There is a selection bias driving the conversation itself. The people most likely to voice a criticism about a given subject are the people who are most engaged with that subject.
Engagement itself is diverse. It can be driven by genuine interest, and it can be generated by political narrative.
What is most important is the criticism itself. Is it valuable? To whom? The more people there are voicing criticisms, the more difficult it is to answer these questions.
The usefulness of democracy is that we can coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them.
The tragedy of democracy is that we must coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them.
> The tragedy of democracy is that we must coordinate our criticisms
into coherent proposals, and vote on them.
Despite classes in civics and debating at some good schools we are
mostly given no training on how to do this as kids.
Instead we are raised by "Hollywood diplomacy", which is deeply
confrontational and revolves around vengeance and gun fights.
Polarisation isn't just in the "environment" but in the lack of tools
we are given to work with.
There are actually long-form studies in things like Peace Studies
(Columbia, George Washington Uni, Kroc Institute, Nottingham Uni in
UK)
I spent some time with graduate of a peace studies programme, which I
initially mocked. But she introduced me to all kinds of ideas like
those of Habermas and Discourse Theory.
Most serious [fn] programmes on negotiation and diplomacy touch on this.
How we get ordinary folk to take on board more of that is challenging
but urgent. Sadly most of "western" life has conflict escalation built
in as a value.
EDIT: added some links for the curious [0,1]
[fn] There's plenty of crappy MBA business type "how to get what you
want" type programmes - I am absolutely not talking about those!
Engagement itself is diverse. It can be driven by genuine interest, and it can be generated by political narrative.
What is most important is the criticism itself. Is it valuable? To whom? The more people there are voicing criticisms, the more difficult it is to answer these questions.
The usefulness of democracy is that we can coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them.
The tragedy of democracy is that we must coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them.