It's amazing. My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism, and friends on the right think the only reason for voting biden is socialism.
Where did all the intellect go?
The social dilemma documentary I think is very useful. It feels like social media bubbles are a large component, although of course there have been many contentious elections in the past.
Being centrist I can relate to parts of both sides but my experience is they both dislike centrists.
Yeah, there's a lot of really dumb straw-manning going on.
A good phrase I ran into is "strategic empathy". Like Sun Tzu teaches:
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
Sadly, humans seem allergic to this kind of thinking. As Orwell writes in "Notes on Nationalism":
"The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably certain of being in the right."
The smart (if mistaken) reasons to vote Trump were always trade and the Democratic Party's abandonment of Labor.
And Republicans, on the other hand, who think Biden is a socialist are delusional.
It's possible, though, that people aren't as dumb as they seem. For an individual, pretending not to empathize with the opposition is probably safer in a tribalized society. So perhaps that's what we're really witnessing.
Thanks for the mention of Orwell’s notes on nationalism. I just read it and it is remarkably relevant, even if the movements used as examples aren’t.
As a European it was incomprehensible to me why anyone would vote for trump as I had only received the straw man version of Trump through my local media. But when traveling the U.S. early 2016 I had the good fortune of spending a few hours on a bus with two trump voters and having them explain their hopes for a trump presidency, and it no longer seemed irrational. The hope that having no loyalties or obligations to the political powers that be he could actually have policies which benefited regular people seemed reasonable. There is a fair argument to be made his actual economic policies have indeed mostly benefited Americans, so someone voting just based on the economy would not be irrational in choosing Trump.
Still, he’s Donald Trump, and a bully. I don’t think I could ever be convinced to ignore all the other stuff to the degree of voting for him. I can understand those who outright dismiss him and anyone aligned with him without seriously trying to engage with their arguments.
The Democratic Party didn't abandon labor. Labor and the electorate abandoned the Democratic Party. Starved for funding and votes, the Democratic Party moved right and embraced neoliberalism. Mondale was pro-labor. He was crushed by Reagan in 1984.
I don't believe that Trump is a racist. I believe that Trump is a Trumpist. I believe that he lacks the capacity to hold any real beliefs outside of his own self-interest, even twisted and depraved ones. He panders to racists, along with other segments like Evangelicals, not because he believes in their cause but because they give him what he wants: praise and power. But to think that Trumpism is about race is deeply, tragically, missing the point.
If we want to understand and get to the root of what just happened for the past 4 years, the left needs to step back and seriously reconsider its assumptions.
I disagree wholeheartedly. You’ve described Trumpism in terms of “what goes on in Donald Trump’s head.” I think very few people ultimately care about this. Instead, most people interpret “Trumpism” as what his followers believe. And I can see little argument that there’s a much stronger thread of white primacy in his statements and followers than anyone else.
Explaining why taxes, redistribution of wealth, and allowing government to oversee certain services is actually beneficial to a market is a sure fire way to get called out as a communist and radical leftist.
Pointing out why historically, conservatives were deadset against abortion —in order to have a more productive discussion using pure history, not Bannon-style nonsense—is met with a absolute refusal to acknowledge the evidence.
Having a nuanced view makes no friends and just generates suspicion by all sides.
They haven't been, in the long view. Historically abortion was a Catholic issue, and sometimes liberal Protestant[1]. It generally wasn't an issue for Evangelicals, who were also mainly on the political left. Then in the late 60s the teenage son of a popular Evangelical pastor/author[2] became concerned for the rights of the unborn, convinced his father to take that message to the masses, it worked, and Republicans figured out that it would be a way to build a new coalition.
If you look at the extreme countercultures of the 60s, you see one side who hated "the system" that produced mass affluence, but loved the fruits of it. The other side loved the system, but hated the fruits. So one way to look at it is as a sort of political shibboleth indicating that you were definitely on one side and not the other.
US evangelicals had a mix of indifference or outright support. However it’s a mistake to confuse “conservatism” with religious organizations and even a party.
That it really took off in the 1960s+ isn’t surprising with Nazi death camps fresh in everyone’s mind, leaving a very bad impression with anything tied to eugenics and its proponents.
While I don’t agree that abortion is equivalent to eugenics—-sorry, if my wife were to die otherwise I’d choose abortion—much of the revulsion has its moral roots in the argument against eugenics.
They haven't. It's a political alliance with the anti-abortion crowd. The 1976 Republican party platform was the first to include a stance on abortion.
>> My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism […]
> While saying the "only" reason is too strong, there have a number of studies showing it was a key factor
I'm not going to read all those links, so hopefully you ordered them by compelling-ness.
A racial demographic agreeing politically is different from racism. The black vote is fairly united on the opinion that Democrats offer a better option for black people. That isn't classed as 'racists voting for democrats'. Ditto hispanics. It follows that whites are voting as a racial block doesn't mean that whites are racist. And if they think Democrat policies noticeably favour blacks and hispanics then they are probably right, because that is what the blacks/hispanics think.
The study is fine, but it doesn't support "they're voting that way because they are racist".
> CN was measured in Wave 4 using a five-item version of the Collective Narcissism Scale (Golec de Zavala et al. 2009; Golec de Zavala, Cichocka, and Bilewicz 2013). The items were: “If the United States had a major say in the world, the world would be a much better place,” “The United States deserves special treatment,” “It really makes me angry when others criticize the United States,” “Not many people seem to fully understand the importance of the United States,” and “I will never be satisfied until the United States gets the recognition it deserves.” All items used a seven-point scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7).
I dunno, that doesn't sound sound to me, and people tend to draw bold conclusions from such matters.
I've seen quite a lot of such papers, proving that "conservatives are knowing liberals better than vice versa" or similar, but diving into methodology it seems like people are trying to exacerbate what the data says.
People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.
> People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.
I agree with this, but there’s a bit that I don’t understand about their mindset. If they think they’ve lost their job to an immigrant who’s willing to work harder for less money, how does less government involvement make it better? You can’t just ban immigrants and solve the problem because the real problem is a system that allows exploitative labor practices. By American standards those immigrant workers are also getting a bad deal and the people doing the exploiting aren’t going to stop unless someone forces them to.
I think the reason you see people latching on to Trump is because they think all politicians want to maintain the status quo and they think Trump will break it. I understand the sentiment, but Trump didn’t really DO anything to help them. All he seems to do IMO is assign blame and talk about how things should be. It’s easy to say “we have the greatest plan” or “everyone should live in a mansion”, but it’s really hard to actually have the greatest plan and to implement it or to build everyone a mansion.
It’s really sad because I think middle class America is being disenfranchised and there’s a near majority of people who’ve been convinced it’s the fault of poor, “lazy moochers” rather than the wealthy capturing and hoarding all of our productivity gains over the past 40 years.
I think there should be common ground in wanting to get rid of the part of the government that serves the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. It’s just a matter of understanding the sides are wealthy vs everyone else, not right vs left.
> If they think they’ve lost their job to an immigrant who’s willing to work harder for less money, how does less government involvement make it better?
I'm not sure they want less government. Walls are built by governments, tariffs are protectionist measure. They want neo-mercantilism, which Trump is embodiment of.
> but Trump didn’t really DO anything to help them.
Oh, he started a big trade war with the gravest enemy stealing their jobs. I think he also imposed more strict immigration policy, but I'm not sure.
> capturing and hoarding all of our productivity gains over the past 40 years
I think that's wrong. Your productivity gains are mostly due to technology and rise of Asia. Asians and tech companies reaped the productivity gains accordingly. I mean, even eastern europeans like myself saw an extraordinary increase in standards of living.
> middle class America is being disenfranchised
> I think there should be common ground in wanting to get rid of the part of the government that serves the interests of the wealthy
I don't think that's your problem, and I don't expect american future to be good.
First, I think your political system is broken due to Duverger's law. Hence you have a political system where people have to adjust their views according to politicians' stances, and not vice versa. Lack of competition leads to corruption, regulatory captures etc etc, and I doubt that such system would find a will to reform itself.
Second, your wealthy already pay quite a lot of taxes, unlike Europe, where there is regressive VAT and high income tax for the middle class, and middle class is the main fiscal contributor. Hence your politician more concerned about well-being of those who affects budget the most. There is nothing strange here, and this kind of corporatism wouldn't heal itself as well.
I think that the root of your problem is not malicious rich whom Americans like to demonize so much, but broken beyond repair political system and unfair tax burden: politicians are more free to act as they will facing no pressure and competition, politicians strive to please big biz which is the main contributor to the budget. I'm really curious how you'll deal with that, if you'll manage to.
> I think that's wrong. Your productivity gains are mostly due to technology and rise of Asia.
IMO the average person hasn’t gotten enough of the gains from tech and it’s one of the things that worries me. As automation accelerates we can’t tolerate a handful of elites reaping all the benefits from that.
I don’t know much about the USA tax system. I’m Canadian. We pay high taxes and I don’t have a problem with it. In general though, I think the wealthy elite in the world have been capturing a disproportionate amount of the wealth / productivity gains since the 80s.
I also think the rewards for “success” are way too high for CEOs, etc.. They claim to be irreplaceable, but whenever something bad happens and they get called before Congress they act like they barely know more than the janitor. I think their only real value is in knowing all the other rich people.
I believe in capitalism and think hard work needs to be rewarded, but that the rewards are skewed too much. Once you have 100x the standard of living of the average person in the wealthiest countries in the world I think that should be enough. Everything else is just pure greed.
> People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.
Noted:
> Of course, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Both may have some validity. Moreover, as Michael Tesler has argued, economic anxiety and discontent among white voters in 2016 appear to be closely connected to racial resentment. His analysis of survey data indicate that many white voters, especially those without college degrees, believe that racial minorities and immigrants have been favored by government policies while their own communities have been neglected, especially during the Obama years (Tesler 2016b). The Trump campaign explicitly connected these issues by arguing that illegal immigrants were taking jobs away from American citizens and reducing wages for American workers.
> To sort out these competing explanations, we test the hypothesis that Trump’s surge among white working class voters, compared with previous GOP presidential candidates, was due to his explicit appeal to white racial resentment and ethno-nationalism. Thus, Trump’s campaign may have helped to politicize these attitudes, identifying them with a political party, especially among less educated white voters who tend to be less attentive to political campaigns and therefore less aware of differences between candidates on racial and other issues (Tesler 2016c). To test this hypothesis, we can compare the correlations between scores on the racial resentment scale and relative ratings of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates on the feeling thermometer scale over time among white voters with and without college degrees.
> The racial resentment scale has been criticized for not separating racism from ideas like conservatism or individualism. Some political scientists have attributed Republicans' higher resentment scores to the fact that they typically favor less government intervention
Well that's not surprising considering the nature of the questions. Damn your notion of racism is strange, Americans.
>> Some political scientists have attributed Republicans' higher resentment scores to the fact that they typically favor less government intervention
> Well that's not surprising considering the nature of the questions. Damn your notion of racism is strange, Americans.
"Government intervention" may be a codeword for social programs, which are often viewed in a certain way:
> Here, we integrate prior work to develop and test a theory of how perceived macro-level trends in racial standing shape whites’ views of welfare policy. We argue that when whites perceive threats to their relative advantage in the racial status hierarchy, their resentment of minorities increases. This increased resentment in turn leads whites to withdraw support for welfare programs when they perceive these programs to primarily benefit minorities.
> Wetts and Willer are hardly the first scholars to argue that racial animus is a powerful factor motivating opposition to social spending and redistribution in the US. Jill Quadagno’s The Color of Welfare in 1994 and Martin Gilens’s Why Americans Hate Welfare in 1999 credited racial factors — in particular, stereotypes of black people as lazy and overly dependent on government aid — with substantially reducing support for welfare spending since the war on poverty began in the 1960s.
>"Government intervention" may be a codeword for social programs
Yeah, are you sure that racism is about opposing welfare and quotas? Not thinking that other people are inherently inferior or malicious due to their race, but that there should be no affirmative action.
That sounds like a ill-minded umbrella term to me, invented to call people you don't like racist.
> racial animus is a powerful factor motivating opposition to social spending and redistribution
It's not a surprise if you define racial animus as being against welfare.
> Consistent with the expectations of new racism researchers, resentment accounted for racial bias in support of the experimental college scholar-ship program examined in this study, reinforcing its role as a measure of racial prejudice. But these effects were confined to self-identified liberals. Racial resentment did not explain racially biased program support among conservatives and was not linked to other negative racial attitudes among them. This leaves the concept of racial resentment in real doubt. If resentment measures prejudice among liberals but not conservatives it cannot function successfully as a broad measure of racial prejudice.
anti-black racism has (and continues to be) woven into the fabric of American society. That's not an understatement, our cities are often built in ways that harmed racial minorities. When there are, quite literally, "racist bridges" in the US, not to mention the anti-black histories of everything from Central park to the US highway system, it's not clear why that is a bad definition.
it comes almost from an angle of "not enough empathy" and painting individualism as a byproduct of broader narcissism complex
america want to succeed but only if every moral decision is followed. realistically this is almost never enforced and people act amorally all the time even if doing so somewhat altruistically
Definitely appreciate your contribution to the discussion.
Just a suggestion.
Maybe consider reducing the number of links, and posting the citation adjacent so we can see the title of the paper, and what journal it was published in before clicking. A brief tl;dr from the abstract would be magnificent as well.
Otherwise I'm just sort of taking on faith that whatever you posted will be worth the time to click on, and there's like 7 links there, so I'm just not gonna.
And people can't vote against their interests, be mislead or be straight up wrong. Isn't that just falling for demagoguery in the end? It's not like the electorate is truly informed in the US.
I think that's the key point. Decades of undermining the education system, plus many other problems such as "big money lobbying" is likely what led to such extremisms.
You know... the key metric of "education" used to be "what percentage of your population can read and write". By that measure, the US is fairly "educated". However, just like the value of each dollar goes down as the economy grows (i.e. inflation), I think it's important to apply a similar idea to education; just as the access to information increases, the value of _only_ being able to read and write is no longer enough to be considered as "educated".
You can’t seriously be arguing that everyone has been made so stupid by the education system as evidenced by the fact that they don’t agree with you. This is akin to categorically sweeping away the wisdom of the last generation because of leaded gasoline.
New rule: if you’re going to disparage the other side and call them stupid, you have to find two nice things to say about their side.
The US education system is failing, pretty badly. This is not a new grievance. Whether that causes or contributes to is probably unproven, but it's hard to think it doesn't.
It doesn't mean that all trump supporters are uneducated. But they do have a tendency to be uneducated. All the trump supporters I know are in that camp either for their extremist/nazi views, or due to misinformation, or for financial reasons. Those first two groups highly favor the uneducated.
Let me rephrase. One attribute the education system should provide students is the ability to think critically. By being able to think critically, a person should be able to have the capacity to see and understand the arguments on both sides. From there, a healthy debate can commence on which policy is better.
Keep in mind my previous comment is in response to the original post, which talks about people on both sides having the "extreme mindset", i.e.:
> It's amazing. My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism, and friends on the right think the only reason for voting biden is socialism.
Indeed, maybe I was wrong in suggesting that the poor education system is what caused this issue. But regardless, the ability to think critically is an important attribute, and I do believe extremisms are caused, in part, by the lack of it.
"Critical thinking" is not a generic, universally transferable skill. It is highly domain-specific. One can possess "critical thinking skills" when it comes to solving software design problems but be absolutely clueless about public policy.
It might be more accurate to say that Americans need a better standard of education for history and civics.
It's not about them agreeing, but when people can't understand basic statistics or when people no longer even believe science, scientists and the scientific method, then yes it is the education system. Do you think it's a coincidence that there's a significant gap between how educated people are and which party they vote for?
I'm not sure that has changed that much. There's always been a component of politics that's tribal in nature, and it takes a lot to overcome that inertia. It's not unlike sports, where people will root for the local team, even though there's not much that's local about the team other than the name.
You can see that behavior for example around the ACA. It's obviously inspired by Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health care reform, so you'd think the Republicans would be all in favor of it. Yet at the federal level, since it was pitched by the Democrats, the Republicans are against it.
It seems to be everywhere (even on the top rated comment here). Biden himself is dismissed as being not left enough by a lot the online population from what I can see.
Because he wasn't the the fashionable choice for Democratic nomination (Sanders) he's reduced to being just an old guy who isn't Trump but is in the right party without anyone even bothering to even read his Wikipedia page or look up some of his speeches on youtube.
He's a passionate politician and an empathic speaker who has the experience to be a realist and appeal to republican voters too. He's exactly what is needed right now.
Sanders wouldn't have had a chance to get in, but even if he did he would just polarise things even further.
Well if you vote for Trump you like what he says or it doesn't bother you enough, then that speaks volumes. Like when he called Mexicans rapists/murderers/drug dealers, or when he made fun of a disabled reporter, or said a women was too ugly to rape. Trump is just a horrible person. I'm German, a and left wing European.(I used to live in the US also). I don't like democrats politically. But if I could have, I would've voted for them as I view them not as destructive as republicans. But, even if Trump was as left as Sanders, one of the few American politicians I actually like, I wouldn't vote for him.
> Like when he called Mexicans rapists/murderers/drug dealer
I think this validates OP's point. He never said all Mexicans are rapists etc, he was speaking about border security and describing the people illegally entering the country through the Southern Border. One of many soundbites spun into a scandal by the media and used to dehumanize him.
His supporters understood what he meant, his detractors took the media spin hook, line, and sinker.
"They aren't sending their best". Yes, your description of this is accurate.
News does this all the time to generate outrage, both left and right leaning, and I absolutely HATE it. Particularly in the Trump and "fake news" era because it leaves them incredibly vulnerable to the criticism. "See! The fake-news, always lying!". Makes it easy to discredit their larger, more serious reporting by picking on these smaller transgressions.
Do you appreciate the inevitable outcome of this sort of speech is that people, whether they are Mexican or not, whether they are legal immigrants or not, so long as they fit into some deranged category, will meet more violence in their day-to-day lives?
It's not racist because of the exact words said, it's racist because of the obvious consequences. There are ways to talk about difficult issues. Trump empowered the worst people to come out from hiding.
The hook, line, and sinker is when he said, "and some, I assume, are good people." It's tantamount to, "I'm not racist. I have a black friend."
> He never said all Mexicans are rapists etc, he was speaking about border security and describing the people illegally entering the country through the Southern Border.
> They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
I think the loss of nuance to our political discussions is a disaster ...and I only see it getting worse. I believe there are good ideas on both sides of the aisle, but often feel like the only one with that viewpoint.
I’ll add one doesn’t have to be a centrist by any means to choose intellect over tribalism. The “left”, the “right”, and the “none of the above” can all achieve it too if they spend less time on media driven depictions and more on deeply exploring the issues.
Centrists have it easier because they naturally see positive aspects of both sides, and that is exactly what is needed. If one can’t put themselves in the shoes of the other side and find a few strong legitimate and logical reasons they can connect with, then they really don’t understand what they are even fighting. You should be able to argue the other side. The reasons are there, and emotion only serves to blind us to them.
disclaimer: I'm not American, but I'm from the UK which has similar issues on a smaller scale.
The thing is, as a leftist I used to be able to have conversations with conservatives. We had different values, but a largely shared understanding of reality. That gave a common basis for contrast and discussion.
Now, that's gone. My biased perception is that the worst of it started on the right: a ways back Fox started creating a bubble of alternative reality, and that's been hugely amplified with the arrival of social media. I started struggling to communicate in meaningful ways. More recently I've found myself fact checking my own community more often than I used to - I wonder if Trump has sent leftists crazy in the same way that Obama did the right ;-).
Check out r/Libertarian sometime. After it was radicalized by self-professed fascist moderators and turned into a pro-Trump meme board, the admin stepped in and installed a moderation team that spent time coming up with rules to prevent the subreddit from being overrun by authoritarians again. They added legitimate left-libertarian[1] moderators, and there are left-libertarians users that post there.
I bring it up because it is the only conservative space I've seen that doesn't end up posting helicopter ride[2] memes at people they perceive to be even slightly to the left of them.
I'd say MSNBC was just as complicit as Fox over the decades.
In 2009, they purposefully cropped video of the main protester outside an Obama town-hall meeting to only show his back and slung rifle, and then used the footage to immediately launch into a panel discussion positing that the primary motivation for the protests against Obama was racial animus. The protester was black.
I'm not going to tell you that there aren't issues on the other channels, but the sheer volume of manipulation on Fox is utterly overwhelming. Imperfect as it is I don't really think MSNBC compares.
Just remember that it's always easier to see the manipulation and bias the your political opponents are doing to their own side, than the ones your own leaders are doing to you.
It seems the "windows of acceptable opinions" have gotten narrower (acceptable in a given social clique); I think the reason is that our social medias are so open - we talk not directly to a few people we trust, but our outbursts are visible to a wide circle or even public. This leads to self-censorship.
I agree. In general I identify as very progressive (especially by US standards), but I hold some opinions that are somewhat outside of the leftist norm, and I'm more or less completely unwilling to discuss them online as I don't trust that I will be treated in good faith.
The sad thing here is that I'm genuinely open to having my opinions changed, and have a history of changing my view in response to argument in the past. But can't have my view changed if I'm too scared to even have the discussion ;-).
Starting to feel that the only way out of it is to remove the «Winner takes it all», to let more political parties participate. And the one with majority, by uniting them, get the president.
It's truly scary watching how viral the conspiracies in this election go in minutes on Twitter/FB. One side wants to find "fraud" so any clip someone posts out of context becomes proof and spreads like wildfire.
As a complete outsider,I watched the politics and conservative subreddits respectively as the election unfolded.
It's of course anecdotal, but after watching that with my own eyes I would find it very hard to believe that those links, threads and comments were developing organically.
For example, the conservative subreddit went from following the election to having the front page fully filled with claims of election fraud in matter of literal minutes, with sources coming from a million places at the same time.
Just like magic, suddenly the election being rigged went from a crazy idea to incontestable fact, and now for many people that's what happened, clear as day.
It was extremely scary to see,I still don't know what to make of it.
Social media is now a primary target for foreign election interference, I'm sure that's a major cause. In 2016 Russia targeted Clinton and supported Trump. But they also generally tried to increase division. One ugly thing about that is disinformation campaigns would actually get support from some Americans.
My main worry is that this is in the US and it's being handled poorly already. A country with great resources where these companies are based and somewhat governed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elections_in_2020
How many Cameroonian experts do the US based tech giants have to combat misinformation there?
Conservatives were saying Trump’s margins would have to be big enough that Dems couldn’t steal it well before election day. It was never a “crazy idea”, it’s been on their minds since the push for vote by mail.
> My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism, and friends on the right think the only reason for voting biden is socialism. Where did all the intellect go?
A good technique for that is to encourage people to follow their own logic (by asking some simple questions if necessary) until they notice themselves that they arrive at absurdities.
There absolutely was. I highly recommend watching the Gore Vidal vs William Buckley Jr debates. Both Vidal and Buckley were extremely well spoken and reasoned in their arguments. I wonder if Buckley and Goldwater are weeping over Trump as their political successor.
I'm not talking about the political actors, I'm talking about the electorate. To some degree, the politicians will do what resonates. The difference is that for most of our history you pretty much had to be a gentleman to even consider the senate or presidency. (I mean that classically, not in the misogynistic sense.) It was probably Bill Clinton and then Trump that have demonstrated that the masses will gladly elect a non-gentleman and Trump has really leaned in to the lowest common denominator politics. That combined with self-selecting media. It's potent. You basically can distill the different tribal voices down to a vote for socialism or a vote for racism and it's sad to say but it worked pretty damn well and we had one of the biggest turnouts ever.
Perhaps. I'm not sure because I haven't seen enough research on this point, but I do find it plausible that as the barrier to entry has lowered, the gentility of the candidates has decreased. Thanks for the food for thought.
This is a false equivalency because voting for Trump in 2020 is a demonstration of complicity with a years-long record of racist rhetoric and policies while it’s simply laughable that a Biden administration would implement anything as redistributive as the New Deal, much less hiring true socialists in the administration.
I blame Fox News for getting away with a decade of bad-faith claims of socialism towards things like mortgage assistance or Pre-K education.
It would be a mistake to take some % increase as general approval from a demographic. If the demographic already had very little support prior, all it shows is that wasn't as bad as expected. In this case, Trump's policy having fewer discriminatory outcomes than expected doesn't mean they aren't racist. That's not to offer additional commentary on if him or his policy is racist, but that increase in support doesn't contradict the possibility.
Areas with the highest covid death rates voted for trump does that mean his covid policy was sound? Minorities like many vote against their own interest. Good people on both sides. I will give you the prison reform thing but that was Kushner and trump later expressed regret for it, and it was pandering.
sure. 4 years of trump are to blame for racist rhetoric but surely not 47 years of biden. trump is not the problem he is the one that made the problem more visible. racism was always there.
What do you mean by centrist? America doesn’t really have a left-wing political group, certainly not in any mainstream way. Obama referred to himself as a Reagan Republican and Biden is even more right-leaning. Even figures like AOC and Bernie Sanders are extremely anodyne, not at all “left wing” just barely more liberal than American centrists.
The “centrist” view in America is extremely far to the right, which then allows factions like Trump’s to be far right to deeply fascist, racist extremes (this is not hyperbole, Trump is dangerously fascist) and yet still act like he’s just “on the right” because “centrist” positions in the US are themselves so deeply far right already.
The US really urgently needs more mainstream far left politicians, instead of nearly-Republican examples like Harris, Warren, Biden, Buttigieg, etc. AOC & Sanders are the closest, but by no means do they represent views that are anywhere near being a healthy “far left” ideology to help draw a compromise from the far right and towards a healthier centrist position.
“Centrist” in the US would at least be on the fence of letting individual own assault rifles, withdrawing federal funds for abortion, reducing the EPA and decommitting from international agreements on climate change, granting large tax breaks to corporations, eliminating social welfare programs for oppressed classes of people (in ways that overtly hurt the poor, minorities and women), and creating a legal chasm blocking any road to universal medical care, all while buying into jingoistic ideas about America being the best and dehumanizing other groups like immigrants and foreigners.
That’s the centrist position in the US. When anything further left is even suggested, the socialism boogeyman is drummed up and huge populations of people will vote against it for no other reason than “socialism bad.”
Any sense of acting like there’s a benign Republican core of ideas around states’ rights or lower taxes to be discussed in good faith is just gobsmackingly wrong about the US. That is just simply a falsehood.
What passes for middle of the road, “good faith” centrist discussion is deeply far right already, and “both-sides-ism” where “liberals claiming all Trump voters are racist” is disingenuously used to act like it’s “the same as” the behavior of the American far right is both completely wrong and contributing to the problem.
There is no longer a core of fiscally conservative but socially liberal citizens, that just does not exist.
I also reject the premise of your first point. It doesn’t matter what the current within-country standard for left and right are, that’s useless semantics. All that matters is outcomes in peoples’ lives.
A personal right to own assault rifles or limit federal funds for abortion (even if only for fiscal or states’ rights reasons) is emphatically far right in the sense of overall outcomes for lives, it does not matter what within-country label someone might want to call it by.
I did not say labels are meaningless. I said taking labels that have meanings, like far right vs far left, and trying to redefine them (semantic games) to be relative to some arbitrary standard within a single country (like saying “fiscal conservative but social liberal is “centrist” in the US” when in fact it all hinges on the fine points of those positions) is not helpful or useful.
Political labels (not within-country labels at a point in time) can be useful. Far right and far left have long-developed meanings in terms of broad policies they endorse and those policies have meanings in terms of the actual measurable impact on lives and human flourishing.
I feel your comment is not in good faith at all. Saying something like “what does this even mean” as a rhetorical deflection tactic when my comment was perfectly clear is very uncharitable and additionally it’s not contributing any new arguments or information, you’re just acting like the premise is unclear, but for no acceptable reason.
The labels referring to political parties within a specific country will have meanings within that same context.
> "to be relative to some arbitrary standard"
That's what you were doing by saying the left isn't actually the left. Why? The left has a clear definition in the USA. You are redefining it for some reason.
> "Far right and far left have ... meanings in terms of the actual measurable impact on lives and human flourishing."
Yes, both extremes are generally terrible for lives. Was that the point? Otherwise no, I don't know what you mean. Perhaps you can answer instead of deflecting.
You’re still seemingly deliberately misrepresenting and not engaging with my point and just disingenuously deflecting by appealing to increasingly abstract meta debates about relative definitions.
It doesn’t matter if the labels of right or left would have context within the colloquial definitions within a country and I am not “redefining” them by saying those reference points don’t matter.
There’s a superseding context in which far right and far left already have well understood definitions in terms of terminal values and how their policies map to those values. That exists outside of any given country or political unit.
> “The left has a clear definition in the USA.”
Uhhh no. That is not a reasonable thing to say. For example, Trump campaigned on the idea that Kamala Harris is extremely far left, but most people who identify as far left see her as basically just slightly left of center.
The idea there is a clear “left” in the US is itself a pure Republican propaganda construction just so it can paint Democrat candidates as “evil socialists” no matter their actual policies or how they map to the superseding notion of left-leaning politics.
Biden for example would have been a solid, firm Republican candidate ~35 years ago, even if running on a Democratic ticket.
My main point is that “center” in the US is already very far Republican-leaning and has shifted increasingly towards the right wing in the past 30 years, to the point that a very, very right-leaning Democrat like Biden is now sensationalized as being “far left” in election propaganda.
There is not actually any mainstream political group in the US that is really “far left” in the sense of offering a counterbalancing policy initiative that Republicans would have to significantly compromise away from their right wing core in order to engage with. Such a thing does not exist in the US.
You can play games of redefining words if you want and pretend like whatever position is occupied by the Democratic party thus, by definition, represents the “left” and thus represents a ideological separation from “the right” but it would just be falsely shifting definitions, it wouldn’t make “centrist” in the US to be any less far-right-leaning that what it really, actually is.
Why do you keep saying the labels don't matter than insist on using labels to say these parties and candidates are something else? The redefinitions are coming from you. So far you've offered three variations: (1) Left-vs-right as based on "outcomes of lives", (2) as opposed to 35 years ago, and (3) as opposed to some international comparison.
The first makes no sense and still lacks any explanation. The other two are arbitrary.
These parties are left-vs-right as of 2020 American politics. The definitions are dependent on the context of the time and place because politics change over time. They are also relative to each other; Left means left of the right, and vice versa. And center means in the middle of both. It's the current era that determines where the spectrum is actually anchored.
Why are you so insistent on using some other scale to label everything differently? What purpose does that serve? Is that not meaningless semantics?
Yes, agreed, if you are willing to discuss in good faith we could resume the discussion, but that seems very unlikely given your comments so far.
If all you do is try rhetorical deflection by repeatedly saying previous comments weren’t clear when by any reasonable standard they were clear, you’re just arguing with yourself in an echo chamber and it’s not productive for people to engage with you.
You aren’t engaging with the clearly explained positions of my comments, you’re merely splicing quotes out of context and acting like you are entitled to question definitions of basic, widely agreed terms. Claiming subjectivity and confusion over definitions and then disingenuously acting like the other party is the one that’s changing definitions is not a valid argument. You’re just writing a lot of inflammatory verbiage to drum up confusion and selectively quote earlier comments to act like the position they represent isn’t consistent or clear even though it is.
Looking in your comment history it seems you have a very strong habit of doing this in many threads, often with a clear agenda favoring US right-leaning politics, so the most reasonable conclusion I can see is that you are trying to inflame confusion and derail otherwise valid points by converting them into endless semantic arguments about definitions just to support your existing biases.
You're saying X is actually Y based on a different context. I keep asking you why you skip context and only use Y and you have no answer other than to say it's different from X and is the "real" answer. This is, quite literally, redefining the terms to support your bias. Why are you so insistent on saying there is "no real left" in the USA when there clearly is? Who cares about these outdated global definitions? You're disagreeing with the entire country to do what exactly?
I take great care in my discussions to be as objective and concise as possible, while focusing on the actual arguments and asking questions to get to the root of the matter. You clearly haven't read my thousands of comments on this site if you think otherwise. However I find that you constantly use the same "good faith" excuse every time. Why is that? If your position can't be clearly communicated and so easily breaks down under light questioning, then it's a failure of your position.
But since this isn't going anywhere, I'll end it here.
> So far you've offered three variations: (1) Left-vs-right as based on "outcomes of lives", (2) as opposed to 35 years ago, and (3) as opposed to some international comparison.
The very obvious point is that by using any consistent definition of left and right, either time-locked, global, or otherwise, the US doesn't have anything resembling a far-left party.
> Why are you so insistent on using some other scale to label everything differently? What purpose does that serve? Is that not meaningless semantics?
It forces people to recognize the extreme rightward shift in politics, and therefore the idea that appealing "to the center" is in fact an appeal to regress further to the right. This is something those on the right vehemently want to avoid admitting, since it prevents them from painting themselves as victims.
Those definitions aren't consistent, they're just different because the context is different. It's like general relativity, left vs right only exist in relation to something else.
> "forces people to recognize the extreme rightward shift in politics"
This is just strange. Politics change all the time in every dimension, just like people's values and opinions. Clinton was a Democrat who wanted strong borders and now the modern left wants open borders. Isn't that a shift to the left?
Everyone is aware that politics change over time. Nobody needs to recognize anything other than the policies and parties they identify with and want to have. If you can't discuss the policies and must use a party definition from decades ago then I don't see how this is anything but "painting [yourselves] as victims".
> Those definitions aren't consistent, they're just different because the context is different. It's like general relativity, left vs right only exist in relation to something else.
Yes, and the US Republican party is extremely far right, so labelling other parties solely in relation to US politics is not useful for discussing like actual political ideology.
It is, however, useful if you want to paint mainstream European political ideologies as socialism.
> Everyone is aware that politics change over time.
Then recognize that and be willing to have a discussion about politics in relation to time. If you refuse to engage with someone who points out that a political party or idea is not actual far left in the grand scheme of things, you are refusing to recognize the larger context.
In general, its difficult to have conversations without consistent definitions, and if the Republican party can change the definition of "left" by moving further to the right, this makes discussion of left politics hard, so people interested in discussing leftist politics have to reject that definition to have productive conversations.
If you don't want to have productive conversations with those people, that's your choice. But say that, don't claim they're being disingenuous.
> Clinton was a Democrat who wanted strong borders and now the modern left wants open borders. Isn't that a shift to the left?
Depending on exactly what you mean by "open borders", Sanders, who is conventionally considered left-of-the-median Democrat, wants less open borders than the democratic party as a whole. He's for freedom of movement of people, but for more tariffs and economic protectionism than the democratic party.
Trump and Sanders are actually sort of unique in this regard. Conventional Democrats and Republicans both favor free trade, although perhaps for different reasons. Trump, being anti-globalization does not, and Sander, being pro-labor, does not.
Again, in relation to what? It's the right, as according to current American politics because that's the context.
> "points out that a political party or idea is not actual far left in the grand scheme of things"
There is no "grand scheme" of things, you just picked a different context. Things would be different still if we went back to the Civil War or Ancient Greece.
> "productive conversations with those people, that's your choice. But say that, don't claim they're being disingenuous."
I'm not, I'm asking simple questions that go unanswered. The only reasoning I received was that you want people to recognize a shift. But since you claimed that the shift was being "ignored" as marketing and propaganda, isn't highlighting that shift effectively the same? I find it more so actually since politics changed naturally so it's the activist position to claim what the parties "really" are based on a selection from the past.
And immigration refers to people, not trade. Clinton made this speech [1] in 1995, but if any Democrat made the same speech today they would be vilified. That shows the left hasn't shifted to the right at all, they shifted even more to the left.
> Again, in relation to what? It's the right, as according to current American politics because that's the context.
The world. Historical American politics. A larger context. I'm repeating myself and you're ignoring it. Please stop asking questions that have already been answered. If you have objections to using a larger context, state them, but don't pretend I didn't answer your question already.
> Things would be different still if we went back to the Civil War or Ancient Greece.
Yes. You can pick specific contexts in which the modern american republican party was downright progressive. But you have to cherrypick those contexts, as you just did. Saying "world politics today" is a fairly objective measure, is it not? I mean there are even parties in Europe that are right-of-the-Republicans, so it isn't as though they're the furthest right. It's just that the Europeans call those parties fascist, and in some cases the parties embrace that label. Here people get annoyed when you do that.
> I'm not, I'm asking simple questions that go unanswered. The only reasoning I received was that you want people to recognize a shift. But since you claimed that the shift was being "ignored" as marketing and propaganda, isn't highlighting that shift effectively the same?
You're still ignoring it, and we're still discussing semantics, not politics. Do you want to have a productive conversation, or do you want to keep avoiding discussion of actual policies?
> I find it more so actually since politics changed naturally so it's the activist position to claim what the parties "really" are based on a selection from the past.
I can't parse this.
> And immigration refers to people, not trade. Clinton made this speech [1] in 1995, but if any Democrat made the same speech today they would be vilified. That shows the left hasn't shifted to the right at all, they shifted even more to the left.
This is the first time you said the word "immigration". I'm done.
> Biden for example would have been a solid, firm Republican candidate ~35 years ago, even if running on a Democratic ticket.
35 years ago the parties were a lot closer together because the Republican Party hadn't taken its jaunt into extremism that started in the 1990s, but, no Biden—who was then then to the right of his current position, was a solid Democrat then, though, like Clinton, part of the conservative Democratic Leadership Councl.
I agree with you. I think we’re saying the same thing. 35 years ago Biden would have been pretty close to a centrist candidate, pretty close to a milquetoast Republican at that time, despite being in the Democratic party.
While Biden may have ideologically shifted left a small bit (changed views on criminal justice, climate policy), he’s still very close to the same point on the political spectrum he occupied 35 years ago. But now, because of the slide to extremism of the Republican party, Biden is suddenly caricatured as a socialist, far left boogeyman.
That’s not a function of the US Democratic party actually being far left leaning. It isn’t. It’s an expression of increasingly extreme far right positions of Republicans to shift the entire discussion massively to the right and redefine the center.
Any system where you define the center in such a way that Joe Biden is “far left” is a complete far right propaganda machine divorced of any acceptable or realistic definition of “centrists” or far left.
> “ Other proposals bring out stark partisan rifts. Democrats, for example, are much more likely than Republicans to favor banning assault-style weapons (88% vs. 50%) and high-capacity magazines (87% vs. 54%).”
You can also see in the charts in that link that even though a modest majority of all Americans believes there should be stricter gun laws, it is driven drastically by how dominant that view is among Democrats (86%) vs Republicans (where 69% say current gun laws are OK or are already too strict).
I only chose this topic because it refutes the falsehood that there’s some core of reasonable centrists in America - there’s totally not. Many issues are like this example of gun laws where it is extremely partisan and where one version of the extreme partisan divide is usually considered “centrist” (for example, belief that gun laws are mostly OK as-is, which is a really right wing belief but is seen as “centrist”) but it actually belies America being heavily shifted to the far right by default, so it’s not really center.
I empathize more with your right-leaning friends. The extremes of the right (racists, nazis, white supremacists, etc) are kept very much in check by taboo. The extremes of the left (socialism, communism, collectivism, and the new Woke cult) are not.
Anecdotally, I not only do not work with any of the former, but can't imagine a workplace that would suffer them. At the same time, I work with multiple people that are proud, self-proclaimed members of the latter group.
If you think about why the former are taboo and the latter aren't (at least in your mind), something obvious should happen.
And as a european, I can tell you with high degree of certainty that absolutely zero of your friends or workmates are actually socialists or communists. It's possible they embrace socialist ideals, as Sanders does, but Sanders is at best a moderate left-wing here in europe.
You folks in the US developed a weird hatred of the word "socialism", equating it with the ridiculous dictatorial ideals of Stalin, Castro etc. But although socialism has a hard time working, that doesn't mean some of its ideas don't work in a democracy.
Here in europe, "free health care" is not socialism. It's a human right. Human rights are fun, you should try them.
What exactly is your impression of how socialized healthcare works, here in Europe?
Are you under the hallucination that I'm required to offer my services to the government so others can receive their surgery?
This is your problem, you have associated "socialism" with slavery, ergo you refuse to hear any arguments that has the word "social" in it because it's automatically bad by association.
Maybe start to accept that your fellow Americans don't actually want slavery, but maybe are instead unhappy with the completely fucking absurd and insane private health insurance system?
It is truly mind boggling, the mental jumps some of you folks are ready to make, to arrive at the conclusion that your life would be made worse were you to take example from countries that have it better than you. Because God forbid the US isn't number 1 in everything.
A zero-percent tax, to my knowledge, does not make an effective society. Society functions because it is comprised of individuals overall working together.
Like, seriously, you can't keep using public infrastructure and services and think taxes are slavery. The amount of shit you use daily that is funded by your taxes, hell, that is funded by my taxes as well from across the globe, is unreal. You would have to go find some virgin island and live off the land of you were to take this ridiculous argument to its logical conclusion.
And you're probably paying for private insurance right now. Either because you have to, or because your employer makes you. A socialized healthcare system would be more efficient and fair on everyone, you included. How do I know? I had to have sinusoidal surgery two years ago and didn't have to run a fucking indigogo campaign to pay for it.
You framed it that way, look at the words you chose: racism, Nazism, white supremacy. The overarching ideal of all that can very simply be summarized as "non-white people shouldn't exist". The ideal of collectivism is "power to the people."
You took the worst possible interpretation of the former and the best possible interpretation of the latter. In what world do you think anyone believes this was done in good faith?
I already told you in the other thread that you have a different definition of socialism than the people you're talking to.
It's not bad faith. You need to accept you are working off a different vocabulary. Your shitty media abuses this to stoke the divide.
Neither definition is more correct, but it stands to reason that people arguing in favour of "socialism in politics" aren't Stalinists, for fucks sake. If anyone tells you that, they are trying to rile you up. And if you believe them, you're a fool.
Best possible? Someone could probably do better, but off the top of my head, "if we aggregate metrics from populations using a sampling method other than a uniform random distribution, we should expect to see differences" probably approximates it.
What is the worst possible interpretation of socialism, communism, collectivism, and the new Woke cult?
They're Neo-Confederates, celebrating the cause of treason. You may be sympathetic to that cause but own it without pretending it was anything other than an insurrection to protect slavery.
I don't really get calling Confederates traitors. I get that they are the baddies in the whole civil war thing, but traitors? I assume that they had the right to secede and the war was inevitable anyway.
Isn't the 4th of July literally a holiday in the US? That's totally a treason to the British empire.
If it's helpful, many of the confederate statues were actually put up many years after the end of the civil war explicitly to intimidate black people/minorities and to continue to establish that white supremacy is still something to be celebrated via statues. In this context the celebration of the 4th of july establishes the independence of the united states against an empire, while the statures are made to enforce white supremacy. [0].
In many cases they were active duty military officers who broke their oaths of service (e.g. Robert E. Lee), which tends to be mentioned a lot in the rationale for using that term.
The Nazi concentration camps still stand. Furthermore, when people vandalized Auschwitz's notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work sets you free) sign[0] it was restored.
If even Jews wish to preserve the concentration camps for the significance of historical mistakes for humanity that they represent, what does it say about those who wish to destroy history elsewhere?
"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it".
Is it your contention that the people defending the statue of Lee would have given similar reasons for their behaviour as those who restored Auschwitz's sign? I ask, because that seems very unlikely to me.
Context is important. Few are arguing that there shouldn't be remembrances of those people and events and the reasons for them, it's how those things are remembered that is in question.
No, but the reason is less important than the pros of this outcome.
Would you condemn a man who saved a child from a burning building because he wanted his 15 minutes of fame and not because it was the right thing to do?
I'm deliberately using a hyperbole to emphasize a point, but there's also a much more recent example of statue destruction: ISIS has destroyed a lot of statues. Is this the company one should keep?
Note that when statue destruction is normalized, broken windows theory kicks in and statues of prominent black civil rights activists[0], Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi[1], etc. get vandalized as well. I think very few people would agree that Gandhi (I'm not a scholar of history, but I've seen many people referencing him as arguably one of the most virtuous people ever) deserved this.
> what does it say about those who wish to destroy history elsewhere?
This is a misleading framing: nobody is calling for destroying history. If you follow the discussion at all closely, a very common refrain is that statues should be in museums rather than major civic places and, even more importantly, presented with correct and complete historical context. A large number of these statues were put up for partisan purposes during the Jim Crow era and have little artistic or historical value since their purpose was always propaganda rather than education.
A similar dynamic plays out with plantations: nobody is calling to have them destroyed - what conservatives are objecting to is including the complete history of the slavery and torture which were as integral to their functioning as the luxuries enjoyed by the planter class.
Using the German example: the entire country is aware of the history but they learn that in schools and museums, there aren’t statues of Hitler in parks, and if you visit a concentration camp it shows the horrors suffered there rather than painting a rise-colored view of how comfortably the camp commander lived or talking about how productive the slaves in the forced labor factories were without acknowledging the cruelty of their lives.
Literally a hoax. He explicitly condemned them in the same sentence. You have been gaslit and are confident about it without having checked the basic facts.
You've linked to the second interview he gave about Charlottesville. In his first statements[1] in an interview on August 12th, 2017, he famously didn't condemn white supremacists who murdered someone, saying instead that he condemns "egregious displays of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides".
Then, several days later in the second interview[2] on August 15th that you linked to, he equates the violent white nationalists that murdered someone with what he calls the "alt-left", the purported group that the murder victim belonged to, saying that he thinks there is blame on both sides. After asking for further clarification, he says that there were fine people on both sides. Only after further questioning, and in a separate statement, does he condemn white supremacists.
People were criticizing him for his initial equivocation on August 12th, comparing the white supremacists who murdered a person to the victims of their violence, and the fact that he didn't name or condemn white supremacists. In fact, when journalists asked him to condemn them, he walked away from the interview. He refused to differentiate between the two.
Then, on August 15th, he defends his initial comments through his continued equivocations in the second interview.
It isn't a hoax to criticize inappropriate equivocations, especially when it took him 4 days to muster out a condemnation, but still only after doubling down on the equivocations.
That whole exchange is very different than what I have seen. Its actually alarming how reasonable he sounds in this clip. Believe me, I think he was an awful president, and I voted against him twice, but this is what I wish my liberal peers would admit about our own bias.
Are there evidence-based ratings for different publications? And is that the kind of thing that could be done at all objectively? If not objectively, at least methodically?
> And is that the kind of thing that could be done at all objectively?
No, unfortunately. And just as unfortunately, when you try to communicate why someone on "the other side" might have decent reasons for feeling the way they do, you are seen as an enemy. Alas this is human nature and not likely to change.
Sadly I have not found any trustworthy 'fact checkers' that are not in and of themselves also inherently biased.
But once you realize that every major news org seems perfectly willing to gaslight you fundamentally, you start to doubt basically everything you read.
If this one 'fact' about trump condemning nazis is so obviously a false story, how many other false stories are there?
The problem with this understanding is that it doesn't help you learn the truth, it just lets you understand that everyone is lying to you, and if you don't put in the exhausting work to find more information (assuming any is available) about every story you will be lied to with impunity.
When you offload the process of interpreting events to someone else, you lose the ability to tell truth from lies. When those people are so confident in their lying to do it on things like this, how many other things have they lied about?
It's important, I think, to not toss out the baby with the bathwater. Are fact checkers inherently biased? Probably. Should we ignore them? No. CNN's fact checkers called out the distortion on the 'both sides' discussion, as did PolitiFact and others.
When it comes to fact checker bias, PolitiFact is a good example to look at because they publish numbers on all the politicians. If you look at both left and right wing politicians, you'll see that they say plenty of inaccurate things. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Hillary Clinton, Biden, all say inaccurate or untrue things to the order of 20 - 45% of checked statements.
Trump is in a category all his own. 72% of his checked statements are inaccurate.
Of course you should subject those numbers to scrutiny. Certainly there is sample bias in what statements get checked. But it is easy to find many, many Trump statements in which he makes statements that are so verifiably untrue that it becomes easy to conclude that he has little interest in providing evidence for his opinions. This graduates him from garden variety bias into active malfeasance.
I think it's important to recognize bias and fight it, but in the end, the mainstream media at least holds itself to a factual standard, as do mainstream politicians on both sides. Trump is very, very different. He himself represents nothing more than a war on factuality itself and a disdain for consensus or evidence of any kind.
I'm sorry but only an idiot would take that group of hipsters and provocateurs seriously, Trump said the next day he's not even familiar with the group.
Calling this evidence of 'racism' and 'fascism' is just pathetic.
Whatever, he said “stand back and stand by”. Politicians are word-smiths and that’s what he said. If anything it’s evidence of cluelessness which is also bad, given the responsibilities
With all of his commentary about cities like Portland, one of the Proud Boys' favorite targets, there is almost no chance he's never heard of them. And with the number of documented, public lies made by him, why would you ever take a statement like that at face value?
PPACA came straight out of Heritage Foundation. It had substantial bipartisan support in committee, markup, and amendments. Republicans voted against it to use as a political fundraising foil, which they did extremely effectively for a decade.
Is quite cynical.
As for the five year racist lie of birtherism told by Trump. 51% of Republicans believed it in 2017. There are more QAnon believers in the upcoming Republican caucus than Black members.
51% of republicans dumb enough to answer a poll in 2017 about where Obama was born believed it. How wrong do political polls need to get before we start laughing at them?
Yeah, QAnon is a real shame.
But that's an interesting thing for you to say. I agree, it's a shame the black republicans that were running for congress didn't win. But they didn't lose to... white republicans. They lost to democrats. Some of them were probably even white! And I doubt that republicans didn't vote for them because of their skin color. So that was a real interesting thing for you to say.
The president is the face of leadership for the country. The way they address the country and the things they say is unquestionably a huge part of the presidency.
They can say "not my president" all they want, just as Trump can say he won the election, when he clearly didn't.
One of those is far more impact, though. One of those is a person who runs the executive branch of the strongest government in the world. The other is someone making a post on twitter. To compare the two is wrong - period.
No. the other side is millions of emotional people with incorrect data posting on twitter getting everything wrong but then getting retweeted thousands of times based on a headline.
bless you that you think that doesn't do anything and is beyond analysis.
The thing is, bipartisan support was impossible to achieve at the time. Obama crafted a conservative health bill, attempted to reach across the aisle and got stonewalled - it was noted at the time that the Republicans adopted an unusually obstructive approach during the Obama era. Bipartisan support was (by design) more or less impossible to achieve.
More or less, yes. Take a look at the ACA. This is a piece of legislation that was essentially conservative in nature. It pleased very few on the democratic side, and bore plenty of similarities to some republican plans from the 90s. The Republicans reacted as if communism was coming to America.
> As opposed to the excellent state and not "unusually obstructive " form that democrats left the nation with after 4 years of never trump?
During the Trump administration, the Republicans had 2 years of controlling the house, the senate, AND the presidency. Not sure how much you think the Democrats could obstruct in that situation. In the following two years there's been just a democratic house, from which the Republican senate majority leader has been more or less unwilling to review legislation. And not just democratic-lead legislation - plenty of bipartisan legislation has been ignore too.
Really not sure why you're giving Pelosi sole blame for the failure to come to an agreement on stimulus. McConnell seems to be the clearest blocker here: seems there was hope for the White House and the House to come to an agreement, which McConnell scuppered: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/10/15/mcconnel... .
You just said that democrats couldn't interfere with the republicans during theirs, so how on earth did the democrats pass a bill that they didn't like?
Not a single republican voted for the bill. I think that probably removes any intelligent reference you could make to Romneycare, which was bipartisan and for a single state.
It was Pelosi. Her position was my bill or nothing. No small immediate relief for renters getting the boot with a 1 trillion price tag that they could immediately add to. Your own article said McConnell wanted relief. It was her 2.2 trillion or nothing and she chose nothing. She did it knowing it would hurt trump. If she cared she'd do what she could to help and pass the trillion no?
> Not a single republican voted for the bill. I think that probably removes any intelligent reference you could make to Romneycare, which was bipartisan and for a single state.
McConnell threatened to filibuster due to the inclusion of the individual mandate which was in Romneycare (and still exists today in the form of a tax[0]). This was part of McConnell's strategy to prevent any democrat from doing anything, even things that have republican or popular support, even among republicans.
For example, while holding the majority, he prevents bills, which would pass on a floor vote, from getting that vote.
> It was Pelosi. Her position was my bill or nothing.
IDK, it sounds like she found a deal with the President, and McConnell refused it. I'd also expect that, like I mentioned above, the relief bill the house passed would pass a floor vote in the senate, which is why McConnell would refuse to bring it to a vote. If anything, it sounds like he's the one saying its his bill or nothing. Notably, you ignore the important point that McConnell also doesn't want relief to take effect until next year. Yes McConnell claims to want relief, he also claims to want to repeal the ACA. He claims a lot of things for political reasons that he doesn't actually want.
I've edited this post to address the (incorrect) response below.
the individual mandate has been ruled illegal btw.
I'm sorry, but you're not denying that her point was my bill or nothing. you just seem to think that trumps desperation to pass a bill gives you legitimacy.
which is, lets be clear, rich with irony.
WOAH: "Notably, you ignore the important point that McConnell also doesn't want relief to take effect until next year."
what is your source for that lol. why on earth would that ever make sense. and I mean that kind of loses effect if dems have refused to pass anything for the previous 3 months just so they could pass something when trump loses
He's stated as much. His goal was to start the new term by passing an aid bill. Pelosi wanted one sooner.
> and I mean that kind of loses effect if dems have refused to pass anything for the previous 3 months just so they could pass something when trump loses
Right, this is your invention and justification. We've moved into inappropriate for hn territory, so I'll stop now.
> I'm sorry, but you seem to absolutely refuse to keep the concept that Pelosi only wanted nothing less than her 2.2 trillion dollar bill.
Sure. And McConnell wants nothing more than his 1T bill. Why is it solely Pelosi's fault that an accord has not been reached?
> You can't complain about McConnell delaying it without complaining about Pelosi.
I wasn't? It's common during a negotiation for both sides to be at fault. I do think McConnell is more at fault given that the white house came to agreement, but it's obvious that Pelosi bears responsibility also.
I would also argue that if republicans hadn't spent the last 20 years playing hardball to a ridiculous extent, they wouldn't have inspired similar behavior in their democratic opposition.
Nope. Lieberman was an independent and broke with the democrats on many issues, including the ACA: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/16/joe-lieberman-... . Funnily enough, this kind of makes my point for me. Even during a near-supermajority, the Dems could barely pass some conservative healthcare reform, because the republicans threatened to filibuster almost everything. Historical report here: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna35643530 . The filibuster has since been watered down to reduce that kind of abuse - and honestly I think the Democrats have learned that they need to play hardball, because Republicans sure as hell aren't interested in compromise.
In fairness to you, I did under-consider the effects of the use of the filibuster during Trump's term - appears that while the power of the filibuster has in general been watered down, the Democrats have been using it aggressively to block Trump's nominations. I wonder if the republicans regret kicking off this trend.
> Not a single republican voted for the bill
Sadly, we've reached a world where politicians largely vote as a block, not on their personal beliefs. I'd take this as indications of precisely nothing other than strategy. If you look at the bill itself, it's conservative, and a clear compromise from what the majority of Democrats want.
> It was Pelosi. Her position was my bill or nothing.
Patently untrue - she's already come down from an initial position of 3T.
So unless Pelosi caves to the Republicans' exact demands it's all on her? Let's imagine McConnell says that he'll approve a relief bill containing a trillion for the rich and a buck or two for the poor, is Pelosi solely responsible for delaying relief?
Pelosi is trying to get a level of relief that she views as appropriate. Of course the threat of walking away has to be there - otherwise the other side is free to offer something completely inadequate. If Pelosi and Trump of all people can get close to agreeing, it's worth considering pointing the blame at McConnell.
My point is, why is it that if Pelosi doesn't bend the knee, she bears sole responsibility for an agreement being reached? If she and the white house can agree, why can't McConnell be blamed? Your position seems to be that she should just take what she can get, but why shouldn't McConnell take what he can get? This is a negotiation. The idea that either side bears sole responsibility is crazy to me.
That’s just one of the many impossible pills in that bill that make it a non-starter. Knowingly including garbage like that in what is framed as a COVID stimulus bill is deliberate sabotage.
I agree that this sort of stuff is awful, and I don't support it one bit. But the reality is that provisions like this aren't going to make it into the final bill, and there's no indication that this is some kind of red line - just a negotiating position. Similarly the republicans are also setting their demands up in a way they know democrats will never accept: a low relief figure, excessive corporate protection from liability towards employees.
I don't like it one bit (and I've always favored targeted bills), but there's also no real indication that this provision is what is holding things up - right now, all the talk is about the dollar amount. Senate republicans can't even pass the 1T amount for the HEALS act right now, and are facing severe internal division over the proposed amount.
> One of the big reasons for voting Trump was standing up against this propaganda machine.
This is a horrible reason to vote. You should vote for the person you will think would do the best job of running the country out of the available choices.
Voting out of pettiness or personal offence is corrosive to the signal your vote should be carrying.
Trump is a great President, with a track record of being true to his word in the matters of policy, that was another big reason to vote for him.
But dems are trying to shove their agenda down people throats. If you don't stand up against lies, bullying and manipulation how different are you from people who conceded to Nazi thugs in Germany when they were grabbing political power through blatant propaganda and violence.
Your statement is de-latched from facts. What are you smoking.. seriously?
Who is following in the footsteps of strong-man totalitarian practices? Trump. You can not name any democrat that would fit this description.
Who uses propaganda incessantly. Trump. 25,000 provably false statement in 4 years. Fox news, owned by a Trump ally , maintained a stead stream of provably false pro-Trump right-wing propaganda. Does any democrat or other politician in US history is have such a record? None.
Who is trying on undermining government and shove an agenda down our throats. Trump and the Republicans, who despite have little popular support for many of their policies (by independent polling) use gerrymandering to twist the vote, actively obstruct the government from governing, jamb right-wing extremist justices into court positions. Do democrats ever do this? Almost never.
I grew up in the New York area, like other new yorker's who voted 90% for Biden, we all know something you don't. We've seen his ridiculous antics for decades. He has been a perpetual lier, tax-evader, serial failed business man, narcissistic self-promoter, and con-man. Heck he's been a democrat... but I guess that was back when he needed all those abortions for his mistresses.
In the end, he like much of his elections team, will be put in jail for his crimes. But because he knows he's done a lot of illegal shit, he will first pardon himself... just watch.
The way you stand up against lies, manipulation and propaganda is through truth, not just a mindless allergic reaction.
It doesn't matter what partisans have been shouting at you about their preferred candidate, you need to make a decision based on how the real candidates will behave in office.
If I took what you said at face value, I could change your vote through simply bombarding you with enough lies and propaganda against Biden. That is clearly illogical, and so much so that I don't think you really mean it that way.
Biden should be held accountable for excesses of the Drug War which he supported, but Kamala Harris was Attorney General for California and as such it was her job to enforce the law. Kamala Harris did strictly enforce the law, but also provided many with options to avoid punishment by staying employed and not reoffending.
At this point hypocrisy in politics is pervasive so it is important to be specific about what people did or did not say or do.
I've been listening primarily to the liberal mainstream news propaganda. Their lies are obvious if you dig a bit deeper, look at the facts and think for yourself.
Apparently critical thinking is what college-educated people lack this days after years of indoctrination into groupthink and compliance. Deresiewicz called them 'excellent sheep' for a good reason.
I find this kind epistemology fascinating. Suppose I were to not believe any institutional message, and lend it no credence whatsoever. "Thinking for myself" is not enough. Ultimately, I need information that I can't gather myself, and, often enough, some expert who can put it into context, because there are too many things and too little time, and learning anything in depth requires years. So, in the end, you have to trust someone, and it seems to me that the people who say "think for yourself" or "do your own research" might be skeptical of institutional sources, but are quicker to trust other sources than your "excellent sheep," but why they trust the particular sources they trust is pretty mysterious.
I tried, as a "magical mystery tour" exercise of sort, to see if I could get into the conspiracy theories that permeate the Trump world, but found that I was too skeptical and couldn't truly bring myself to believe what they believe, even as an experiment, because their entire epistemological system, the philosophy of how they come to "know" something, is something I couldn't follow the rules of. How someone's reputation is determined was a mystery to me. There are no documented methodologies, no agreed-upon "scientific method", no peer review. I once asked someone how he knew something, and he said that he'd done his own research. I asked him which databases and archives they had access to, but then realized that what he meant by "research" was that he'd read some posts on Facebook by people he didn't know and watched some videos on YouTube, also by people he didn't know, and he'd judged their reputation based on the opinions of others, but those others had had just the same corpus of knowledge, and nobody actually had any access to primary data, and no one even thought this should make them skeptical.
So how do you know that this conspiracy theory is something you should believe but not that other one? I assumed there was some internal logic, but I just couldn't find a pattern. I think it has to do with the aesthetics of the story; how dramatic it is, how good-vs-evil, and whether it fits with an overarching meta-conspiracy-theory of hidden powers. If the story is dramatic, they believe it. In other words, the truth is whatever makes for a good story, where I am played as a pawn of some hidden cabal. But perhaps you can shed some more light on that epistemological process.
(Before I begin, I'd like to thank you for trying to understand the perspectives of others rather than bashing and ignoring anyone who doesn't share the same beliefs. We need more of this in the world.)
I see a few important aspects to touch on here...I'm personally towards the right of the political spectrum, and would probably identify as Libertarian. First, you're generalizing the entire right-wing ideology from a "conspiracy theory" starting point. Most right-wing ideology isn't based around impacts from "conspiracy theories", it's mostly based around believing that the left's agenda is bad for America in the long-term. Adding up all the "conspiracy theories" won't give you the "sum" of what defines the right's beliefs...it could more reliably be defined as "subtracting" the future negative outcomes of left-wing policies. Second, most "conspiracy theories" by nature aren't fleshed out and therefore don't have clear-cut epistemological foundations. That's not to say they aren't possibly true in at least some form. It was once a "conspiracy theory" to say the Earth was round. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That's not to say some things aren't completely outrageous, but it's much more dangerous to say every "conspiracy theory" is fake than the opposite, which is the media's/left's current approach. Third, you're over-distilling the term "think for myself/yourself". This doesn't literally mean go out and find every single fact yourself, it means diversify your source of news outside of the 3-4 media conglomerates (which are owned by a handful of individuals). Fourth, you seem to skip over the entire aspect of why the parent commenter mentions "think for yourself". It's not only the sweeping censorship that's an issue, it's also the non-reporting or shadow-banning of any topics that go against the left-wing narrative.
Political psychologists claim that, generally (and, of course, as a simplification), the right is over-sensitive to danger, while the left is under-sensitive. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that conspiracy theories aren't actual beliefs about what is actual reality, but rather potential threats, and so, tend to focus on hidden threats -- because that's where "real danger" is presumed to lie -- rather than overt ones, like, say, global warming. Is that what you're saying?
So I think I understand the general framework better now. Nevertheless, while conspiracies are, of course, always possible, they're quite implausible. I can't help but think about Hofstadter's "paranoid style":
> The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction...
> ... Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him...
From what I see in popular conspiracy theories, this is what happens. They form around a Hollywood thriller's perception of power, but those who've seen power up close -- whether in large corporations, the military or politics -- know that this is not how power works. Secrets can't be kept; conflicting interests make it hard if not impossible to get enough people on the same page, and the less mainstream that page is, the harder it is; even the craftiest people are clumsy and make mistakes all the time.
The few successful plots and revolutions in history never happen even remotely to the way conspiracies say they could happen. E.g. they're virtually never dropped from above on an unsuspecting public, but almost always start with restless masses and pervasive instability like Russia's mutinous and depleted military in WWI, or Cuba's series of insurrections; you can usually see them coming a mile away. Even the relatively surprising Iranian revolution was at least as much grass-roots as it was led from above. So even if the framework is one of identifying threats, their originators'/believers' unfamiliarity with history and power looks for threats in the wrong place.
That's OK. I understand the system of not believing something. But Trump world is full of things that those people do believe, and I'm trying to understand why people who claim to believe so little actually believe so much, what they base their belief on, and why they think skepticism is their brand. It's like a bunch of people who'd walk around wearing five layers of clothes and identifying as nudists.
For example, there are thousands of people in that world who are self-proclaimed skeptics, yet believe predictions made by an anonymous person, whose only reputation is of having a perfect score of total misses. So if those people see doubting those who lie to them as central to their identity, why do they make a point of believing someone who so very clearly has done nothing other than lie to them? It's not even a matter of distrusting faceless institutions and trusting only acquaintances, because they're all too happy to trust people they don't even know exist.
Trump has been true to his word, the important things he promised in the matters of policy, the important things he’s done for the economy, diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab countries, cancelling critical race theory indoctrination in government, standing up for police being scapegoated by raging mobs.
His actions speak louder than words. He closed the border with China when everyone was accusing him of xenophobia, he did it just in time to flatten the curve. He helped millions of people with stimulus package, saved countless businesses and jobs via fed corporate bonds, I can go on and on. These are not opinions but facts.
You see it’s not about what or whom you believe but what you and them actually do.
The left accuse the president of being racist without any basis, by misinterpreting or intentionally misrepresenting his sayings. Building their whole campaign around massive 'racism' conspiracy. Many people vote Trump just because they are tired of this bullshit.
That whole BLM summer of protests? Gone, no longer in fashion. Dems don’t really care about black lives, they cynically exploit race politics to grab power. It worked marvels for them in these elections.
I'm not talking about any of that. Why people voted for Trump is a related discussion, but not the same. Clearly, Pizzagate or Q or Birthers or 9/11 Truthers or Ukranian conspiracists did not deliver on their word, so I'm wondering about the dissonance in the self-identification as skeptics by people who are clearly very credulous, as well as by their epistemology, the process by which they come to know what is "true."
Well, when I look at mainstream media saying for 3 years that Trump "is a Russian agent", that Trump is conspiracy theorist saying that Obama admin spied on his campaign - I by being a "critical thinker" compare it to IG report and comments in Senate hearings and make a decision of how adjust my trust ratings for sources. At some point rating of some sources is going to be too low to even consider them, and some will be Ok-ish. That's how I will know what "conspiracy theories" to consider. They might end up not being "conspiracy theories" altogether (like conspiracy theory that Iraq does not have WMD).
I don't have an issue with what the Trump world doesn't believe. A system that says, "we believe nothing" or even, "we believe nothing said by someone's who's ever lied" is fine. What I don't understand is how easily they do believe in stuff that is, at the very least, not more credible than the stuff they don't. It's not their skepticism that perplexes me, but their credulity. They clearly have an epistemology that's very different from the mainstream Western tradition (or any other, for that matter), and I'm curious to understand what it is.
> It is not about skepticism, it is about assigning weights - stories and opinions coming from more trusted sources warrant more attention.
Sure, but how is Q more trusted than, say, the FBI, even if the FBI is hardly to be trusted at all?
> I think that "believing in stuff" is not a problem affecting only the "Trump world".
I agree, but they're unique in not just being credulous -- if not more than others then certainly no less -- but also in self-identifying as skeptics while doing so. "I don't believe scientists and historians and law enforcement because I'm a skeptic, but I do believe the unsubstantiated ramblings of strangers online, some of whom are anonymous!"
> Sure, but how is Q more trusted than, say, the FBI, even if the FBI is hardly to be trusted at all?
Yep, it is all screwed up - we need to work on establishing new sources of information because many old ones pretty much discredited themselves (maybe they can be cleaned up but I doubt it). Political journalism is hard to find these days - but there are some brave people like GG and MT that are trying to do that outside of media corporations and I think it is a way to go for now.
You don't have to dig deep at all to see Trumps lies though. They're so obvious it's disgusting. They're irresponsible and harmful. The fact that you don't see this just invalidates anything you write
> "nepotism with his children is bad, but nepotism with the democrats children is fine."
Do you seriously believe that Biden as president will appoint his children as senior advisers and put his son-in-law in charge of everything from Middle East to Covid-19 response?
If not, then you can't argue that it's the same nepotism on both sides. It's clearly been much worse with the Trumps.
no, I don't. But I'm so glad that you'll suddenly being paying attention to nepotism appointments, like Lisa and Mike Madigan in Illinois.
I'm just saying that you won't complain about them, and you didn't. Just those mean old republicans matter.
I can't imagine what ridiculous credit democrats would take if the middle east countries kept normalizing relations with israel like they did in the past 6 months.
Was either of these Madigans the President of the United States, and the other a close relative in charge of half of the administration's portfolio? If not, then it's not the same. I'll probably start caring about Madigans when they're nationally relevant.
Most accounts from the Trump White House, e.g. Bolton’s book, report that Kushner had a substantial daily influence on Trump. He was officially in charge of numerous initiatives. It’s hard to argue that he and Ivanka were not present in White House deliberations.
wow its hard to argue with such things as demonstrative as "substantial daily influence" and "numerous initiatives" as well as being "present at white house deliberations"
it wouldnt suprise me if what he had for breakfast had a bigger impact.
People are probably harder on him because it was an explicit campaign promise that he would be less corrupt as a non politician. That doesn’t seem to have panned out imo.
Not really. The US has turned "centrism" into a swear word. But that's kind of the point and why calling Biden centre-right is, eh. He's a Democrat; most Democrats are centre-right and most progressives are centre-left. Such is the left wing of the USA.
Even your view of left/right being a spectrum is a woefully inadequate model. In reality political parties sit on at least two dimensions, as shown by the political compass. People who can only think in terms of left/right, red/blue, etc simply shouldn't be voting.
If you want to bring in rigorous analysis you have to first define what left/right even is. Is it economic policy? You really think the biggest thing that differentiates red/blue is economic policy? They both sit firmly on the right.
I would love to see a decent PCA decomposition if you've got one. The way Left/Right is defined seems pretty arbitrary and varies a lot between cultures.
It changes over time too. I learnt that it was about economic policy, but today it's some weird mixture of economic policy, progressive vs conservative, liberal vs totalitarian etc. For example, in the US right now it would be totally normal to label someone who doesn't support gay rights as "right wing". Left/right have essentially become buckets where certain arbitrary issues end up residing.
It's probably because so called centrists don't stand for much of anything beyond trying to gain a social edge by pretending they're above it all when they aren't. It's an excuse to attempt to distill belief systems into a very narrow point of view precisely like you've described with the whole "only reason" nonsense. I'd really appreciate it if one could describe why they consider themselves one since it's totally meaningless to me when someone self identifies as a centrist.
Just like in marketing it's all about how you frame a question to a person. Realistically most people share common beliefs at the fundamental level in what they want to see out of the power structures in our society. In other words, the vast majority of people in this country want to improve upon their material conditions. The rest of the circlejerk is just grifting.
A couple of ideas: (1) Centrism is situational. One might think that the status quo is objectively reasonably close to the ideal, in terms of the general way society is arranged even if there are many imperfections. (2) Centrism is technocratic. If you don't favour a lurch to the left or right, it would make sense to want efficient improvements to how things are run - accepting good ideas regardless of which area of the political compass they come from, bipartisan support for policies on their merits.
Based on the above, centrism (and indeed, being centre-left or centre-right) seems viable as a real belief that people can hold, not some strategy to appear above it all for social benefit, or as a stratagem used by someone actually highly partisan. A centrist's goals could be directly met by encouraging trial of different ideas across the political spectrum, and consistent meta-level rules rather than tribalist thinking. Trying to rise above the bunfighting isn't the benefit of centrist views, it's a necessity to enable the things they want to achieve.
I'll sometimes self-identify as a centrist in that I notice two increasingly radicalized extremes that spend most of there energy screaming at each other. You might think I'm doing that to "gain a social edge" but the truth is I just don't like screaming.
>"...I'd really appreciate it if one could describe why they consider themselves one since it's totally meaningless to me when someone self identifies as a centrist."
Why would they care whether it has a meaning to you. They care about their own beliefs.
Where did all the intellect go?
The social dilemma documentary I think is very useful. It feels like social media bubbles are a large component, although of course there have been many contentious elections in the past.
Being centrist I can relate to parts of both sides but my experience is they both dislike centrists.