—which friends are you suggesting that 1attice get rid of?
draw_down 4y ago
[dead]
mcphage 4y ago
> When public firework displays take positions on controversial issues, they provoke partisan reactions, poisoning debate further and turning aggrieved groups away from public spaces. Is support for Ukraine a controversial issue in the UK? In the US, support for Ukraine is pretty widespread.
- kodyo 4y ago
  Support of the Ukraine is synonymous with supporting NATO’s war. There should never have been a war, and there should have been a cease fire by now. Does that opinion make me anti-Ukraine?
  - _kbh_ 4y ago
    > Support of the Ukraine is synonymous with supporting NATO’s war. There should never have been a war, and there should have been a cease fire by now. Russia should have never invaded I agree, but it's up to Russia to leave now. No one can stop Russias war but Russia. Ceasefires also just help Russia so what you should really want is a quick decisive defeat of Russia by Ukraine.
  - mcphage 4y ago
    > There should never have been a war, and there should have been a cease fire by now. >Does that opinion make me anti-Ukraine? Neither of those facts make you anti-Ukrainian. However, if you think the road to accomplishing that is to have Ukraine surrender, rather than Russian stop invading—that would make you anti-Ukrainian. I do note that you deliberately left out under whose terms a cease-fire should be signed, however.
- Neil44 4y ago
  Ukraine is widely supported vs Russia but I guess he’s saying that just because it’s popular doesn’t make the point morally correct in the context of what he’s saying. The LGBTQ+ is currently controversial in the context of the erosion of women only spaces and rights in the face of certain pressure groups.
- VerifiedJoseph 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
A lot of well meaning people are seriously damaging the country by injecting politics into spheres that the public broadly needs to perceive as “neutral” such as law and medicine. This is usually accompanied by efforts to reframe contentious policy debates as “non-political.” Which of course makes no sense because lots of things that aren’t political in the abstract quickly become political when it comes to people advancing specific remedies or ways of restructuring society.
- prohobo 4y ago
  This happened with an open-source video game I wanted to contribute to, of all things... I thought I'd found a welcoming community that was interested in building something cool, and I could learn some C# while contributing to something really unique and creative. That turned out to be sort of right, but the senior maintainers decided that it's also cool to shove their politics down everyone else's throats and ban anyone who so much as sniffs at it. They intentionally flag-wave their political stances in Discord to bait people into mentioning it, and if they don't like someone's thoughts they ban them and pat themselves on the back for ostensibly removing "toxicity" and "intolerance". When I asked them to stop doing that they tried to bait me into saying something they didn't like, and stated that their political views aren't political at all - more like natural law. From my perspective, these people (regardless of political affiliation) act pathologically and crave the camaraderie and support of being part of an in-group, and enforce that in-group, because they probably feel generally insecure. They don't really understand the implications of their behavior, nor do they actually care about their supposed cause, they just want to feel in control and validated, and they found a venue for it. To stop this pathological politicization you have to create an environment of security. That isn't going to happen any time soon, so I'm not sure what the point of any of this is - just avoid them and find/create communities that don't allow politics.
  - beyond_based 4y ago
    Which game? This sounds awfully familiar.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
hausen 4y ago
The original title is "The extension of political conflict is corroding liberal democracy," which better reflects the opinion in the article. The editorialized title ("the politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy") frankly doesn't do the article any justice.
babelfishstudio 4y ago
[flagged]
PicassoCTs 4y ago
One could develop mechanisms, that make the ability to compromise and negotiate outcomes, a requisite to holding offices, even after elections. This could for example happen, by the small minority parties (who are usually filtered out in most democracies) negotiating the voices they represent to another party that will enter representation, in return for representing a certain view-point. This would prevent votes from being lost and would make the ability to compromise and "secure" these votes more important then populist behavior.
fallingfrog 4y ago
Sorry, but this article is 90% word salad and the other 10% seems to be saying things that most people would disagree with but in the most indirect language possible. I'm not against using precise words when they are helpful. But sometimes I see people using complex language to obfuscate the message instead of clarifying it, and as far as I can tell that's what is happening here. When the meaning of an essay is confused and unclear, either a) I'm just not smart enough to understand it or b) the author is a poor communicator. B is much, much more common.

> Some retort that everything is political, but I do not see how activities such as birdwatching, sex and optometry are political in a meaningful sense. If one insists on the contrary, we return to similarities with totalitarianism. But the author isn't talking about incidents in birdwatching or optometry—they're talking about large, expensive national celebrations. It may be hard to find the politics in birdwatching, but it's not hard to find the politics in holiday firework displays. (And if the author can't see how sex can be political, I'm not sure they read their list of controversial incidents, or have paid attention to modern politics)

TMWNN 4y ago

This first got really bad during the Trump presidency. One could be reading the least "political" article imaginable, and suddenly see something condemnatory about Trump that smugly assumes that everyone reading surely agrees. Nowhere was safe: Film reviews, book reviews, articles about cooking, travelogues, minor human-interest stories, you name it. During the aforementioned Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a subreddit for collecting articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Basically, a Lord's Prayer to preemptively avoid the devil's accusation of maybe possibly being a (shudder) Trump sympathizer in some small way. Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!

Khelavaster 4y ago

[flagged]

nathias 4y ago
Yes, because they are liberal only by name not concept. Liberalism is based on tolerance and civil society as the space of freedom.
- sobkas 4y ago
  > Yes, because they are liberal only by name not concept. Liberalism is based on tolerance and civil society as the space of freedom. Liberalism is no more. It was replaced by neoliberalism. Under it you have as many liberties as you can afford to buy and/or defend.
- tharne 4y ago
  > Yes, because they are liberal only by name not concept. Liberalism is based on tolerance and civil society as the space of freedom. Exactly. We tend to conflate "left" with "liberalism" because historically in the West these two things have gone together. However, they don't have to, and in recent years they have decoupled. The left (at least in the U.S.) has became increasingly illiberal to the point where they now openly argue for censorship (e.g. anything not of or by the worldview is labelled as "dangerous misinformation"). The right does this too, but they don't seem to be as good as the left at couching it in altruistic language, so it tends not to gain as much traction.
  - nathias 4y ago
    In Europe, left was always more marxist so liberalism never really got batched with the left, it was more center/right. But in the US liberalism was as left as you got, so naturally all left will be 'liberalism' at least by name no matter how the content mutates.

tharne 4y ago

The sad part of all of this is that the folks pushing the polarization in the U.S., the Trumpy right, and the progressive left, represent an extreme minority of the population. If either of these two groups had an any level of self awareness, they'd realize that no one wants them around.

kodyo 4y ago
Beyond that, a growing number of us have realized that democracy is incompatible with freedom. Once you accept that, the absurdity of politicians claiming to speak for large swaths of your country is just comical. Downvoters are free to explain why unimpressive people have any say over how you think or how you should behave.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > Beyond that, a growing number of us have realized that democracy is incompatible with freedom. That's an interesting mindset, in theory, but not very grounded in reality. Being a democracy is no guarantee of freedom, but it has let more people live in more freedom than any other system. (The great danger is that tyrants convert democracies into pseudo-democracies, keeping the trappings while removing the freedom, and that makes democracies look bad to those who are unaware.) Seriously, if you've got a system that leads to more freedom, put in into practice somewhere, and show us how it works in the real world. If you can consistently deliver for several decades, we might start to listen. > Once you accept that, the absurdity of politicians claiming to speak for large swaths of your country is just comical. Politicians speak, not for the population, not even for everyone who voted for them, but for everyone who agrees with the politician on that particular point. > Downvoters are free to explain why unimpressive people have any say over how you think or how you should behave. I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say here. But it sounds like you're saying that, in a democracy, "unimpressive people" have a say because they get to vote. Well, I don't know anybody who lets voters decide how they think. How they behave? Well, votes lead to laws, so, yeah. But in a non-democracy, someone was still going to be making the laws, and almost certainly that would be someone who is not you. So it seems to me that you're always going to have other people having a say over how you should behave. (And, in a non-democracy, they can be a lot more serious having say over how you think, too.) The phrase "unimpressive people" I find a bit disturbing. It sounds like you're looking down on them, that there's some contempt there. Frankly, that does not make your position more persuasive.

1attice 4y ago

As a member of one of the minorities whose rights campaigns Prosser cites as ruining his footie, I'll say, apropos nothing, that it's much easier to talk about these issues with detached neutrality when you & your friends are not subject to monotonically increasing levels of stochastic domestic terrorism.

rayiner 4y ago
As a member of one of those minorities as well, I think that’s a lazy cop out and also in the long run bad for us. It drove me nuts during the Trump era when non-Muslims acted like banning refugees from Muslim countries with high levels of terrorist activity was the same as discussing how to round up brown people into internment camps. You can’t piss on people’s leg and tell them it’s raining. Those were conversations that people in Muslim countries had also. Shouting down that debate won’t make the concerns go away, and will only lead to problems down the road.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  Banning refugees from those countries by itself wasn't perceived that way. Publicly promising that you're going to ban all Muslims from the US and then immediately afterwards banning travel from some predominately Muslim countries and telling your supporters that you fulfilled your promise was.
Guthur 4y ago
Sounds like you need to get new friends. We are all dealing with crap, we are all at the bottom of the pile getting the dregs from trickle down economic theory. It's not about one tiny fringe group, when we fight only for ever more specific fringe groups we ignore the injustice we are all subjected to.
- mcphage 4y ago
  > Sounds like you need to get new friends. I don't think I understand—which friends are you suggesting that 1attice get rid of?

draw_down 4y ago

[dead]

mcphage 4y ago

> When public firework displays take positions on controversial issues, they provoke partisan reactions, poisoning debate further and turning aggrieved groups away from public spaces. Is support for Ukraine a controversial issue in the UK? In the US, support for Ukraine is pretty widespread.

kodyo 4y ago
Support of the Ukraine is synonymous with supporting NATO’s war. There should never have been a war, and there should have been a cease fire by now. Does that opinion make me anti-Ukraine?
- _kbh_ 4y ago
  > Support of the Ukraine is synonymous with supporting NATO’s war. There should never have been a war, and there should have been a cease fire by now. Russia should have never invaded I agree, but it's up to Russia to leave now. No one can stop Russias war but Russia. Ceasefires also just help Russia so what you should really want is a quick decisive defeat of Russia by Ukraine.
- mcphage 4y ago
  > There should never have been a war, and there should have been a cease fire by now. >Does that opinion make me anti-Ukraine? Neither of those facts make you anti-Ukrainian. However, if you think the road to accomplishing that is to have Ukraine surrender, rather than Russian stop invading—that would make you anti-Ukrainian. I do note that you deliberately left out under whose terms a cease-fire should be signed, however.
Neil44 4y ago
Ukraine is widely supported vs Russia but I guess he’s saying that just because it’s popular doesn’t make the point morally correct in the context of what he’s saying. The LGBTQ+ is currently controversial in the context of the erosion of women only spaces and rights in the face of certain pressure groups.
VerifiedJoseph 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

A lot of well meaning people are seriously damaging the country by injecting politics into spheres that the public broadly needs to perceive as “neutral” such as law and medicine. This is usually accompanied by efforts to reframe contentious policy debates as “non-political.” Which of course makes no sense because lots of things that aren’t political in the abstract quickly become political when it comes to people advancing specific remedies or ways of restructuring society.

prohobo 4y ago
This happened with an open-source video game I wanted to contribute to, of all things... I thought I'd found a welcoming community that was interested in building something cool, and I could learn some C# while contributing to something really unique and creative. That turned out to be sort of right, but the senior maintainers decided that it's also cool to shove their politics down everyone else's throats and ban anyone who so much as sniffs at it. They intentionally flag-wave their political stances in Discord to bait people into mentioning it, and if they don't like someone's thoughts they ban them and pat themselves on the back for ostensibly removing "toxicity" and "intolerance". When I asked them to stop doing that they tried to bait me into saying something they didn't like, and stated that their political views aren't political at all - more like natural law. From my perspective, these people (regardless of political affiliation) act pathologically and crave the camaraderie and support of being part of an in-group, and enforce that in-group, because they probably feel generally insecure. They don't really understand the implications of their behavior, nor do they actually care about their supposed cause, they just want to feel in control and validated, and they found a venue for it. To stop this pathological politicization you have to create an environment of security. That isn't going to happen any time soon, so I'm not sure what the point of any of this is - just avoid them and find/create communities that don't allow politics.
- beyond_based 4y ago
  Which game? This sounds awfully familiar.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago

hausen 4y ago

The original title is "The extension of political conflict is corroding liberal democracy," which better reflects the opinion in the article. The editorialized title ("the politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy") frankly doesn't do the article any justice.

babelfishstudio 4y ago

[flagged]

PicassoCTs 4y ago

One could develop mechanisms, that make the ability to compromise and negotiate outcomes, a requisite to holding offices, even after elections. This could for example happen, by the small minority parties (who are usually filtered out in most democracies) negotiating the voices they represent to another party that will enter representation, in return for representing a certain view-point. This would prevent votes from being lost and would make the ability to compromise and "secure" these votes more important then populist behavior.

fallingfrog 4y ago

Sorry, but this article is 90% word salad and the other 10% seems to be saying things that most people would disagree with but in the most indirect language possible. I'm not against using precise words when they are helpful. But sometimes I see people using complex language to obfuscate the message instead of clarifying it, and as far as I can tell that's what is happening here. When the meaning of an essay is confused and unclear, either a) I'm just not smart enough to understand it or b) the author is a poor communicator. B is much, much more common.