8 ms·

For all of the author's bloviating and self-congratulating navel gazing, the article manages to largely overlook values, the only mention of them being to dismi

For all of the author's bloviating and self-congratulating navel gazing, the article manages to largely overlook values, the only mention of them being to dismissively reduce them to irrational tribalism. In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics. After all, all political decisions are ultimately about how we want to shape the world that we as humans live in. There can be no agreement about economic policy without a shared understanding of the ultimate goal of an economy. No agreement about foreign relations without a shared understanding of the role of nations as representatives for groups of humans, and how we believe one group of humans should interact with another group of humans through the lens of nations. For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent. The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values. In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

shw1n 2y ago
I reject this idea, someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for As someone said in this thread, in the US two-party system, coalitions are formed before the vote vs after in other countries The whole purpose of this piece is to precisely encourage pointed discussion about values directly and skip the proxying
- rfgmendoza 2y ago
  "someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for" yes but somebody voting for the "most worst candidate" is not somebody who's values should be trusted
  - darth_avocado 2y ago
    The very idea of “least worst” is very subjective. In their eyes, if they disagree with you, it is who’s values should not be trusted.
  - shw1n 2y ago
    and if someone opposite the aisle from you believes the same thing about you, there's zero chance to flip them with direct discussion about values, it's possible basically all comes down to "are you open to the chance you're wrong" you could view that chance as low as 0.001%, but it shouldn't be 0
    - sn9 2y ago
      People frequently have a gap between their values and their politics, and talking about both can reveal the cognitive dissonance. If they engage with politics as tribalism, and you talk to them about a policy their tribe implemented that conflicts with their values, this is useful.
- rebeccaskinner 2y ago
  > I reject this idea, someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for The thing about values is that they don't just capture the notion of what we thing is right or wrong, but also which things we value over other things. In an extreme case, two people can agree on 10 out of 10 different ideals or ethical stances and still have different values and support different parties because of how they rank those things. In that case who you think is the "least worst" is also a reflection of values, as is declaring both sides to be the same, or opting out altogether. They all represent both what things you value and how much you value them.
  - shw1n 2y ago
    > In that case who you think is the "least worst" is also a reflection of values perceived values -- if someone has the same values and rankings as you, but was exposed to different information, then with this logic you'll never be able to find out or flip them as I said to the other commenter, basically all comes down to "are you open to the chance you're wrong" you could view that chance as low as 0.001%, but it shouldn't be 0
dwallin 2y ago
I would say that the partial counterpoint to that is, for most people their values are also largely tribe based, in that their values are not purely fixed, but rather tend to adapt to loosely track the tribal consensus. Very few are the ones willing to stick to their convictions under pressure. There are clearly some (many?) shared average axiomatic values that seem to be common between very different cultures/religions (although individuals vary much more significantly), but it's much easier to obsess on the places we differ. Where I strongly disagree is the idea that groups with different fundamental values can't necessarily find common policy ground. A good example is Basic Income, where you can find agreement between groups on opposite sides that both embrace the idea, but for very different value-driven reasons. In many cases, you can also agree to disagree, and just keep your collective hands out of it (eg. separation of religion and state).
- biasednor 2y ago
  [dead]
mindslight 2y ago
> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". Only if you ascertain the (inverse of the) mapping of values -> vote correctly, and it's definitively not what the parties or the tribes themselves profess. For myself [0], I sympathize with many of the issues Trump ran on while finding most of the Democratic platform cloying and hollow. But I value effective policy, being accountable to intellectual criticism, and a generally open society far far more. (And at this point in my life, a healthy dose of straight up actual conservatism, too!) [0] and while it might seem needlessly inflammatory to include this here, I think it's unavoidable that people are going to be trying to read partisan implications from abstract comments regardless.
ryaniscool 2y ago
I consider this type of thinking to be a form of tribalism because you're essentially saying there are two tribes. Each tribe has specific values. A person's values are not a dichotomy (i.e. republican or democrat). You simply cannot put people into two buckets that define their overarching moral compass. A person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat...or hate everything about Republican values except they got burned by Obamacare so they vote Republican. There is virtually an infinite level of nuance that can be a deciding factor in why someone votes for someone.
- Spivak 2y ago
  > transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat This is the NYT if you want a high-profile example of this existing in the real world. I worked with a guy who was a goldmine of odd but sincerely held political opinions that subverted the usual narratives. He was (I guess still is) gay but believed that trans people shouldn't serve in the military because he saw that they didn't get the treatment they needed. He wanted everyone to have guns as a protection against crooked cops-- he was from a small town. He was against single-payer healthcare because he thought the government would use it as a political weapon. He was was in theory anti-union because he thought union benefits should just be turned into labor protections for everyone instead of just being for union jobs and supported them only as a stopgap. He was pro-solar/wind and had an electric car not for any environmental reason but because he didn't want to be reliant on the greedy power company.
  - GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
    i mean, his views don't sound too odd. he sounds like a communist who's got a dim view of reform or socialism as a means to communism.
  - roarcher 2y ago
    To me that just sounds like someone who arrives at his political views by thinking rather than blindly adopting whatever his peers believe. It's only odd because it's (sadly) rare these days.
nickff 2y ago
Even the language that the different parties use is targeted at certain sets of values; Arnold Kling wrote this short book on the subject ("The Three Languages of Politics"): https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/ThreeLanguagesOfPolitics.pdf https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/ThreeLanguag... "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt is another, more nuanced (and complicated), but extremely interesting take on the subject of how values drive political affiliation.
- brightlancer 2y ago
  Framing has always been used in political debate just to target certain values; what may have changed (or not) is as a deliberate tactic to keep people divided: folks who do not speak the same language cannot communicate. On a lot of issues, I think 80% of folks are in 80% of agreement, but the partisans (whether politicians or activists) are framing the issue to prevent that consensus, because the partisans want something in the 20% that 80% of folks don't agree with.
  - nickff 2y ago
    Kling and Haidt would agree with your respective paragraphs, though they do add a lot of color, and their books are worth reading.
    - brightlancer 2y ago
      I've listened to Haidt speak about it and his book is in my tall stack to read; I don't think I'd heard of King but I grabbed the PDF. Thank you.
eastbound 2y ago
[flagged]
- nadir_ishiguro 2y ago
  [flagged]
- goatlover 2y ago
  I'm not a leftist. Your leader and his allies are a danger to democracy. I don't get this from the Democratic Party, or ANTIFA, or Bernie Sanders. I get it from paying attention to what Trump and his administration have been doing.
nitwit005 2y ago
> In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics. People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining. They'll still happily argue about it for the post part, unfortunately. You can see this effect after some elections where people "fall in line" with their party's new presidential candidate on some issue.
- DrillShopper 2y ago
  > People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining. I call this "politics as religion". Remember you cannot reason someone out of a position they never reasoned themselves into. Route around the damage and make them irrelevant.
cj 2y ago
> "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values" You should test this hypothesis by talking to someone for 10 minutes, then guessing who they voted for. My hypothesis is you wouldn't do better than 50/50.
- J5892 2y ago
  I was talking to a very drunk Republican girl the other day. We were having a small argument about why we would send medical support to Africa for AIDS. Her argument was something about fixing America first (I was also drunk). I asked if she regretted her vote for Trump after several people she knew lost their government contracting jobs, and she said "No, fuck that guy, I didn't vote for him."
- MajimasEyepatch 2y ago
  "If p then q" does not imply "If q then p." Besides, there's a ton of easy ways to beat 50/50 odds without explicitly asking who they voted for. You can ask whether they graduated from college, and that will get you to something like 55/45 or 60/40. If they're white and they did not graduate from college, or if they're not white and they did graduate from college, your odds of guessing right are something like 2:1. Studies have also found (somewhat weak) correlations between some of the Big Five personality traits and political identification: people who score highly on conscientiousness are more likely to be right-leaning, while people who score highly on openness to experience are more likely to be left-leaning.
  - cj 2y ago
    > "If p then q" does not imply "If q then p." My original comment is challenging whether "p then q" is valid in the first place by asking if the inverse would be true as a thought experiment. (Neither is true IMO) Just because someone has certain values doesn't mean they vote a certain way. Just because they vote a certain way doesn't mean they have certain values. "p" (who you voted for) and "q" (your values) are largely independent for a large percentage of voters.
    - 2y ago
jjtheblunt 2y ago
> leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent I'd say they invest in messaging around the values they want voters to believe they represent. i.e., marketing and ensuing reality diverge regularly with politicians, regardless of affiliation.
brightlancer 2y ago
> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent. Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol. And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns. > and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values. That's not new. On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future. > If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values. And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.
- rebeccaskinner 2y ago
  > Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us I didn't say that you shouldn't bother with people. I said that discussing _policy_ is not useful if you don't agree on _values_. It's the wrong level of abstraction. To put it in a plain analogy: discussing the best route to get to your destination isn't useful if you don't agree on where you are going. If you want to engage with someone with different values, then the values are where you need to start. If you want to engage with someone on the best way to get somewhere, you need to start by making sure you both agree on where you want to go.
  - brightlancer 2y ago
    "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" is a value statement; in the US, some folks agree with it, some do not. Under your argument, folks who disagreed about that value statement shouldn't bother discussing criminal justice policy; I think that's erroneous and part-and-parcel of Don't Bother With Those People. Yes, _some_ policy conversations might be futile if folks have completely opposed values, but I don't think we should apply that generally. We MUST work with people who hold different values than us, without trying to change their values so that they become part of Us.
wand3r 2y ago
This makes 0 sense. Democrat and Republican "values", to the extent they are even real, no way represent the full spectrum of values one can have. Further, the Democratic party has a 27% approval rating and the Republican party had like 47% and I bet its falling. So even within your narrow framework this is a bad proxy because both are clearly unpopular.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
andrewclunn 2y ago
Values are largely posturing. Push comes to shove most people don't really care about what they say they care about. Tribal heuristics of trust are way more important.
- rebeccaskinner 2y ago
  I think most people care about some things. Most people don’t have the capacity to feel strongly about every issue, but there are some overarching ones that tend to hold along political lines, and people will tend to have pet issues as well.
bad_haircut72 2y ago
The two sides dont actually have different values, they have small wedge issues that unscrupulous individuals/groups over-exaggerate for their own gain. Im center left but still see myself in Trump supporters, were basically the same people who basically want to live our lives
zkid18 2y ago
I think the assumption that political parties represent two completely distinct sets of values is overly simplistic. In reality, there's a significant amount of overlap between them—what often differs is the style of messaging and the framing of ideas. Personally, I find it hard to fully identify with either the left or the right. I share beliefs and values from both sides, depending on the issue. This makes it difficult to adopt a clear-cut political label, and I think that's true for many people. Politics today often feels more like a battle of narratives than a clash of core principles / values. p.s. my perspective is non-US one.
dumbledoren 2y ago
> The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values. What difference do the parties have? They are both the 'corporate party' maximizing shareholder profit at all costs including killing brown people overseas or murdering Americans at home if they cant pay for healthcare.
benlivengood 2y ago
> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent. The largest two U.S. parties have been heavily minmaxing the propaganda they release to divide districts on the most effective issues they can convert into election wins. Their values are "get elected to office" but the propaganda can't be so straightforward because there aren't a lot of voters who are easily converted by that directness. Voters have values; political parties and candidates have propaganda. Game theoretically the winning move is to compete on comparative advantage of an issue within a voting district; because (for example) Democratic voters are split on the death penalty it's a very useless propaganda point for the party as a whole [0]; sticking to one side or the other would lose more elections than it would win. Note that this is very different from ranking the importance of values and focusing on the most impactful to real people; the (implicit) hope is that by focusing on effective propaganda issues then some values may be preserved through the election process. In practice politicians also horse-trade for future party political capital in preference to espoused values. One fundamental problem is that without a parliamentary style of government where coalitions are required to form a functioning legislature the usefulness of values in elections is greatly diminished. If I may say, the Republican party has done the best at shedding the illusion and explicitly transferring power to the party itself to enforce the values held by one man, which is the ultimate game-theoretically strong position for a political party. Disconnecting the ultimate value-judged outcomes of elections from the political machinations that win them has been incredibly damaging to democracy. [0] https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/the-end-of-the-abolition-era-democrats-quietly-drop-their-opposition-to-the-penalty/ https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/the-end-of-the-abolition-er...
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
  << One fundamental problem is that without a parliamentary style of government where coalitions are required to form a functioning legislature the usefulness of values in elections is greatly diminished. If I may say, This is may be where I personally have a problem. It used to be, in the olden days, that each congressman/senator was responsible to his/her constituents. That no longer appears to be the case. They are responsible to their own tribe ( party ). This is a major issue that would need to be corrected before anything substantial could be even considered. In other words, we used to 535 parties, but those have consolidated heavily to the detriment of the actual people they are supposed to represent. I hate to say it like this, but the coming recession ( depression if we are not as lucky ) may actually piss people off just enough to point their pitchforks at the political class. It will not be pretty, because average American already holds their representative in very high regard ( that is, if they know their name, which is another conversation.. but when things go south, I am sure they will learn their name real fast ). I had a longer rant, but I decided to trim it down.
rzz3 2y ago
> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". I strongly disagree. In this duopoly of a political system, most people on both sides are just picking the lesser of two evils. Meanwhile, we are creating an alarmingly decisive political society by choosing not to associate with those who vote differently than us. Perhaps most importantly, we lose the opportunity to actually shift the political positions of others (and ourselves) by not engaging in healthy and non-judgmental political discussions with our friends and neighbors, ultimately increasing polarization even further. Not everyone is voting based on their values—some are simply voting their wallets or the special interests they align with. Someone who is pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about. It doesn’t necessarily mean their core values are different than yours, but instead maybe simply just their priorities.
- rebeccaskinner 2y ago
  > pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about. What you care most about is a statement of values.
  - greycol 2y ago
    Sure but if you're so reductionist then you'd also be arguing that slaves were making a statement about their values and how they viewed slavery because the majority didn't immediately escape or die trying. It would be disingenuous to say or even imply from that statement that their value system was pro slavery though.
  - rzz3 2y ago
    I’d say priorities and values are pretty different, but there can be some overlap. But the problem is, folks don’t give it the required amount of nuance, and simply loop in all the horrible things the other party does and stands for with the values of that person, and it’s usually not accurate.
MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
> the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values This is an incorrect and cynical statement. I understand why you feel this way (for one thing, it's the exact type of language coming out of many of each party's idealists) but it's simply false. One party supports gun rights while the other supports gun control. Those aren't values. Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety. Abortion rights is about personal liberty. Gun rights are also about personal liberty. Both sides care about personal liberty. The competing talking points aren't always conveniently about the same issue though. For Democrats their border policies are about compassion and human rights. For Republicans their border policies are about domestic prosperity. Do Republicans care about human rights? Yes. Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes. To pretend otherwise is to willfully push apart the tribes in your own mind, and to trivialize the perspective of the opposition. The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.
- misiti3780 2y ago
  bingo!
- Miraste 2y ago
  Abortion rights is about religion-as clear a difference in values as one can have.
  - kulahan 2y ago
    I think if you believe this is simply a religious issue, you’ve majorly missed the point. Many religions do stand against abortion, but the philosophical argument can be summarized in part as “when is something a human”. There really no need for religion to argue that point, and it can settle a huge number of disagreements.
- dbingham 2y ago
erlich 2y ago
> to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values I think your use of the word "world" is telling. Trump, the Republicans, and the global right are focused on their citizens. The Democrats and the global left are more focused on the world and their role in it. It's no longer just two approaches on how we can have the strongest economy. Each party has a weighting for how much to consider every issue across the world. For example, there are people who would be happy with less growth, lower income, but more action on climate change.
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
That's why I love claiming to be a third-party voter so much. It breaks their brains and their response informs whether or not they are worthy of my respect.
TwoNineFive 2y ago
Your need to insult the author proved his point.
andrewmcwatters 2y ago
You're just describing tribalism.
bentt 2y ago
Values alone leads to supporting solutions that sound good but don’t work. “Free money for everyone” speaks to values of equity, fairness, and empathy… while creating all kinds of side effects like inflation. If you are going to focus on values, apply them to a rigorous analysis of what works.
jcz_nz 2y ago
I went through the top responses to you, and indeed, nearly 100% of the pearl-clutching "you're so wrong" have comment history that strongly suggests right wing / libertarian / neocon beliefs. In related news, no one admits to voting for Nixon either.
n4r9 2y ago
You make a great point about values. It's potentially the biggest issue with the linked article. You got a weirdly large number of dissenting replies, so I just wanted to say that. I think it's irrelevant whether or not there are "two mutually exclusive" sets of values. What's relevant is that one's values can point you more in one direction than the other.

shw1n 2y ago

I reject this idea, someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for As someone said in this thread, in the US two-party system, coalitions are formed before the vote vs after in other countries The whole purpose of this piece is to precisely encourage pointed discussion about values directly and skip the proxying

rfgmendoza 2y ago
"someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for" yes but somebody voting for the "most worst candidate" is not somebody who's values should be trusted
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  The very idea of “least worst” is very subjective. In their eyes, if they disagree with you, it is who’s values should not be trusted.
- shw1n 2y ago
  and if someone opposite the aisle from you believes the same thing about you, there's zero chance to flip them with direct discussion about values, it's possible basically all comes down to "are you open to the chance you're wrong" you could view that chance as low as 0.001%, but it shouldn't be 0
  - sn9 2y ago
    People frequently have a gap between their values and their politics, and talking about both can reveal the cognitive dissonance. If they engage with politics as tribalism, and you talk to them about a policy their tribe implemented that conflicts with their values, this is useful.
rebeccaskinner 2y ago
> I reject this idea, someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for The thing about values is that they don't just capture the notion of what we thing is right or wrong, but also which things we value over other things. In an extreme case, two people can agree on 10 out of 10 different ideals or ethical stances and still have different values and support different parties because of how they rank those things. In that case who you think is the "least worst" is also a reflection of values, as is declaring both sides to be the same, or opting out altogether. They all represent both what things you value and how much you value them.
- shw1n 2y ago
  > In that case who you think is the "least worst" is also a reflection of values perceived values -- if someone has the same values and rankings as you, but was exposed to different information, then with this logic you'll never be able to find out or flip them as I said to the other commenter, basically all comes down to "are you open to the chance you're wrong" you could view that chance as low as 0.001%, but it shouldn't be 0

dwallin 2y ago

I would say that the partial counterpoint to that is, for most people their values are also largely tribe based, in that their values are not purely fixed, but rather tend to adapt to loosely track the tribal consensus. Very few are the ones willing to stick to their convictions under pressure. There are clearly some (many?) shared average axiomatic values that seem to be common between very different cultures/religions (although individuals vary much more significantly), but it's much easier to obsess on the places we differ. Where I strongly disagree is the idea that groups with different fundamental values can't necessarily find common policy ground. A good example is Basic Income, where you can find agreement between groups on opposite sides that both embrace the idea, but for very different value-driven reasons. In many cases, you can also agree to disagree, and just keep your collective hands out of it (eg. separation of religion and state).

biasednor 2y ago
[dead]

mindslight 2y ago

> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". Only if you ascertain the (inverse of the) mapping of values -> vote correctly, and it's definitively not what the parties or the tribes themselves profess. For myself [0], I sympathize with many of the issues Trump ran on while finding most of the Democratic platform cloying and hollow. But I value effective policy, being accountable to intellectual criticism, and a generally open society far far more. (And at this point in my life, a healthy dose of straight up actual conservatism, too!) [0] and while it might seem needlessly inflammatory to include this here, I think it's unavoidable that people are going to be trying to read partisan implications from abstract comments regardless.

ryaniscool 2y ago

I consider this type of thinking to be a form of tribalism because you're essentially saying there are two tribes. Each tribe has specific values. A person's values are not a dichotomy (i.e. republican or democrat). You simply cannot put people into two buckets that define their overarching moral compass. A person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat...or hate everything about Republican values except they got burned by Obamacare so they vote Republican. There is virtually an infinite level of nuance that can be a deciding factor in why someone votes for someone.

Spivak 2y ago
> transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat This is the NYT if you want a high-profile example of this existing in the real world. I worked with a guy who was a goldmine of odd but sincerely held political opinions that subverted the usual narratives. He was (I guess still is) gay but believed that trans people shouldn't serve in the military because he saw that they didn't get the treatment they needed. He wanted everyone to have guns as a protection against crooked cops-- he was from a small town. He was against single-payer healthcare because he thought the government would use it as a political weapon. He was was in theory anti-union because he thought union benefits should just be turned into labor protections for everyone instead of just being for union jobs and supported them only as a stopgap. He was pro-solar/wind and had an electric car not for any environmental reason but because he didn't want to be reliant on the greedy power company.
- GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
  i mean, his views don't sound too odd. he sounds like a communist who's got a dim view of reform or socialism as a means to communism.
- roarcher 2y ago
  To me that just sounds like someone who arrives at his political views by thinking rather than blindly adopting whatever his peers believe. It's only odd because it's (sadly) rare these days.

nickff 2y ago

Even the language that the different parties use is targeted at certain sets of values; Arnold Kling wrote this short book on the subject ("The Three Languages of Politics"): https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/ThreeLanguagesOfPolitics.pdf https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/ThreeLanguag... "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt is another, more nuanced (and complicated), but extremely interesting take on the subject of how values drive political affiliation.

brightlancer 2y ago
Framing has always been used in political debate just to target certain values; what may have changed (or not) is as a deliberate tactic to keep people divided: folks who do not speak the same language cannot communicate. On a lot of issues, I think 80% of folks are in 80% of agreement, but the partisans (whether politicians or activists) are framing the issue to prevent that consensus, because the partisans want something in the 20% that 80% of folks don't agree with.
- nickff 2y ago
  Kling and Haidt would agree with your respective paragraphs, though they do add a lot of color, and their books are worth reading.
  - brightlancer 2y ago
    I've listened to Haidt speak about it and his book is in my tall stack to read; I don't think I'd heard of King but I grabbed the PDF. Thank you.

eastbound 2y ago

[flagged]

nadir_ishiguro 2y ago
[flagged]
goatlover 2y ago
I'm not a leftist. Your leader and his allies are a danger to democracy. I don't get this from the Democratic Party, or ANTIFA, or Bernie Sanders. I get it from paying attention to what Trump and his administration have been doing.

nitwit005 2y ago

> In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics. People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining. They'll still happily argue about it for the post part, unfortunately. You can see this effect after some elections where people "fall in line" with their party's new presidential candidate on some issue.

DrillShopper 2y ago
> People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining. I call this "politics as religion". Remember you cannot reason someone out of a position they never reasoned themselves into. Route around the damage and make them irrelevant.

cj 2y ago

> "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values" You should test this hypothesis by talking to someone for 10 minutes, then guessing who they voted for. My hypothesis is you wouldn't do better than 50/50.

J5892 2y ago
I was talking to a very drunk Republican girl the other day. We were having a small argument about why we would send medical support to Africa for AIDS. Her argument was something about fixing America first (I was also drunk). I asked if she regretted her vote for Trump after several people she knew lost their government contracting jobs, and she said "No, fuck that guy, I didn't vote for him."
MajimasEyepatch 2y ago
"If p then q" does not imply "If q then p." Besides, there's a ton of easy ways to beat 50/50 odds without explicitly asking who they voted for. You can ask whether they graduated from college, and that will get you to something like 55/45 or 60/40. If they're white and they did not graduate from college, or if they're not white and they did graduate from college, your odds of guessing right are something like 2:1. Studies have also found (somewhat weak) correlations between some of the Big Five personality traits and political identification: people who score highly on conscientiousness are more likely to be right-leaning, while people who score highly on openness to experience are more likely to be left-leaning.
- cj 2y ago
  > "If p then q" does not imply "If q then p." My original comment is challenging whether "p then q" is valid in the first place by asking if the inverse would be true as a thought experiment. (Neither is true IMO) Just because someone has certain values doesn't mean they vote a certain way. Just because they vote a certain way doesn't mean they have certain values. "p" (who you voted for) and "q" (your values) are largely independent for a large percentage of voters.
  - 2y ago

jjtheblunt 2y ago

> leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent I'd say they invest in messaging around the values they want voters to believe they represent. i.e., marketing and ensuing reality diverge regularly with politicians, regardless of affiliation.

brightlancer 2y ago

> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent. Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol. And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns. > and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values. That's not new. On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future. > If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values. And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.

rebeccaskinner 2y ago
> Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us I didn't say that you shouldn't bother with people. I said that discussing _policy_ is not useful if you don't agree on _values_. It's the wrong level of abstraction. To put it in a plain analogy: discussing the best route to get to your destination isn't useful if you don't agree on where you are going. If you want to engage with someone with different values, then the values are where you need to start. If you want to engage with someone on the best way to get somewhere, you need to start by making sure you both agree on where you want to go.
- brightlancer 2y ago
  "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" is a value statement; in the US, some folks agree with it, some do not. Under your argument, folks who disagreed about that value statement shouldn't bother discussing criminal justice policy; I think that's erroneous and part-and-parcel of Don't Bother With Those People. Yes, _some_ policy conversations might be futile if folks have completely opposed values, but I don't think we should apply that generally. We MUST work with people who hold different values than us, without trying to change their values so that they become part of Us.

wand3r 2y ago

This makes 0 sense. Democrat and Republican "values", to the extent they are even real, no way represent the full spectrum of values one can have. Further, the Democratic party has a 27% approval rating and the Republican party had like 47% and I bet its falling. So even within your narrow framework this is a bad proxy because both are clearly unpopular.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

andrewclunn 2y ago

Values are largely posturing. Push comes to shove most people don't really care about what they say they care about. Tribal heuristics of trust are way more important.

rebeccaskinner 2y ago
I think most people care about some things. Most people don’t have the capacity to feel strongly about every issue, but there are some overarching ones that tend to hold along political lines, and people will tend to have pet issues as well.

bad_haircut72 2y ago

The two sides dont actually have different values, they have small wedge issues that unscrupulous individuals/groups over-exaggerate for their own gain. Im center left but still see myself in Trump supporters, were basically the same people who basically want to live our lives

zkid18 2y ago

I think the assumption that political parties represent two completely distinct sets of values is overly simplistic. In reality, there's a significant amount of overlap between them—what often differs is the style of messaging and the framing of ideas. Personally, I find it hard to fully identify with either the left or the right. I share beliefs and values from both sides, depending on the issue. This makes it difficult to adopt a clear-cut political label, and I think that's true for many people. Politics today often feels more like a battle of narratives than a clash of core principles / values. p.s. my perspective is non-US one.

dumbledoren 2y ago

> The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values. What difference do the parties have? They are both the 'corporate party' maximizing shareholder profit at all costs including killing brown people overseas or murdering Americans at home if they cant pay for healthcare.

benlivengood 2y ago

> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent. The largest two U.S. parties have been heavily minmaxing the propaganda they release to divide districts on the most effective issues they can convert into election wins. Their values are "get elected to office" but the propaganda can't be so straightforward because there aren't a lot of voters who are easily converted by that directness. Voters have values; political parties and candidates have propaganda. Game theoretically the winning move is to compete on comparative advantage of an issue within a voting district; because (for example) Democratic voters are split on the death penalty it's a very useless propaganda point for the party as a whole [0]; sticking to one side or the other would lose more elections than it would win. Note that this is very different from ranking the importance of values and focusing on the most impactful to real people; the (implicit) hope is that by focusing on effective propaganda issues then some values may be preserved through the election process. In practice politicians also horse-trade for future party political capital in preference to espoused values. One fundamental problem is that without a parliamentary style of government where coalitions are required to form a functioning legislature the usefulness of values in elections is greatly diminished. If I may say, the Republican party has done the best at shedding the illusion and explicitly transferring power to the party itself to enforce the values held by one man, which is the ultimate game-theoretically strong position for a political party. Disconnecting the ultimate value-judged outcomes of elections from the political machinations that win them has been incredibly damaging to democracy. [0] https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/the-end-of-the-abolition-era-democrats-quietly-drop-their-opposition-to-the-penalty/ https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/the-end-of-the-abolition-er...

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
<< One fundamental problem is that without a parliamentary style of government where coalitions are required to form a functioning legislature the usefulness of values in elections is greatly diminished. If I may say, This is may be where I personally have a problem. It used to be, in the olden days, that each congressman/senator was responsible to his/her constituents. That no longer appears to be the case. They are responsible to their own tribe ( party ). This is a major issue that would need to be corrected before anything substantial could be even considered. In other words, we used to 535 parties, but those have consolidated heavily to the detriment of the actual people they are supposed to represent. I hate to say it like this, but the coming recession ( depression if we are not as lucky ) may actually piss people off just enough to point their pitchforks at the political class. It will not be pretty, because average American already holds their representative in very high regard ( that is, if they know their name, which is another conversation.. but when things go south, I am sure they will learn their name real fast ). I had a longer rant, but I decided to trim it down.

rzz3 2y ago

> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". I strongly disagree. In this duopoly of a political system, most people on both sides are just picking the lesser of two evils. Meanwhile, we are creating an alarmingly decisive political society by choosing not to associate with those who vote differently than us. Perhaps most importantly, we lose the opportunity to actually shift the political positions of others (and ourselves) by not engaging in healthy and non-judgmental political discussions with our friends and neighbors, ultimately increasing polarization even further. Not everyone is voting based on their values—some are simply voting their wallets or the special interests they align with. Someone who is pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about. It doesn’t necessarily mean their core values are different than yours, but instead maybe simply just their priorities.

rebeccaskinner 2y ago
> pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about. What you care most about is a statement of values.
- greycol 2y ago
  Sure but if you're so reductionist then you'd also be arguing that slaves were making a statement about their values and how they viewed slavery because the majority didn't immediately escape or die trying. It would be disingenuous to say or even imply from that statement that their value system was pro slavery though.
- rzz3 2y ago
  I’d say priorities and values are pretty different, but there can be some overlap. But the problem is, folks don’t give it the required amount of nuance, and simply loop in all the horrible things the other party does and stands for with the values of that person, and it’s usually not accurate.

MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago

> the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values This is an incorrect and cynical statement. I understand why you feel this way (for one thing, it's the exact type of language coming out of many of each party's idealists) but it's simply false. One party supports gun rights while the other supports gun control. Those aren't values. Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety. Abortion rights is about personal liberty. Gun rights are also about personal liberty. Both sides care about personal liberty. The competing talking points aren't always conveniently about the same issue though. For Democrats their border policies are about compassion and human rights. For Republicans their border policies are about domestic prosperity. Do Republicans care about human rights? Yes. Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes. To pretend otherwise is to willfully push apart the tribes in your own mind, and to trivialize the perspective of the opposition. The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.

misiti3780 2y ago
bingo!
Miraste 2y ago
Abortion rights is about religion-as clear a difference in values as one can have.
- kulahan 2y ago
  I think if you believe this is simply a religious issue, you’ve majorly missed the point. Many religions do stand against abortion, but the philosophical argument can be summarized in part as “when is something a human”. There really no need for religion to argue that point, and it can settle a huge number of disagreements.
dbingham 2y ago

erlich 2y ago

> to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values I think your use of the word "world" is telling. Trump, the Republicans, and the global right are focused on their citizens. The Democrats and the global left are more focused on the world and their role in it. It's no longer just two approaches on how we can have the strongest economy. Each party has a weighting for how much to consider every issue across the world. For example, there are people who would be happy with less growth, lower income, but more action on climate change.

BeFlatXIII 2y ago

That's why I love claiming to be a third-party voter so much. It breaks their brains and their response informs whether or not they are worthy of my respect.

TwoNineFive 2y ago

Your need to insult the author proved his point.

andrewmcwatters 2y ago

You're just describing tribalism.

bentt 2y ago

Values alone leads to supporting solutions that sound good but don’t work. “Free money for everyone” speaks to values of equity, fairness, and empathy… while creating all kinds of side effects like inflation. If you are going to focus on values, apply them to a rigorous analysis of what works.

jcz_nz 2y ago

I went through the top responses to you, and indeed, nearly 100% of the pearl-clutching "you're so wrong" have comment history that strongly suggests right wing / libertarian / neocon beliefs. In related news, no one admits to voting for Nixon either.

n4r9 2y ago

You make a great point about values. It's potentially the biggest issue with the linked article. You got a weirdly large number of dissenting replies, so I just wanted to say that. I think it's irrelevant whether or not there are "two mutually exclusive" sets of values. What's relevant is that one's values can point you more in one direction than the other.