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

In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics. After all, all political decisions are ultimately about how we want to shape the world that we as humans live in. There can be no agreement about economic policy without a shared understanding of the ultimate goal of an economy. No agreement about foreign relations without a shared understanding of the role of nations as representatives for groups of humans, and how we believe one group of humans should interact with another group of humans through the lens of nations.

For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent. The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

I consider this type of thinking to be a form of tribalism because you're essentially saying there are two tribes. Each tribe has specific values.

A person's values are not a dichotomy (i.e. republican or democrat). You simply cannot put people into two buckets that define their overarching moral compass.

A person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat...or hate everything about Republican values except they got burned by Obamacare so they vote Republican. There is virtually an infinite level of nuance that can be a deciding factor in why someone votes for someone.

> person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat

The term you're looking for is political coherence, i.e. the degree to which you can predict a person's views based on knowing their view on one issue. Political elites tend to be highly coherent. If you know a Congressperson's views on guns, you probably know them on abortion and corporate taxes.

In the real world, however, votes tend not to be politically coherent. Instead, what we see in a hyperpartisan polity, is that a diverse set of views collapses after an issue achieves partisan identity status. Talking about a thing through a partisan lens is what causes the partisan collapse. Hence the effects of mass and then social media on the quality of our discussions.

(And I agree with OP that the author's "I'm above politics" stance is naively immature.)

> Political elites tend to be highly coherent

Coherence might not the word you're looking for. The policies of political parties and groups are born out of historical circumstances and the diverse coalitions they represent. Political elites are "coherent" in the sense that you can expect them to consistently follow the party line, and thus infer all of their views just by knowing one of their views.

The party line, i.e. platform of the Democratic and Republican parties, or any other large political party in the world, is, by itself, nothing coherent though. Many of their policies and claims do not make any more sense besides each other than they would make against each other. Realignments on issues are pretty common across the world. What is left-wing in one part of the world at one point of time might be rightist across space and time.

> Coherence might not the word you're looking for

Ideological and political coherence are the terms of art [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8827732/

This is a difference in the subject of coherence.

Logical coherence refers to the variation and predictive power of the reasoning.

Coherence can also be used to describe the variability and predictability of positions or states themselves.

If you measure the characteristics of some photons in a coherent laser, you know what the other photons are doing. They are predictable using a model.

Logic is a poor predictive model for politics. Tribe identification is a strong predictive model for politics

> transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat

This is the NYT if you want a high-profile example of this existing in the real world.

I worked with a guy who was a goldmine of odd but sincerely held political opinions that subverted the usual narratives. He was (I guess still is) gay but believed that trans people shouldn't serve in the military because he saw that they didn't get the treatment they needed. He wanted everyone to have guns as a protection against crooked cops-- he was from a small town. He was against single-payer healthcare because he thought the government would use it as a political weapon. He was was in theory anti-union because he thought union benefits should just be turned into labor protections for everyone instead of just being for union jobs and supported them only as a stopgap. He was pro-solar/wind and had an electric car not for any environmental reason but because he didn't want to be reliant on the greedy power company.

To me that just sounds like someone who arrives at his political views by thinking rather than blindly adopting whatever his peers believe. It's only odd because it's (sadly) rare these days.

Yea, holy hell... someone with _nuance_ in their views? Blasphemy!

Realpolitiks...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik

> He was was in theory anti-union because he thought union benefits should just be turned into labor protections for everyone

Uh, hmm. So weaker unions result in labor protections for everyone? I gotta say, doesn't seem like that's really how the U.S. is playing out. If weekends off and an 8-hour workday didn't exist they certainly wouldn't be argued for now.

US has very strong unions, you don't have anything close to SAG-AFTRA in Europe since such strong unions are illegal. European unions are just big, but their are reigned in by laws much more.

So yeah I think weakening the protections unions from workers in USA enjoys would lead to more people joining them, since there is less risk in doing so. Most people don't wanna work in an industry dominated by something like the screen actors guild.

i mean, his views don't sound too odd. he sounds like a communist who's got a dim view of reform or socialism as a means to communism.

Tribalism is just bad sociology, that's where the nuance is missing.

You're acting as if people are saying "democrat good, republican bad" as the meaning for associating values with who someone voted for, but missing the part that you can easily associate that someone has poor values if they voted for Trump.

Sure, you need to go a bit deeper if someone didn't vote for Trump to know their values, but voting for someone who ran on a platform of mass deportations, retaliation against his enemies, obvious idiotic economic policy, homophobia and transphobia, and racism, makes you a kind of shit person, and it's not really necessary to go any deeper to know their values don't match yours.

So you're saying >50% of the USA population are objectively shit people? If you're a member of the other 50%, you aren't automatically shit but you still could be?

Seems bleak dude. Also, consider that conservative media has indoctrinated people to think like you do...except in the opposite direction. i.e. if you voted for Kamala or Biden, you're the enemy.

Where are you getting >50% of the population from?

He did not even get 50% of the votes cast for president. More people in the USA opted out of voting for him than to vote for him.

> Also, consider that conservative media has indoctrinated people to think like you do...except in the opposite direction.

I came to similar conclusion by reading conservative media. NOT by reading mainstream media that forever excuse, rationalize and sanitize what is going on among conservatives.

Also, note that he did not just said "they are enemy". He listed actual positions these people demonstrably have. All you have to do is to ... listen to what they say. Oh, and I also tell you some stuff they want for gender relations: they want women completely dependent on men economically, spousal abuse to be an accepted price for keeping families together.

The person you are responded to described really existing value differences. Musks "empathy is weakness" is not some kind of outlier claim, it is something conservatives were pushing on for years already. Especially in its far right circles. Likewise the Trumps "truth does not matter" philosophy.

MAGA isn't 50% of the population. Voter turnout was 63.7% for 2024, so I'm saying that ~32% of the USA population are objectively shit people, in the same way that Germans who supported Hitler were objectively shit people.

If you can't see that disappearing people without due process is wrong, you don't have good values. If you can't see that pardoning conmen, and insurrectionists is wrong, you don't have good values. If you can't see the use of Venezuelan prisons and Guantanamo Bay as extralegal black sites as wrong, you don't have good values. If you can't see that a president illegally ignoring the courts and congress is wrong, you don't have good values.

You could say that some of the other stuff that's happening is just an extension of the culture war, and that it's a matter of interpretation of whether it's wrong or not (DEI hate, transgender issues, abortion rights, etc). I don't agree, but those topics are harder to give a black and white answer on whether it's wrong or right.

Clear violations of the constitution, ignoring basic human rights, and doing straight up crime are black and white issues, and in general, most Trump voters support these things, and these are things he campaigned on, so even if they disagree with them now, they voted to allow it to happen.

> the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values

This is an incorrect and cynical statement. I understand why you feel this way (for one thing, it's the exact type of language coming out of many of each party's idealists) but it's simply false.

One party supports gun rights while the other supports gun control. Those aren't values. Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety.

Abortion rights is about personal liberty. Gun rights are also about personal liberty. Both sides care about personal liberty.

The competing talking points aren't always conveniently about the same issue though. For Democrats their border policies are about compassion and human rights. For Republicans their border policies are about domestic prosperity.

Do Republicans care about human rights? Yes. Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes. To pretend otherwise is to willfully push apart the tribes in your own mind, and to trivialize the perspective of the opposition.

The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.

Imho opinion, what you are describing are republicans of the past. As parent says, there used to be shared values. Two of the shared valued were peaceful transition of power and respect for the rule of law / division of power between executive, legislative and judiciary.

Imho the values of MAGA republicans are clearly distinct from GWB republicans (even if it may be precisely the same voters). Specifically the two values described above are no longer shared values.

I believe there are more, but for the two values above we have irrevocable proof.

> what you are describing are republicans of the past

I know it seems that way but it has always seemed that way. Republicans talk about Democrats of the past (southern Democrats). Democrats talk about Republicans of the past (Lincoln). This feeling isn't new.

> Two of the shared valued were peaceful transition of power and respect for the rule of law / division of power between executive, legislative and judiciary.

Re: peaceful transition of power the Republicans insist (whether true or not) that January 6th was peaceful. The value is still there. Re: the rule of law, Republicans claim they are abiding by the law. (Are they not?) The value is still there. Division of power is certainly coming under question with the actions of DOGE, but I don't think the mere existence of DOGE is evidence that Republicans don't value the division of power. Some of these things aren't immediately obvious to everyone, especially if they are determined to be legal (whether we like the law or not).

We must resist the urge to demonize and dehumanize the opposition. That is exactly what is happening: even with our comments and upvotes we are collectively deciding that the opposition is out of their minds and are increasingly a foe to be vanquished. That is, frankly, stupidity of the masses.

If someone changes and begins to continually insists that something plainly untrue is true, does that mean that they possibly still have the values they used to? How long do you continue defending the "well, maybe..." case?

Throw out the Jan 6th example, it's now ancient history. As a party, Republicans are, at this very instant, claiming that judges are acting illegally for... using their constitutionally mandated legal powers. Simultaneously, but separately, the party apparatus is repeating on a daily basis a new conspiracy theory that the judges they don't like are being controlled by some nefarious power.

And it's a very, very well established playbook. We have many examples of countries that dismantled their systems of transition of power and division of power starting with the courts. It's a move that could pretty much make it into a "For Dummies" book.

"The value is still there." I can't see it. But maybe I'm too focused on judging on the entire scope of action and speech, rather than a very narrow bit of speech that isn't at all reflected in actions.

I think the outcomes achieved for domestic vs foreign is another interesting angle. The degradation of purchasing power of working and middle class is have been consistently getting worse.

I think this is spot on.

I feel like folks on both sides would stop talking past each other if they were willing to understand the other POV rather than dismissing it as crazy.

While you broadly make a great point, there are psychological dimensions to take into consideration. Some people's personalities are more inclined toward tribalistic thinking and will extend their capacity for empathy only toward their own in-group, while others are capable of expanding the "in-group" to include all of humanity. So while it may be true to say that Republicans care about human rights, it is more accurate to say they care about their OWN human rights, and not the rights of people outside their in-group.

If you want to remove the political labeling from this statement, about 30% of the population "thinks" (or, rather, does not think, but acts) this way, and it is important to realize that the motivating factor differs between them and the other type of human, who cares about people in the abstract.

Abortion rights is about religion-as clear a difference in values as one can have.

> Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny.

Not true. This is simply not what they want.

> Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety.

Republicans wants to ensure their opponents are sufficiently tyrannized. They care much less about safety, systematically. They even openly look down on those who care about safety, not seeing them sufficiently manly.

> Do Republicans care about human rights?

Not much. Openly not much so, Musk called empathy the biggest weakness of western civilization. Trumps and Musks moves clearly do not care about human rights, republicans stand by them.

> Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes.

Yup, they do. I am not really sure about republicans anymore, given last moves.

> The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.

These people vote for Trump and Vance and see empathy as a weakness. That is not compromise, that is capitulation to a lie. You want one side to dominate and have everything they do excused. The other one should be nice, submissive and empathetic. But this is based on lies - lies about what republicans actually do and lies about their motivation. Lies to make them sound better. And lies about what democrats actually do - lies to make them sound worst.

bingo!

This was true a decade ago. It is no longer true.

The modern Trump controlled Republican party is not a party that cares about personal liberties. It is a fascist, authoritarian project that is toying with straight up Nazism. They are explicitly pulling from the Nazi playbook in their language and strategy of attack on the rule of law. Someone who supports that party is supporting a completely different set of values from someone who opposes it.

That said, that party is also backed by a powerful and effective propaganda machine that has successfully pulled the wool over many people's eyes such that they don't fully realize what it is they are supporting.

The left has called every Republican presidential candidate a Nazi/fascist/authoritarian since Ronald Reagan.

this is far too broad of a generalization. just like it would be too broad of a generalization to declare all conservatives to be maga.

if we’re to believe trump he declares people to be “extreme leftists” who are clearly not even leftists.

so i find it highly unlikely that the entirety of “the left” called every republican presidential candidate these things.

Doesn't matter what the left said previously, what matters is that the Trump Administration is behaving in an autocratic manner. Godwin's law has been abused online since forever, but you can just draw a comparison with Putin's ascent to autocratic rule in Russia.

I would say that the partial counterpoint to that is, for most people their values are also largely tribe based, in that their values are not purely fixed, but rather tend to adapt to loosely track the tribal consensus. Very few are the ones willing to stick to their convictions under pressure.

There are clearly some (many?) shared average axiomatic values that seem to be common between very different cultures/religions (although individuals vary much more significantly), but it's much easier to obsess on the places we differ.

Where I strongly disagree is the idea that groups with different fundamental values can't necessarily find common policy ground. A good example is Basic Income, where you can find agreement between groups on opposite sides that both embrace the idea, but for very different value-driven reasons. In many cases, you can also agree to disagree, and just keep your collective hands out of it (eg. separation of religion and state).

[dead]

> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values".

I strongly disagree. In this duopoly of a political system, most people on both sides are just picking the lesser of two evils. Meanwhile, we are creating an alarmingly decisive political society by choosing not to associate with those who vote differently than us. Perhaps most importantly, we lose the opportunity to actually shift the political positions of others (and ourselves) by not engaging in healthy and non-judgmental political discussions with our friends and neighbors, ultimately increasing polarization even further.

Not everyone is voting based on their values—some are simply voting their wallets or the special interests they align with. Someone who is pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about. It doesn’t necessarily mean their core values are different than yours, but instead maybe simply just their priorities.

> pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about.

What you care most about is a statement of values.

I’d say priorities and values are pretty different, but there can be some overlap. But the problem is, folks don’t give it the required amount of nuance, and simply loop in all the horrible things the other party does and stands for with the values of that person, and it’s usually not accurate.

Sure but if you're so reductionist then you'd also be arguing that slaves were making a statement about their values and how they viewed slavery because the majority didn't immediately escape or die trying. It would be disingenuous to say or even imply from that statement that their value system was pro slavery though.

Also some people don't vote for someone, they vote against someone else.

I don't have any statistical data on this, but my impression is that it's more than "some people." It may be half or even most.

You have one contingent that is anti-Trump and will vote for any alternative to Trump, even a senile old man with dementia. You have another contingent that is against Progressivism/leftism and will vote for anything that opposes this, up to and including voting for Trump despite strongly disliking him.

The root problem is that social media amplifies extreme voices, so you get very extreme rhetoric coming out of both sides. This scares people and makes them feel like their primary goal must be to vote against the scary thing.

I reject this idea, someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for

As someone said in this thread, in the US two-party system, coalitions are formed before the vote vs after in other countries

The whole purpose of this piece is to precisely encourage pointed discussion about values directly and skip the proxying

"someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for"

yes but somebody voting for the "most worst candidate" is not somebody who's values should be trusted

and if someone opposite the aisle from you believes the same thing about you, there's zero chance to flip them

with direct discussion about values, it's possible

basically all comes down to "are you open to the chance you're wrong"

you could view that chance as low as 0.001%, but it shouldn't be 0

People frequently have a gap between their values and their politics, and talking about both can reveal the cognitive dissonance.

If they engage with politics as tribalism, and you talk to them about a policy their tribe implemented that conflicts with their values, this is useful.

The very idea of “least worst” is very subjective. In their eyes, if they disagree with you, it is who’s values should not be trusted.

> I reject this idea, someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for

The thing about values is that they don't just capture the notion of what we thing is right or wrong, but also which things we value over other things. In an extreme case, two people can agree on 10 out of 10 different ideals or ethical stances and still have different values and support different parties because of how they rank those things.

In that case who you think is the "least worst" is also a reflection of values, as is declaring both sides to be the same, or opting out altogether. They all represent both what things you value and how much you value them.

> In that case who you think is the "least worst" is also a reflection of values

perceived values -- if someone has the same values and rankings as you, but was exposed to different information, then with this logic you'll never be able to find out or flip them

as I said to the other commenter, basically all comes down to "are you open to the chance you're wrong"

you could view that chance as low as 0.001%, but it shouldn't be 0

> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.

The largest two U.S. parties have been heavily minmaxing the propaganda they release to divide districts on the most effective issues they can convert into election wins. Their values are "get elected to office" but the propaganda can't be so straightforward because there aren't a lot of voters who are easily converted by that directness.

Voters have values; political parties and candidates have propaganda. Game theoretically the winning move is to compete on comparative advantage of an issue within a voting district; because (for example) Democratic voters are split on the death penalty it's a very useless propaganda point for the party as a whole [0]; sticking to one side or the other would lose more elections than it would win. Note that this is very different from ranking the importance of values and focusing on the most impactful to real people; the (implicit) hope is that by focusing on effective propaganda issues then some values may be preserved through the election process. In practice politicians also horse-trade for future party political capital in preference to espoused values.

One fundamental problem is that without a parliamentary style of government where coalitions are required to form a functioning legislature the usefulness of values in elections is greatly diminished. If I may say, the Republican party has done the best at shedding the illusion and explicitly transferring power to the party itself to enforce the values held by one man, which is the ultimate game-theoretically strong position for a political party. Disconnecting the ultimate value-judged outcomes of elections from the political machinations that win them has been incredibly damaging to democracy.

[0] https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/the-end-of-the-abolition-er...

I think the assumption that political parties represent two completely distinct sets of values is overly simplistic. In reality, there's a significant amount of overlap between them—what often differs is the style of messaging and the framing of ideas.

Personally, I find it hard to fully identify with either the left or the right. I share beliefs and values from both sides, depending on the issue. This makes it difficult to adopt a clear-cut political label, and I think that's true for many people.

Politics today often feels more like a battle of narratives than a clash of core principles / values.

p.s. my perspective is non-US one.

> leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent

I'd say they invest in messaging around the values they want voters to believe they represent.

i.e., marketing and ensuing reality diverge regularly with politicians, regardless of affiliation.

> "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values"

You should test this hypothesis by talking to someone for 10 minutes, then guessing who they voted for.

My hypothesis is you wouldn't do better than 50/50.

"If p then q" does not imply "If q then p."

Besides, there's a ton of easy ways to beat 50/50 odds without explicitly asking who they voted for. You can ask whether they graduated from college, and that will get you to something like 55/45 or 60/40. If they're white and they did not graduate from college, or if they're not white and they did graduate from college, your odds of guessing right are something like 2:1.

Studies have also found (somewhat weak) correlations between some of the Big Five personality traits and political identification: people who score highly on conscientiousness are more likely to be right-leaning, while people who score highly on openness to experience are more likely to be left-leaning.

> "If p then q" does not imply "If q then p."

My original comment is challenging whether "p then q" is valid in the first place by asking if the inverse would be true as a thought experiment. (Neither is true IMO)

Just because someone has certain values doesn't mean they vote a certain way.

Just because they vote a certain way doesn't mean they have certain values.

"p" (who you voted for) and "q" (your values) are largely independent for a large percentage of voters.

My point is that the validity and soundness of the inverse proposition has no bearing on the validity and soundness of the original proposition, so you’ve proposed a meaningless experiment.

I also think that your hypothesis that voting and values are not connected is false, but that’s a separate issue.

I understand your point and I agree with it. I didn't respond to it directly because it wasn't contributing to the discussion at hand. But I agree with your point that an inverse proposition doesn't always hold!

The hypothesis is that knowing a person's voting activity helps one to predict that individual's values. I don't think the parent is claiming that the values that might be revealed by a 10 minute conversation are a predictor for voting activity. I think there's a distinction, since people can - and, in my perspective, often do - misrepresent or misidentify their true values in their conversations with strangers. I am assuming that people act on their true values, not necessarily those that they advertise, when they fill out ballots.

The is a really good, IMO, Saturday Night Live skit about this where the contestants try to guess Republican or not of various people. Some of the bits do a great job of pointing out how some of the values people claim to believe in are only applied selectivity when it benefits their side.

I was talking to a very drunk Republican girl the other day. We were having a small argument about why we would send medical support to Africa for AIDS. Her argument was something about fixing America first (I was also drunk).

I asked if she regretted her vote for Trump after several people she knew lost their government contracting jobs, and she said "No, fuck that guy, I didn't vote for him."

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

Values alone leads to supporting solutions that sound good but don’t work. “Free money for everyone” speaks to values of equity, fairness, and empathy… while creating all kinds of side effects like inflation.

If you are going to focus on values, apply them to a rigorous analysis of what works.

> In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics.

People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining. They'll still happily argue about it for the post part, unfortunately.

You can see this effect after some elections where people "fall in line" with their party's new presidential candidate on some issue.

> People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining.

I call this "politics as religion".

Remember you cannot reason someone out of a position they never reasoned themselves into. Route around the damage and make them irrelevant.

> The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

What difference do the parties have? They are both the 'corporate party' maximizing shareholder profit at all costs including killing brown people overseas or murdering Americans at home if they cant pay for healthcare.

Even the language that the different parties use is targeted at certain sets of values; Arnold Kling wrote this short book on the subject ("The Three Languages of Politics"): https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/ThreeLanguag...

"The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt is another, more nuanced (and complicated), but extremely interesting take on the subject of how values drive political affiliation.

Framing has always been used in political debate just to target certain values; what may have changed (or not) is as a deliberate tactic to keep people divided: folks who do not speak the same language cannot communicate.

On a lot of issues, I think 80% of folks are in 80% of agreement, but the partisans (whether politicians or activists) are framing the issue to prevent that consensus, because the partisans want something in the 20% that 80% of folks don't agree with.

Kling and Haidt would agree with your respective paragraphs, though they do add a lot of color, and their books are worth reading.

I've listened to Haidt speak about it and his book is in my tall stack to read; I don't think I'd heard of King but I grabbed the PDF. Thank you.

This makes 0 sense. Democrat and Republican "values", to the extent they are even real, no way represent the full spectrum of values one can have.

Further, the Democratic party has a 27% approval rating and the Republican party had like 47% and I bet its falling. So even within your narrow framework this is a bad proxy because both are clearly unpopular.

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

You're just describing tribalism.

> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values".

Only if you ascertain the (inverse of the) mapping of values -> vote correctly, and it's definitively not what the parties or the tribes themselves profess.

For myself [0], I sympathize with many of the issues Trump ran on while finding most of the Democratic platform cloying and hollow. But I value effective policy, being accountable to intellectual criticism, and a generally open society far far more. (And at this point in my life, a healthy dose of straight up actual conservatism, too!)

[0] and while it might seem needlessly inflammatory to include this here, I think it's unavoidable that people are going to be trying to read partisan implications from abstract comments regardless.

> to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values

I think your use of the word "world" is telling.

Trump, the Republicans, and the global right are focused on their citizens.

The Democrats and the global left are more focused on the world and their role in it.

It's no longer just two approaches on how we can have the strongest economy. Each party has a weighting for how much to consider every issue across the world.

For example, there are people who would be happy with less growth, lower income, but more action on climate change.

> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.

Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol.

And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns.

> and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

That's not new.

On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future.

> If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.

> Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us

I didn't say that you shouldn't bother with people. I said that discussing _policy_ is not useful if you don't agree on _values_. It's the wrong level of abstraction. To put it in a plain analogy: discussing the best route to get to your destination isn't useful if you don't agree on where you are going.

If you want to engage with someone with different values, then the values are where you need to start. If you want to engage with someone on the best way to get somewhere, you need to start by making sure you both agree on where you want to go.

Your need to insult the author proved his point.

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

> it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values". If you discover that someone has completely different values from you

No, it’s a prejudice. People have a very short analysis and are generally not ready for their beliefs to be discussed.

Most people believe the definition of left is “good” and right is “bad”. Like, they literally believe this is how people identify their side. “Oh yes you’re rightwing, that’s because you don’t mind being selfish, self-serving, evil even. That’s your conception of the world.”

Not at all. I’m social, therefore I am right-wing. I care about women’s rights, therefore I am right-wing. I want poor people to get help, therefore I am right-wing. The left wing has a pro-immigration “at all cost” policy and it means women are raped. It’s systematic and part of what authors aren’t jailed for. The left has a pro-poor policy and therefore poverty develops while leftwing electoralites have unsanctioned lavish parties with the commons’ money (lavish parties ala Weinstein for which metoo stories surface a dozen years later).

Leftists can’t fathom that I have literally the same pro-women anti-poverty values as they have. If anything, leftists judge (and pre-emptively sanction!) people on prejudice.

You kinda seem selfish, self-serving - evil, even.

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

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

The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!

Here is politics:

Are common American citizens able to afford and obtain reasonable health care?

Are common Americans paid a living wage? Can one person earn enough to have a family?

Do our children have a reasonable opportunity to grow, have a productive life and have a family if they want one?

Is the financial situation getting better for Americans or is the difference between earnings and expenditures growing larger. (Hint do we use code words like 'inflation' instead of calling it like it is).

A functioning democracy requires that the common people are enable to formulate and enact laws that they believe are in their best interests. Do the majority of the laws enacted in all the states meet this requirement?

A functioning democracy requires that the common people are able to use the law and courts to right wrongs. Are the common people able to use/afford access to the courts when wrongs are committed.

Do the common news media act as a forum for the common concerns and issues of the People. (Here's looking at you NYT).

Cuo Bono? If the laws passed are not in the interests of the People, and the courts are not accessible by People, who benefits? If the news media are not a forum for the interests of the People, whose interests do they represent. (Here's looking at you Jeff Bezos).

If advertising funds our primary sources of news, whose interests are represented.

Those are simply things you should discuss with your friends. They are questions not answers. This is not rocket science.

These are real problems. But they are also loaded questions, if someone asked me these at a party I would view them as looking for confirmation, and not seeking truth. There's nothing wrong with that, but the author's goal is curiosity and truth seeking, and I'm skeptical that most of these questions align with that goal.

The ironic thing to me is that the author essentially makes this the main point right from the get go:

> The insidious nature of this question comes from the false representation as earnest, intellectual discourse. Many who ask it may truly believe they’re engaging earnestly, but their responses quickly reveal an angle more akin to religious police.

As you point out, nearly all of talkingtab's questions are loaded. At the very least, talkingtab essentially says outright what they expect the "correct" answer to be, e.g I'm baffled why talkingtab seems to think "inflation" is a "code word". I speak English, and inflation is "telling it like it is" based on the simple definition of the word.

As another example, for this question:

> Are common Americans paid a living wage? Can one person earn enough to have a family?

What happens if a response is "No, I don't believe that cashiers at McDonald's deserve to be paid a 'living wage', because I don't believe that job is intended to support a family on its own"? To emphasize, I'm not saying what the "right" answer is, but I do believe reasonable people can disagree over what constitutes a living wage and which jobs deserve to be paid it.

If anything, talkingtab's post just highlights to me the author's specific point about political "tribes" vs political views, and if anything has convinced me more that the author's view is spot on here.

> the author essentially makes this the main point right from the get go

Then find better friends. The author is essentially complaining about the quality of his friends.

Ah, yes, those pesky humans and their cognitive biases...

> Ah, yes, those pesky humans and their cognitive biases...

This is sort of meaningless without citation of the bias you claim.

In case you're being serious: yes; you can find friends who won't shit on you for your views.

My read is that talkingtab’s agenda here is to focus the conversation on what politics is. Rather than being this thing you discuss with people (or not) it’s about injustice against the majority. So why does that get brought up? Because with the OP it’s easy to end up concluding that politics to the average person is something you choose to idly or deliberately or max-brainpower chatter with other people about. Then it can be easily thought that it’s just about differing policy positions. But talkingtab is saying that it’s more confrontational than that.

So why are the questions “loaded”? Because as you can see with your own eyes, they have their own political agenda. Part of politics is defining what the the agenda should be—and what should be considered political.

As you can imagine, people who think they are arguing or fighting on behalf of people making a living wage etc. want to put that message out there. They are not discussing abstract concepts or competing in some open-mindedness competition or some rationality contest. It matters to them.

> If anything, talkingtab's post just highlights to me the author's specific point about political "tribes" vs political views, and if anything has convinced me more that the author's view is spot on here.

You are even more convinced. Yet there is nothing here that suggests that talkingtab is tribal in the sense of what the OP is talking about. None. Is this received opinion or opinion born from studying like a monk for 10 years? You don’t know.

You also say that talkingtab is presenting what the “correct” answer is. Yes, according to them. Again, is it really tribalism? Or is it conviction as well as the polemic tone of the whole comment? And having conviction doesn’t mean that you cannot conceive of people having other opinions, or being intellectually unable to present counter-arguments to their own position. Again, no proof of tribalism is presented.

And this focus on tribalism presupposes that the end goal is to find your tone. Alternatively you can look at their arguments. Maybe they want to change the flaws they perceive in the world.

I always wondered, what those Pinkerton man thought, when they attacked union members with machine guns for their masters in the guilded age.

They thought "Well, I guess this makes me one of those people for whom "Not talking about politics with Friends" becomes a core tenent to my personal philosophy."

They thought that the union members were criminals.

Without the ability to realize that it's politics that defines what a criminal is.

The original argument put forth by capitalists was that unionized workers were effectively engaging in economic sabotage by striking and blockading factories.

That said the Pinkertons were basically mercenaries akin to organized crime, so probably viewed things in terms of might makes right.

Unfortunately they're thinking the same thing today.

The strawmanning of arguments from both sides is so intense that most people lay in a bed composed entirely of strawman arguments. I firmly blame the media above all for this, but individuals carry a burden to for not trying to remake their bed.

It took me 15 years to to remake my bed into somewhat rational arguments, and still I find lots of hay in there. Generally both sides, or all sides really, want the same things and disagree on how to get there. And the truth is there is almost never an obvious or clear way to get there. It's fractal pros and cons all the way down.

> but individuals carry a burden to for not trying to remake their bed

In what way? I turn on Fox sometimes and it's not that it's slanted, but it's just a stream of lies and BS. I've watched a bunch of Trump's speeches and in addition to being incoherent, he says the same lies and BS all the way down. Yesterday's tariff speech was a great example.

I don't consider myself progressive (though the MAGA right would think me so), but where do I go to try and 'remake [my] bed'?

I think what's meant is that you need to be open to changing your opinion and manner of approach to things. To stay with the analogy: when you "remake" your bed and it ends up the same, chances are that you didn't try to improve on its design.

By turning on Fox sometimes (provided it's not your main source) you might already not fall into the category of people not trying to remake their bed.

Wait, we're designing bedding now? Not just remaking our beds? What a strained analogy that when you 'remake' your bed and it's the 'same' (why would it be different?) then you didn't improve the design?? Even more shocking is that you ran with this as opposed to realizing that these were warning signs that either your fundamental argument is ridiculous, or your analogy is.

Well, the first thing is to realize CNN is also just a stream of lies and BS. Every media news organization in the world has become (they always were?) pure garbage.

Listening to first-hand sources is the way, I guess, but also remembering they can be lying as well, so be vigilant.

It's true, because all the upper levels of ALL large media organizations have been infiltrated by big-moneyed conservatives.

CNN and NBC weren't always as bad as they are now, but their descent has been obvious and dramatic.

Some of them still employ democrats to some minimal extent, such as Jamelle Bouie at the NYT, but that's merely subterfuge, lest their bent be glaringly obvious.

If someone can name a large organization that is an exception to my first paragraph, I would be happy to learn of them.

CNN has always been propaganda

https://youtu.be/rWtwjDhgN3Q

https://youtu.be/NlcSiYulhos

> Generally both sides, or all sides really, want the same things and disagree on how to get there.

No, that is just not true. For example, do you think Putin and his supporters wanted a functioning democracy in Russia and independent Ukraine? No, they wanted someone functioning as a dictator to restore Russia's cold war territory and influence, and they wanted to undermine western democracies that stood in their way.

History does not support your claim that everyone wants the same things. Some people want power and strong man to take over the government. We see that with the Trump administration. The religious conservatives want to use that to make America a Christian nation. The billionaire libertarians want to use it to deregulate their industries and run the government like a corporation. And Trump wants to act unilaterally to bring about his vision of being seen as some great figure. They have illiberal aims.

I'm speaking about the collectives, not the individuals. There are always deranged individuals and some of them, many of them, manage to get in power. But the ideological collectives all have pretty much the same core goals. Needs met, population happy.

What's your threshold where an "individual" becomes a "collective"? Certainly billionaire libertarians, religious conservatives, Putin and his supporters and the Trump administration (along with the judges he's appointed, the people in congress and state governments who ran on his platform and the 10s of millions of Americans who voted for them) are not individuals...

They also very obviously want different things compared to others.

Shy of a few fringe groups, I am not aware of any large suffering & death collectives. Every large collective is trying to achieve a better life for it's adherents, and is always welcoming to those who want to join. Christains might see living is the light of Jesus as the ideal life, and while not for everyone, you should at least be able to understand why they feel that way (as opposed to a religion of self inflicted torture).

Remember the goal here is not to become sympathetic to Trump, or Putin, or Sanders, or Netanyahu, or Islam. The goal is to have an accurate understanding of them, so that when you form arguments against them, you are actually attacking bedrock and not just straw.

> Christains might see living is the light of Jesus as the ideal life, and while not for everyone, you should at least be able to understand why they feel that way (as opposed to a religion of self inflicted torture).

Yes, but also we've seen how they've behaved in the past when they had vast political power in Europe. And we see what the goals of the Heritage Foundation is with Project 2025. There have always been a decent number of conservative Christians who want prayer, the bible and ten commandments in school. Who don't want legal abortion or gay marriage. And the more power they have, the more they would restrict. They also tend to believe in a lot of conspiracy theories, like the Democratic Party being controlled by satanists and communists, who have also infiltrated the "Deep State".

So you can imagine how those beliefs play out with enough political power.

politics, especially international geopolitics is a zero-sum game. The game of competition for limited resources and markets. Because resources are limited, the pie is fixed, and this makes it zero sum game.

Although there is a way to frame political alliances as a win-win when two parties increase their share at a cost of some other third party losing theirs.

Because of that, the arguments will always be straw-man, because people want to win resources, not to argue in good faith.

Any political issue can be framed in terms of zero sum game, if you look at the whole picture

This is incorrect. There are few physical resources that we have reached the limit of, such that one entity’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. There are also a great many things of value that aren’t simply raw resources, for which the pie will never be fixed, because the pie is made by humans and can be made bigger or smaller.

This zero-sum narrative is only true in a world of no growth, where all resources are being fully utilized to maximum effect. That is very far from the world we live in, where there is enormous room for additional extraction, creation, and efficient utilization of resources.

the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy.

Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.

You may be conflating win-win with debt-based growth, where economy can grow at the cost of running fiscal deficit and accumulating debt. Sure the economy and market can grow, but the debt will also grow and the inflation will cancel out the nominal growth

Again, the law of preservation of energy only makes things zero sum between entities if all the energy is already being used at maximum efficiency, which it isn't.

For a simple example, consider farming, where plants are used to harness the energy of the sun and capture it in a form useful to humans. Yes, there are inputs that go into it, but the output is more valuable (economically and otherwise) than the material input, because the plant also captured a bunch of solar energy that would have otherwise done nothing useful for anyone's economy. My economy has now grown, without having to take or go into debt from some other economy.

Even in a scenario where I do take on debt to get the materials/water/whatever, the value that is created is greater than the debt taken on. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't do it.

Humans create value by harnessing more energy and using it more efficiently for things that humans (and therefore economies) value. This is an ongoing process, with a long way to go.

We use about 1 part in 10000 of the sun's energy deposit on earth... No, we are _really_ far away from preservation of energy being a limiting problem

yes, the only way to increase economy without stealing from someone else is technological advancement and efficiency improvements (which amounts to R&D spend = $$$$)

I guess I can interpret the strongest form of your argument to suggest that resources and markets have a specific level of economically relevant supply at any specific time, which I suppose is an empirical claim that’s true. I feel like recent days’ trade policy earthquakes might operate along a similar line of reasoning: there’s only so much, “they’ve” been getting better off, which means they’ve been “taking” from the US, so the US is taking back.

In the same sense it’s true that there are only so many bushels of seed corn left after the winter. At the moment, we can squabble over how to divide the fixed supply. I could take all the corn, eat half, keep the rest for myself to plant this season. Or, if I’ve already got enough to plant all my land, and you’ve got more land and nothing else to do, I could invest some of my leftover corn with you and we can all have double the harvest in a few months… when the supply will have dramatically expanded, assuming I don’t treat it as a zero-sum game right now. Or I could focus on “winning” right now, and we’ll both be poorer after the harvest than we would have been otherwise.

While I agree that you could frame most any political issue in zero-sum terms, I feel like the blind spot is the same: it tallies the score based on assumptions fixed in time, and it takes a pessimistic view of cooperative potential, of humans’ power to influence the constraints themselves.

the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy / Law of preservation of matter.

Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.

Any free lunch one can have in the economy is only possible in nominal terms, when your economy/market grows, but your sovereign debt and fiscal deficit also grows and in real terms, after inflation there is no real growth.

if you look at the core, the bottom of the economics it is just pure physics: The flow and exchange of energy and materials, labor and capital. The fight is over a distribution of the flows between various factions

Aren’t we so, so, so far from physical limits though? To the point that we speak of likely energy reserves in terms of centuries of consumption at current levels, even if we only get around to proving the next couple decades’ worth at a time?

If Musk et al get their wishes, and we become “spacefaring civilization” or whatever—aren’t the conceivable physical limits of known reality so far away as to be irrelevant?

And isn’t the story of the industrial era one of compounding productivity per unit of labor?

That's not how economics works. The pie is not fixed, it tends to grow over time as there's more trade between countries and their economies get bigger. The global economic pie has increased a massive amount over the past century.

the trade has increased because jobs have been offshored, corporations have been running labor cost arbitrage and making a profit from a difference in labor cost in US vs elsewhere

And as with most arbitrages, costs have lowered as a result. It means a piece of technology with thousands of individual parts can be in your hand for $200. Labor efficiency differences have resulted in an explosion of value-for-dollar for the American consumer.

They are both real problems and loaded questions. Okay. Ostensibly the point of politics is to solve problems that people have. That will lead to people putting forth what they think the problems are. We simply don’t have time to theorize every concievable potential problem and then, one by one, painstakingly (with our minds wide open like an open brain surgery) consider whether they are in fact problems that people have.

All of these pointed questions can also be disputed.

Actually they make great conversion. Preface with, “Why is neither party talking about…” and you’ll find that most people agree.

Then lead them to the understanding that both parties are right-wing? (support the current economic system, support mass-murdering brown people overseas, support embezzling for personal gain as long as they don't get caught, etc)

> support embezzling for personal gain as long as they don't get caught

If you think this is a strictly right-wing characteristic you are hopelessly partisan.

Notice that I said both parties do it.

[flagged]

> fascism and fascist ideologies

This is political dog-whistling. As Orwell pointed out almost eight decades ago: "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’."[1] and is now obviously only a dog-whistle for fellow ideologues. This does not belong on HN.

[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I agree the term is vague. But what then would you have us call it? The whole, constitutional crisis, outright flouting of the rule of law, suspension of due process/disappearing of political enemies in the streets type thing that is verifiably happening right now. Are you requesting that the word fascism be banned from HN? Have you seen the videos of legal college students being shoved into unmarked vans by unmarked and masked officers of the law? What do you call that? The talk of a third term?

I'd love to say, "he's just blustering", it's what my father said but he's enacted just about every thing he said. Should he begin speaking about a third term i don't think we have the luxury to ignore that anymore. To annex our nearby "allies" who've now become a united front opposing any economic relationship. What is that called? What would you have us say?

You can't call Trump a fascist, he has yet to have the trains run on time.

Why not give it a new name? We could do so with Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. There is no reason we have to stop giving these phenomena a new name. You can always talk about the similarities, but if you mix it carelessly you'll lose the differences.

>But what then would you have us call it?

Most people say "fascist" when at most they mean "authoritarian". But maybe the latter's not scary enough for the boogeyman you want to evoke. Sometimes they say it when they should say demagoguery (which is, in my opinion, more than alarming enough of a word in ways that I can forgive people for feeling "populist" isn't). Quite often though, people merely mean "distasteful", but since tastes vary quite a bit, this might not alarm anyone at all.

>suspension of due process/disappearing of political enemies

You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?

>The talk of a third term?

From a man so old and in such ill health it seems quite likely he won't survive his second term? Mostly he's just trying to get a rise out of you. I don't like bullies, but when they do the "made you flinch" thing, part of me wants to smirk. Couldn't you just this once not flinch?

>To annex our nearby "allies"

He did it in the most asshole way possible, but offering them a proportionate number of votes in our Senate is hardly the insult they make it out to be. Especially when they're all dragged along by our policy already and just have no say in it whatsoever. "We want you to join the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and the benefits are truly too long to list" shouldn't send them running away screaming in terror.

>You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?

> I don't like bullies, but when they do the "made you flinch" thing, part of me wants to smirk.

You like bullies, actually - you just don't like thinking you like bullies.

Then why does part of me always wish you were clever enough to not flinch, just once, and show them up?

I keep waiting for it to happen. Hoping. And yet you always disappoint.

When he actually hits you, it makes sense to flinch when he flails his limbs. He did cause the stock market to tank literally yesterday.

> You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?

Illegally, without due process. That's why a federal judge has been ruling against them on this. They also lied that everyone deported was part of a Venezuelan gang (or at least that they had proper grounds for thinking so, thus the importance of due process), and they lied that it was some kind of invasion.

>Illegally, without due process.

And what process, exactly, is due? Why is it due? My understanding of the term is that due process is mostly that because everyone gets the same... if some are getting different treatment, this raises due process concerns. If there was never any process designed, or if it has been abandoned. The bureaucracy can change the rules to some extent, they are not written in stone.

>That's why a federal judge has been ruling against them on this.

No one believes that, not even the left. They're happy that it's occurring of course, and they're clever enough to pretend that they've got real arguments... but in the back of their minds they know that the federal judge would rule against this no matter what, because the Trump administration is doing it. After all, for a full 2 months afterward they had people who were claiming the election was rigged and hoping that somehow that it would be invalidated. Their imaginations ran wild with ever-more-fanciful schemes. Now that's not happening, they've moved on and believe their in some sort of counter-coup.

>and they lied that it was some kind of invasion.

What's the definition of "invasion"? If an enemy were to invade with tanks and guns, they'd be wiped out. A clever enemy might just encourage its people to "migrate". To foment a sort of economic war. Or the word invasion can even have more metaphorical or casual usage. If someone says that mice have invaded their home do you complain that the word "invade" is wrong because the mice aren't wearing military uniforms and trying to accomplish some general's strategy?

Even if you think it’s a dog whistle, Facism does mean something and it’s rather more accurate to use it now than say, 30 years ago.

No, it does not mean anything. Different people from the same side of the political spectrum define it differently, let alone different parts of the spectrum. If you don't define it before using it, it's a dog-whistle, full stop.

I've heard this dismissal a good bit often ("that's just a nothing word that means 'bad thing I don't like' ") but that's really just not true.

It has been consistently defined through the decades, especially during the 20th century. Here's one common example you can find from the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary and it sounds pretty familiar:

"A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

I kinda feel like that would work just as well with ‘right’ replaced by ‘left’.

If anything, this definition is a better argument for the parents’s point.

Dictatorship, belligerent (North Korea style) and nationalism seem much more important features than left or right.

One could do worse than using Eco's Ur-Fascism[1] as the starting point. The man had personal experience and he could write (oh how he could write.) However, I'd expect that some would dismiss him as an inveterate lefty (he wasn't), so we're back on square one.

[1] https://archive.org/details/umberto-eco-ur-fascism/umberto-e...

Dog whistle for what? Please define what it is a dog whistle for. Maybe in that context you'll find the common definition understood by people using it

Speaking of words having meanings, what exactly do you mean by dog-whistle here? I understand dog-whistle to mean coded language for a different concept.

The word is starting to be used by the left in the same way the right uses "woke": It's become watered down and an over-used way to simply say "anything my side doesn't like".

- Climate change is real: "woke"

- Firing people in government: "fascist"

- Compassion and fairness: "woke"

- Cruelty toward political enemies: "fascist"

- Expertise-driven and reason-driven policies: "woke"

- Stacking government positions with loyal cronies: "fascist"

- Rights for women, minorities, gay people, and so on: "woke"

- Handouts to corporations: "fascist"

They've become vague words that mean the same thing: "Politics I don't like"

This reminds me of the joke about how republicans will defend criminal conspiracy by saying "Wow so it's illegal to make plans with friends now".

In the academic community the term still has a useful meaning and is often used appropriately in those circles.

But you could substitute neoreactionary in GP and it would still be referring to real bloggers that are treated as if they're making legitimate and justifiable arguments.

It's a serious concern, I think it's good to criticize this tendency.

You do not have to look very far to find prominent voices on the right who are apologetically anti-democracy.

Or even unapologetically.

if what you mean by anti-democracy, is government oppression, then the left and right both use this equally.

there is only one continuum: liberty from government oppression, or lack thereof.

I hope you don't seriously consider the oligopoly of two parties and small circle of connected elites, dependent on financial backing from ultra high net worth oligarchs, corporations, special lobbying groups - a democracy. This is not democracy, it is plutocracy (the power of capital/rich)

There is bad, and there is worse, far worse.

And, it's a kleptocracy, more and more, for a very long time now.

US is not a democracy. Trump got like ~77 mln votes, which roughly compares to 23% of the population of 340 mln people. so Trump doesn't even represent the a quarter of US population.

other countries are more democratic, in a sense that winning candidate represents larger share of people living there

This is the opposite of a dog whistle it's entirely explicit. There are people being thrown into vans for speech right now. There are law firms that are negotiating to lift bills of attainder for their prior political litigation. They are _literally_ throwing people in El Salvadorean prisons without due process, including people that were in this country legally.

Eh, I really do call BS on that.

Umberto Eco's 14 tenants of fascism still stands strong and is highly visible in modern discourse.

*tenets

Every rationalist movement eventually ends up at odds with rational people.

But then, whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing? Because it's really unclear. On the one hand, "rational people" keep their views even as they drift apart from a wider "rationalist movement". On the other hand, it's the rationalist communities - the movement - that's much more likely to actually know something "about the foundations of economics or political science". On the grasping hand, such communities can and do get stuck missing forest for the trees.

But then on the slapping hand, approximately all criticism of rationalism (particularly LessWrong-associated) I've seen on HN and elsewhere, involves either heresay and lies, or just a legion of strawmen like "zomg Roko's basilisk" or GP's own "arguments" like:

> Nobody likes a technocrat, because a technocrat would let a kid who fell down a well die there, since the cost of rescuing them could technically save the lives of 3 others someplace else

It's hard to even address something that's just plain bullshit, so in the end, I'm still leaning towards giving rationalists the benefit of doubt. Strange as some conclusions of some people may sometimes be, they at least try to argue it with reason, and not strawmen and ideological rally cries.

EDIT: and then there's:

> They often re-hash arguments which have been had and settled like 200 years ago

Well, somebody has to. It's important for the same reason reproducibility in science is important.

I'd be wary of assuming any complex argument has been "settled like 200 years ago". When people say this, they just mean "shut up and accept the uninformed, simplistic opinion". In a sense, this is even worse than blindly following religious dogma, as with organized religions, the core dogmas are actually designed by smart people to achieve some purpose (ill-minded or not); cutting people off with "settled like 200 years ago" is just telling them to accept whatever's the cheapest, worst-quality belief currently on sale on the "marketplace of ideas".

Rationalism, and the people who believe in it and promote it, has the problem that the human mind unavoidably decides to act as the arbiter of what is rational or not. This limits your vision to only that which the mind internally 'agrees with' or not, entrenching hidden biases.

Fundamentally, it's the mind only engaging with the cognitive, and ignoring the limbic. Engaging with the limbic, with the deep, primal parts of the brain, challenges cognitively-held truths and demands you to support these truths from a broader context.

This is why rationalists are more prone to engage with fascist viewpoints, they seek more power for their held beliefs and fascism offers that in spades. You're not thinking about the history of fascist movements and how horrible they all turned out. You're thinking: How can we do it better this time?

Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real, and you need both the rational and the irrational to make reality. Focusing exclusively on rationality is intentionally blinding yourself to messy reality.

> Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real

I just want to highlight this, since it's the cleanest way I've seen this expressed. This is a fantastic hackernews comment.

I too want to highlight this, since it's one of the cleanest case of blatant equivocation sneaking past people.

>> Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real

That only works if you think Rationality ⊂ Reality the same way ℚ ⊂ ℝ — which is like saying Space-time ⊂ Archery because time flies like an arrow.

Wordplay is not an argument.

And I'd like to highlight this, since it's one of the cleanest cases of everyone in a situation knowing what's being said, and then a rationalist coming along and thinking everyone is misunderstanding it except for him.

Rationalists read poetry like "Compare thee to a summer's day? Pfft, impossible!"

Rationalist Jesus preaches the gospel of Effective Altruism and pure consequentialism. Rob and beat your neighbors in service of them, that's real love.

That's an interesting take, but I can't see how you can dismiss rationality/rationalism as insufficient to process reality on the basis of "ignoring the limbic", without dismissing all of science and mathematics in the process.

I do agree there's more to human experience than just the cognitive / "system 2" view, but the important aspect of our cognitive facility - aspects that put humans on top of the global food chain - is that we can model and reason about the "limbic", and even though we can merely approximate it in the cognitive space, we've also learned how to work with approximations and uncertainty.

This is to say, if reason seems to justify viewpoints generally known, viscerally and cognitively, to be abhorrent, it typically means one's reasoning about perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum instead of actual human beings, and fails to include the "deep, primal parts of the brain" in their model. That, fortunately, is a correctable mistake.

Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.

> I can't see how you can dismiss rationality/rationalism as insufficient to process reality on the basis of "ignoring the limbic", without dismissing all of science and mathematics in the process.

Only a rationalist could make such a statement. I tell you rationalism is only a part of reality, not the whole, and you take that as a dismissal of all of the rational. I have no problems with science and maths, I just don't elevate them to the level of prime importance that rationalists do. I watched the Veritasium video on Cantor and the Axiom of Choice before I saw it on HN, and I follow Dr. Angela Collier on YouTube.

I'm an intuitionist, not a rationalist. I believe in a broad and rich informational diet, and that intuitive understanding is better than reductionist, which is the only kind of understanding rationalists seem to value.

> is that we can model and reason about the "limbic",

We can, and the academic domain that produces is generally called the humanities, and the humanities seem to be almost universally dismissed, even despised, by rationalists. So color me unimpressed when rationalists do this acceptance / dismissal dance regarding them. You don't really care about the humanities, just that we can model and reason about them. You want your rational bent to encompass the irrational, when fundamentally it cannot do that. Yes we can study the humanities. Just not with science or math or any other positivistic approach that would satisfy a rationalist.

And I fundamentally disagree with the notion that it's the cognitive that allowed us to dominate. In fact it's the cooperation between the cognitive and the limbic that produces the language that allows us to communicate with each other that gave us the advantage. Without the limbic there's no reason or room to cooperate.

All your viewpoint seeks to do is reduce the real into the rational.

> Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.

Hence Elon Musk's Nazi-esque government takeover.

Everyone likes to use fascist to smear their political opponents, yet I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that the "anti-fascists" are any different. They support mass censorship, state propaganda, political violence, forever war, discrimination, debanking, lawfare, lockdowns, and ironically even infringement of bodily autonomy through unconstitutional vaccine mandates.

I hope this "I know you are but what am I" approach to politics falls out of fashion soon. Like listening to children playing cops and robbers.

It's childish to still not see the Democrats are corrupt corporatists, and that we need real third parties and candidates strong enough to resist the myriad of dirty tactics thrown at them. Say what you will about Trump, but he's about the only person who has the strength and resources to take on an entrenched deep state and corrupt intelligence agencies. They tried to impeach him with a fake Russian collusion hoax, throw him in prison on trumped up non-criminal felonies, and oh yeah multiple assassination attempts which were memory holed a couple weeks later.

The Iron Law of Wokeism is projection of the same crimes they commit upon others. We already have massive evidence the Democrats are corrupt and authoritarian, colluding with media, persecuting and assassinating whistleblowers (Assange, Snowden, Seth Rich). They engage in grotesque amounts of graft and inefficiency, as seen with California's High Speed Rail project, Biden's rural broadband and EV charging stations, which have delivered nothing. The Democrats don't even respect their voters choices in primaries, as evident by super delegates, Hillary conspiring against Bernie Sanders, the forced abdication of the obviously senile Biden, appointment of the obviously inept puppet that was Kamala Harris, etc. etc.

I hope real civil libertarians become in fashion. The self-described anti-fascists are basically communists who would create an authoritarian nightmare state, per usual. Funnily enough, the Berlin Wall was officially the the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, and Putin is engaging in a "special police action" against Ukraine in order to "de-nazify" the regime.

> whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing?

Just a nit, it's "who" in this case, not "whom," because it is a subject not an object. "Whom" is more often used as "to/with/for whom."

Thanks! English is not my first language, and I still have problem with this particular thing.

(IIRC use of "whom" was never covered in my English classes; I only learned about it from StarGate: SG-1, a show in which one of the main characters had a habit of mocking enemies by correcting their grammar.)

Your entire post is premised on rational people only being rationalists

It always falls down because the end-goal of ones "rationalism" always has to be determined by a set of values.

If you want to form a political ideology based on rationality, your very first step will stick you right in the middle of the sticky-icky world of the humanities. 'Hello deontology, my old friend.'

Isn’t rationalism (as discussed above) more closely related to utilitarianism? Thus rationalism is more of a consequentialist framework than a deontological one?

Even definitions there are extremely hazy. "The most good for the most people".

Define "good". Happiness? Economic prosperity? Community? And over what time span?

Define "most". Percentage of people served? Number of people served?

Define "people". Are you counting citizens? Immigrants? Foreigners? Prisoners? People in the future?

You know the joke in the sciences about how everything distills down to mathematics? I would argue that we just as often distill down to philosophy. You have to reckon with a lot of questions which a stats degree can't help you much with.

To steal a quote from The Good Place, “This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors”

Its almost like you’ve discovered content manufactured whose only purpose is propaganda

What's also remarkable is that these people often have incredible disdain for communities of experts who study these topics for their careers. The number of times that I've seen one of these blogs discuss a topic that they believe they have invented while ignoring the mountains of literature already produced on the topic is... concerning.

This is what no humanities education does to a motherfucker.

My favourite genre of this is when the crypto community rediscovers centuries of economic lessons from first-principles.

Those are good questions for sure and could lead to some interesting discussions, but (and maybe my generally left-leaning bias is showing by saying this) they're questions that are in many ways self-evident. For example, it's hard to argue that health care should only be affordable for the rich and that everyone else should just die in the streets.

There's other issues that are much less clear and, in my experience, more likely to shift from discussions and debates into strife and arguments:

- Should private citizens be allowed to own firearms? Should they be allowed to carry them on the streets?

- What do we do about meth and opiates on our streets? What do we do about the associated property and violent interpersonal crime?

- Should we start building more nuclear power plants to cut down on our greenhouse gas emissions?

And locally:

- The city is expanding to the west. What should this neighbourhood look like?

These, I believe, are squarely in the realm of "politics" and unless you're having the discussion in an ideological bubble are likely to be much hotter-button issues.

There's a lot of nuance in the healthcare access and affordability issue. In developed countries at least there's a pretty broad consensus that if someone is having a medical emergency then they should receive treatment regardless of ability to pay. But beyond that it gets sticky and there are hard choices that no one likes to discuss. Resources are finite but demand is effectively infinite, so one way or another there has to be some form of rationing. Like if a poor patient is dying of cancer and a drug could extend their life by 3 months at a cost of $100K then should society be obligated to pay? This is inherently a political question with no obvious correct answer.

"healthcare should be for everyone" is a great claim to make. but then the question is implementation. how will you get rid of the current system and replace it with a more equitable one? people are generally hesitant to make changes unless things are really bad. i like to think of this in terms of chemical bonds - people are bonded to their current systems, and wont break those bonds unless they are under enough stress that bond breakage is favorable. and once you start arguing for destruction of the current system, the morality gets fuzzy. do you support accelerationism, or a more gradual change? and then once you are in the weeds of implementing a fairer healthcare system, things are just genuinely terrible. i am very uninvolved in the healthcare system, but you need organizational structures, supply chain, etc. someone somewhere will probably try and be selfish about things which will make everything harder. structures will have to be built to deal with legal minutia. and meanwhile there are all these other preexisting systems used to the former system that struggle to make the switch instantaneously? every question is complicated and awful once you think about implementation. nothing is ever self evident. imo!

> "healthcare should be for everyone" is a great claim to make. but then the question is implementation. how will you get rid of the current system and replace it with a more equitable one?

And as importantly, what does "more equitable" or "fairer" mean? More broadly, how do people define "better"?

In the US, a major issue is that The D and The R have radically different ideas of what those words mean, even though they agree on the high level objectives like "healthcare should be for everyone".

- should private citizens be able to own their own property? Or should the government jump in an take what they think is "fair" so they can redistribute it to others?

Is this a trick question about tax or an ‘are you a communist?’ question?

Outside the extremes edge cases (billionaires), I’d be surprised if any significant portion of the population thought owning stuff a problem.

> I’d be surprised if any significant portion of the population thought owning stuff a problem.

Except for Real Estate...there's a not-insignificant group of people who thing that the idea of owning multiple homes and renting them out should not be allowed.

> Are common American citizens able to afford and obtain reasonable health care?

"Should common American citizens" ... is a question.

This already implies a country's citizens having access to health care without financial barriers is a good idea already :)

[Note that I'm in the EU, I have access to affordable health care by default and I like it that way. But I don't think everyone in the US thinks like that. Or even understands what it means.]

Agree.

It is same thing with higher ed. Everyone should have college degree . Now even without everyone having it but just 3-4 times then before means there are tons of graduates without jobs, low paying jobs commensurate to years in education and heavy load of debt.

The question from start had to be Should everyone get a college degree?

Define all kinds of privilege/benefits as rights. And then move on to ask innocent questions as Is even asking for our rights politics?

Uh oh. Last paragraph is leading :)

"Should common American citizens" ... is a question

"How should..." is the really important and interesting question. Even when everybody answers yes, which most people do, to the "should" question they will often completely disagree on the "how should" question.

> The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!

I don't personally agree with how quick you are able to write those things off as not being political. Would you mind providing a bit more explanation of how you are able to arrive at such confident No's?

Perhaps you consider political to be an intrinsic quality of a thing rather than a descriptor of how a thing is used/intended? I fall into the latter camp, and thus am very open to consider almost anything and everything political. Much like art.

> The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!

What an easy answer when you not part of the disadvantaged demographic. Some problems apply almost exclusively to a single demographic. Not asking the cultural questions is like thinking that segregation was perfectly okay because everyone had access to everything you'd need. Just not in the small space.

Urban problems are not rural problems even when they look like the same problem. Why there is a food desert in Nowhere, SomeState is not going to be anything like the reason there is a good desert in Urbanville, Somestate. So while everyone definitely deserves the ability to acquire food pretending that subgroups don't exist means you can't actually solve their struggle. If you apply a blanket solution it doesn't help everyone.

It is beyond disingenuous to pretend that different kinds of people don't feel the impact of culture and regulation differently and in ways they either can't themselves or can't at all change. To take that stance, shows that one is on the default demographic that is always considered before anyone else.

> It is beyond disingenuous to pretend that different kinds of people don't feel the impact of culture and regulation differently

But that is why you shouldn't talk about it at parties, because people experience it so differently it is likely to lead to conflict and bad times.

Saying you need to talk about it since it is important is like teaching math at parties because it is important, it will just irritate people since they are there to enjoy themselves not get lectured.

Unlike your math example, if serious harm or death is at stake, I don't mind if it leads to conflict and bad times. Avoidance because "it might be a bad time", to me, feels like a lack of appreciation for what is at stake in these conversations.

Literally none of this is politics, its governance. Politics is the human word for the chimplike "who gets to be the boss" games we play. No matter how well your society is running there will always be politics, put 20 people on a tropical island with no problems and 4 weeks later half of em will want to kill the other half - thats politics

Politics is decision making in groups.

Every group of people is a political unit and anything that affects decision making is political. Your office is a political unit, your family is a political unit, etc.

So if a racial issue is affecting the decisions we make then yes it’s political.

> The crucial question is what is "politics"? … Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!

When people talk about privilege, this is it - being able to dictate which issues are ‘politics,’ and being able to dismiss my rights as ‘not politics.’

Do I have a right to work? To live? To own property? To marry the one I love? To have sex with the people I’m attracted to? To raise a child with my partner? To choose my own identity and to live my own life?

A white cishet man takes all those rights for granted - why shouldn’t I? Why should my struggle to obtain those same rights be dismissed as ‘inflammatory issues about sex or gender or political correctness’ and therefore ‘not politics?’

Are you married? Would you like to be? Do you ever worry about how you’ll be treated when you go to work, or make a purchase at the store? What’s it like to go grocery shopping, or car shopping, or touring places to live? What’s it like apply to and interview for jobs? Does you boss look like you? How do your parents feel about you? How do your neighbors greet you when they see you? What’s your relationship like with your landlord?

You’re really telling me that none of that is worth ‘politicking’ over?

that attitude is exactly why things are not going well right now - because we are pretending that of we look away, equality and justice will take care of itself.

>A functioning democracy requires that the common people are able to use the law and courts to right wrongs. Are the common people able to use/afford access to the courts when wrongs are committed.

Having recently been completely railroaded and betrayed by the court system I can tell you. No. I literally had all my evidence thrown out with no explanation from the Judge other than "I don't think this is relevant" in regards to several different topics that I had made an organized report on. Meanwhile the corporate defense provided unorganized meaningless piles of documentation that would takes months to go over and it was left as "evidence" I do mean meaningless, several hundred pages were literally blank white pages submitted as evidence. I guess the crappy software they use to do discovery generated lots of white space in between snippits of info.

The court had decided before the trial that by default a person is wrong and a corporation is right.

“What is politics” is entirely contextual.

I start talking about my wife’s work. That’s just personal family stuff, right? Not if there’s someone there who’s a hardcore women-should-stay-home sort.

Or maybe everyone is ok with women having jobs, but my wife’s work has been substantially impacted by the recent DOGE nonsense. Something as simple as “she has to go to the office on Monday” becomes political if there’s a Trump supporter present.

Let’s just talk shit about our cars. Oops, what brand of car you own is now political.

“My parents are going to come visit” sorry, turns out that the ability of foreigners to enter the country without fear of being detained for weeks for no good reason is political.

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The problem is the property political class, which includes both parties a-la Gore Vidal, seeks to dismiss, gaslight, and distract from these problems and instead make them pseudo-wedge issues or political footballs. One side is stuck on remaking reality as a shared, fantastical mirage, and the other complains about the delusion with stern words but agrees to it anyhow. Neither is concerned with addressing the core problem: big money buying all 3 branches of govt, and John McCain found that out the hard way that ethics don't win votes because enough Americans' manufactured consent to condone lawlessness, authoritarianism, radical deregulation, and privatization.

Either a Constitutional Convention 2.0 needs to happen to undo the damage like the repeal of the Tillman Act and the disastrous Citizens' United, or Americans needs to voluntarily do away with popularity contests by instead picking public administrators with limited power by sortition from amongst professional societies for a limited term of say 4 years once.

Politics is simply figuring out who’s on your team. It’s why our current billionaires are so big on immigration and divisive rhetoric. Small groups have used this tactic for thousands of years to rule over larger groups.

In a good society you would know and have a favorable view of our wealthiest (kings in all but name) people. They wouldn’t be afraid and hide their wealth (Bezos, musk, etc are not the top) because there wouldn’t be an immoral wealth gap.

There are a lot of questions that are upstream of yours. Or at least, that illustrate why your questions are aggressively framed in a specific ideological directions and it's possible to frame them in the other direction.

If common American citizens can't afford health care, do other American citizens have an obligation to provide it? There is a word for a system where people are obligated to provide their labor to others. Does that word apply to a system where everyone gets free healthcare?

Do common Americans provide enough value to earn the wages they make now, especially the ones making a legislatively mandated minimum wage? How many fewer can actually earn an arbitrary increased number? Do people deserve things they didn't earn? What's the non-mystical explanation for that, if so?

Why aren't we having children? They can't have a productive life without having a life.

Is the difference between earnings and expenditures growing larger because Americans are unwilling to pay one another? If we are, why is that? (Actually I'll cheat a little on this one and provide a correct answer: the entire increased gap here is explained by housing. So the questions becomes: why aren't Americans willing to let strangers live closer to them? Might there be some risk or self-interest there? Are people obligated to act against their interests? Why, how, and by whom are they obligated?)

Which is better, democracy or a stable and prosperous society? Might they be mutually exclusive? What's holy about the popular vote, especially for morons? Even if we keep democracy, does a functional democracy require some form of IQ tests as a condition of the franchise?

Is the purpose of courts to write wrongs or interpret the law? Does separation of powers require courts to refrain from writing wrongs if the legislature has passed laws that are wrong? If not, does the lack of separation of powers place any limit at all on the courts' ability to right wrongs? How about when the courts are controlled by people whose concept of wrong is different than yours? Doesn't a functioning democracy require the concept of right and wrong to be decided by what are literally called the political branches, the legislative and executive?

Are the news media obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? Are you then obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? What's the difference between you writing in a public forum and a journalist? If there is a difference, should you therefore not enjoy freedom of the press? What if you, say, advocate for the courts to ignore separation of powers to do what is right? What if we the people decide that is not in our interests? How will you be punished for this transgression?

In actuality, I would probably give the same answers to many of these questions that you would. But the point is that there is no "just asking questions, man". Questions have premises and assumptions. If you, like me, don't like the ones in this question set, don't assume people will be comfortable if you're just askin' yours. I wouldn't be. And if people are all comfortable with you just askin' yours, ask yourself whether you have friends or conformation bias with echo chamber.

Great post, I agree with all your points regarding what is politics except that a functioning democracy should rely on common people, I think it should rely on the valuable people.

Common man democracy just lowers the decision making process to majority of idiots of the country that are easily manipulated. Worse yet, in its current form, it essentially causes the flip flopping mess because of the lack of long term vision and focus, something the common man doesn't want to deal with.

One man one vote in general makes no sense either. Why should a homeless or fresh immigrant's vote have the same impact as someone that has lived and paid taxes in a country for decades? How about...you get a vote weight equal to the amount of investment/taxes you have made in that country over the course of your life. Provide more for the community, have more to lose, get more say on policy.

Give incentive to the society value providers to remain and society detractors to leave.

Add to this that the current Democracy system is fundamentally flawed, most of those systems are exploitable anyway, it makes zero sense to change things up when a great leader is doing well. Having an arbitrary rule that they must step down because they can only serve for x time makes no sense. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Same goes the other way, where bad leaders can remain in power using war mechanisms.

The core problems today with society is not the left right or whatever, it's that people are lazy, selfish, manipulative, different, it's hard to find a system that works that can make everyone happy.

Are you willing to risk personal death or decrease your value for the greater good of the nation as a leader or citizen? That's the standard that all citizens and especially politicians should be held to. There are examples of this in the past, usually when a revolution happens. One might say it's happening in the US right now.

For certain one solution would be to remove people as much as possible from the equation, remove all incentive to abuse the system. The dictatorship and laws of a country should provide negative motivation for someone to cheat and should reward people providing value to society.

It's not easy, no matter how well a system is designed, people will find a way to cheat it, Bitcoin is a great example of this, not accounting for the banking industry buying the ecosystem and shitcoins diluting the entire system.

AI is not there yet, I don't think it ever could be, it's been trained on existing flawed ideas which have been further gimped in the interest of 'security'. It has no original thought, can't even draw a full glass of wine.

“Hello friend, thanks so much for coming over. I just wanted to start by asking you what do you think are the preconditions for having a functioning democracy”

On top of that if you strictly want avoid political topics, be aware that there are forces who profit from making topics "political" that probably shouldn't be.

So when someone else decides which topics are politicized and you want to avoid political discussions — congrats you just let others decide about which topics you are willing to discuss.

My opinion is that most topics have a political dimension anyways, also because most topics have a economic dimension. Or phrased differently: Everything is political.

When discussing politics with friends the "how" is probably much more important than the "if". Most people do not have a vetted political opinion, they just have a strong vibe that they can't really reason about. They aligned with some sources and read/watch news they like to hear and that forms their image of the world. They never really tried to form a logically coherent worldview that is backed by facts instead of pre-filtered annecdotes that may or may not have happened in that way.

With this as the starting point a healthy political discourse isn't possible. You can't argue against someones vibes.

But that doesn't mean good/interesting political discourse isn't possible. It just means that if someone lets the politicians turn them into a vibe-based party-before-issue follower that uncritically believes most of what politicians say, they can no longer think or discuss the topics that impact them with others on a reasonable level. And this is why topics get politicized in the first way.

And no-one is immune to this, especially not you guys over there with that two-party system. But we all need to remember that towing the line of a political party means they no longer represent us, but we represent them. Mental flexibility translates to voter agency and our democracies hinge on voters being well informed and not throwing their agency away.

TL;DR: Not discussing politics and blindly towing the party line is like throwing your own agency away.

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(Article starts off be asserting that they don't talk politics with friends then proceeds to describe how to talk politics with friends?)

Friends are people you should support and build up. You shouldn't try to make them feel bad by winning arguments with them. That said- a healthy society is only possible if individuals can exchange ideas about how to run things and then act collectively (aka "politics"). Sometimes people will have different interests and priorities, that lead to them having different ideas about stuff- most of the time this is totally fine.

This basically comes down to respect and communication skills- but for god's sake people- keep on talking about "politics"!

yep the purpose of the essay was to:

1) show the situations in which politics can't be discussed productively (dogmatic ideologies)

2) show how to avoid being dogmatic yourself

I absolutely encourage people to discuss politics productively

For me, "avoid being dogmatic yourself" is failing to bring home one very important point to avoid being dogmatic: understand that you are equally susceptible from the mistakes/misunderstandings that you blame others for.

An example in this article is the following part

> my angle ... becomes that of opposing their tribalism. Unfortunately ... most people just view me as the opposite of their own tribe

But this part totally fails self-reflection: it talks about your "conservative friends" and your "liberal friends". They are labelled "conservative" or "liberal". How does the author know that the interlocutor did not act exactly like the author: the interlocutor brought a subject, from their point of view their position on it where pretty neutral and sensible, the author reacts by playing the devil's advocate. They therefore see the author as the "conservative" or "liberal" person, and if they follow the author's strategy, they will play the devil's advocate. And then, THE AUTHOR fails to realize they don't actually care about the conclusion.

The lazy answer is: I'm smarter than them, I can tell when it's the case or not. Or: the subject I bring are not political, they are just common sense and sensible position, but they sometimes bring something I disagree with, and this is not common sense and sensible position.

In both case, it's weak and does not acknowledge the possibilities that you may have done the same mistakes as them from time to time (either classifying a "moderate" as "far" just because they were doing the devil's advocate, or presenting opinions that are not "trivially moderate" from the eyes of your interlocutor). It's a detail, but because of that, I'm not sure the author is as "non dogmatic" as they think they are: they are saying what everybody is saying. The large majority of people don't say "I'm dogmatic and my opinions are crazy" (if they believe their opinions are crazy, then it means they don't believe in their opinions and it is not really their opinions).

Absolutely. While I am a person who would avoid politics in most contexts myself, I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable with this attitude in this write up.

If you see others as being "insufficiently equipped" to handle nuance, "because it's hard" or "because they are too resistant" is a judgement I prefer not to pass on others.

> "Because if a desire to seek truth isn't there"

Who defines the truth? As much as I understand there is a need to draw a line somewhere, I also believe that everyone has a right to their truth. And that's my truth. I let everyone have their perspective and don't see a need to impose mine or look down upon them if they don't agree to mine, this included :)

People are entitled to their perspective of course, but it is a hindrance to discussion when people conflate their perspective with truth.

I think of truth like π. Some people say its 3, others 3.14, others 3.1415

There is a trade off between energy expended vs accuracy needed vs accurately communicating, but the de-referenced concept is not a matter of human perspective. Coordinating truth is why we have standards and protocols to build on.

If everyone has their own truth, then how could you know that to be the case? You'd have to appeal to something outside of "your truth" to make that judgement. Meaning, if it were even possible (or coherent) for there to be such a thing as "your truth", then you couldn't know it to be the case. It simply would be "the truth" as far as you are concerned. You can't step outside yourself. There is no "objective POV".

These sorts of claims are as incoherent as the equally intellectually jejune skeptical positions ("there is no truth" or "we cannot know the truth" or variations thereof). It's rare to see anyone outside of first year philosophy students make them.

Why can't you just say we have disagreements about what the truth is?

That's another way to put it. The disagreement doesn't still elevate either party to a moral high ground. That was the only thing that upset me about this write up.

this is actually in the footnotes and addressed by the "thinking in bets" section

"[9] Fully understanding I can be the one in the wrong -- however, when this is the case, the person explaining is usually able to:

understand my argument convey their disagreement in good faith without circular reasoning or rhetorical tricks"

"There's a 40% chance this succeeds because of A, 25% chance of B, 10% of X, and 5% something we haven't thought of"

The footnote is basically saying "I can tell when it's the case or not", which is in fact exactly my problem. That is not the answer that I'm expecting from someone who has self-reflection.

For example: "understand my argument" is assuming that the argument is obviously correct. When someone presents to you an incorrect argument, 1) this person thinks the argument is correct (otherwise they will not present that argument), 2) you will not answer by saying "I've understood", you will argue. From their point of view, you are the one failing to understand. Now the question is: how many time this person was you? How many time you presented a bad argument and then blamed the interlocutor for "not understanding" when they don't accept a faulty argument?

Same with "circular reasoning or rhetorical trick": when I disagree, it is always very easy to convince myself that there is a problem in the interlocutor logic. Especially if I failed to understand or misunderstood the argument. I would even say that for all discussions that are not trivial, there are always elements that can be seen as circular or rhetorical trick.

I’m having a real hard time with this one lately.

The major mistake/misunderstanding I see now is thinking that a stupid, vindictive asshole who failed upwards would be a good person to run the country.

I don’t think I’m susceptible to that. I’ve never viewed anyone the way a lot of these people view Donald Trump. I can’t imagine I ever will. Is it a failure of imagination or is something really different between us?

Trump may be a bad leader but he'd still be just one type of bad leader. I'm not trying to fully relativize Trump either, they're not all equally bad.

I agree with Slavoj Zizek's take on Trump's appeal and why a lot of criticism of him seems to either have no effect or increases his fan appeal: As a general rule, people relate to others by identifying with their weaknesses, not only or not even primarily with their strengths. You aren't susceptible to his appeal because you're of a different class or background which has different sets of strengths/weaknesses which make it hard for you to relate to Trump.

The weaknesses Trump has - his stubborn ignorance, his impulsiveness, his might-makes-right mentality and disdain for rules, his vindictiveness - are deeply shared with his fans. They will forgive his sins because it is their sins too. For example when Trump is attacked for an impulsive comment, they relate to the risk that they could also be cancelled for some comment that is seen as racist or sexist or something. His policy framework is made of the kind of simple ideas you'll find in a pub, I once heard Trump described as "the average guy from Queens" and it made a lot of sense to me. "Nobody knew healthcare was so complicated", "We're going to build a wall".

I belong more to a white collar, professional class. I probably have a blindspot on the weaknesses and sins more endemic to my group, ones that I share with the figures I find appealing. If I had to guess I'd say it's something like an ideological/theoretical zeal, bureaucratic dysfunction, and an exclusionary judginess. When a politician unveils some theoretically elegant project and it largely fails and runs over budget and gets mired in bureaucratic hell, I'm maybe too quick to forgive that as it's a relatable sin.

In short, people like the dumb jerk because they are also dumb jerks? I can't say I disagree, but I don't think that's what cauch's comment was going for.

I think it is. It's one thing to point out dumb jerkiness which often stands out particularly in this administration, but self-reflection is realizing that you have your own blindspots for your equivalent of dumb jerkiness.

I'm not succeeding in that realization. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be, and I don't think there are any attributes that could possibly make me admire anyone the way these dumb jerks admire Donard Trump. Maybe I'm just not aware, but I have no idea how I'd correct that.

I'm very much not convinced "that you are equally susceptible from the mistakes/misunderstandings that you blame others for." People are not the same. I'm smarter than some people, dumber than others. I'm stronger than some and weaker than others. Surely the same is true here. Understand that I am also susceptible to mistakes/understandings? I'm 100% on board with that. But equally susceptible to the same ones? I really don't think so.

It is a problem that so many people thinks that a presidential election is to vote for the guy they relate to and not a competent manager. I guess they are so used to vote for the prom king and the reality tv show candidate that they don't realise that the point is not to vote for the person they like.

Similarly, it is worrisome that people vote for what will profit the most for them instead of what is the more just and fair (sometimes even voting against your own profit). It leads to stupid situations, for example where idiots are for protectionist measures whatever the consequences on other countries, but at the same time are angry when people in another country are voting for protectionist measures that affect theirs negatively. It is quite clear with the Trump supporter: they are furious if someone else treats them like they treat others, and seems to not even realise the absurdity.

It is really hard to live in a society with people like that: it just creates lose-lose situations for everyone.

I don't think most people consciously or explicitly aim to only vote for the guy they relate to. The people they relate to will just naturally be more understandable to them and better match their expectations of what a competent manager looks like.

Realistically, no democracy can really depend on widespread familiarity with the hard skills of civic & political management. It just gets really technical and complicated, voters naturally have to reason about what little they understand, and you understand what you relate to.

I'm not trying to make the point that voting for the reality TV show candidate is good, my point is that the problems with reality TV show candidates are in their blindspot but there are other bad leaders that will fit in your own blindspot.

edit: sorry I just realized that you already made this point in one of your earlier comments! And yes, I personally agree with much of what you say.

I find the most productive political discussions are about history. Most people don’t know any history at all, so a willingness to discuss the reason we have the Third Amendment, or the lasting effects of King Leopold’s dominion in Africa, or the Peleponnesian War, makes for a good discussion, and the distance makes people less emotionally tied to their positions and more willing to accept nuance. If we find we disagree, this also gives us social cover to pretend the topic isn’t intensely relevant to the present day.

Maybe the long peace within the US changed things, but in most countries and especially in Europe discussing history in a room with more than 2 nationalities is a good recipe to sow dissent.

Good point. I live in the US and I wouldn’t start with the American civil war. Talk about other people’s history. I’ll trade you the American Civil War for the Franco Prussian War.

The American Civil War is a great place to start. You can very quickly assess where somebody’s head is at and move on quickly.

That depends on what your purpose is having a conversation is in the first place

I mean it is a good filter to understand someone with. When I moved from the midwest to the south as a teenager and learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that you begin to understand there are some people that are deeply entrenched in their views and you have to make a judgement on how much time you're going to spend dealing with that.

I think entrenchment is a description of both sides, has neither I really willing to budge. I think the critical I think the critical criteria is how much you have to deal with it at all. Is it an interesting conversation that you can have once in awhile, or something that gets inserted into every conversation.

I think the civil war is interesting and nuanced topic to interrogate once in awhile, and can usually find some points of agreement with most people.

The legal, moral, and philosophical questions around it are fascinating. For example, how do you reconcile people's right to self-determination with a desire to carry out abhorrent actions. Historically speaking, the civil war and failures of reconstruction are probably the single most defining aspect of modern American political life.

I agree and I’d think we’d have a good time chatting about it.

To me, the concepts of self-determination and owning humans are in conflict. I think it’s appropriate and important to honor the gallantry and sacrifice individual soldiers.

But it’s important to appreciate that the Confederacy was explicit in its evil, and the labor of those soldiers in civilian life was cheapened by the aristocrats who founded the Confederacy to preserve their human property. And the (specious) ideals of self-determination were discarded as the demands of the first modern war demanded centralized control.

> learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that

Did you peel that back to the next layer? Did they want to reintroduce slavery? Or did they want independence from a distant government?

I knew folks in the South who thought some of the craziest racist things and probably would've been OK with slavery (I did hear them promote segregation).

At the same time, the vast majority folks I knew who defended the Civil War or wanted secession didn't want slavery or segregation, but local (and often less) government. Did they misunderstand the role of slavery in the Southern secession? Usually. Does that change their _current intent_? No.

The latter group (which was much larger) should be engaged with on the issue of local government and secession, especially in the context of folks in Blue States who've been rattling about secession under Trump.

The particular problem with class 1 ( want independence from a distant government ) is to gain enough political power to effect change is they necessarily incorporate class 2 ( want to reintroduce slavery ), this necessitates the use of POSIWID

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Unfortunately I don't think the group of 'just want to secede' is "much larger" than those willing to commit civil rights violations after years of practical experience living in the south. The people saying it in the context of the blue states doing it mostly realize it won't work, and the amount of civil rights violations either way skyrocket in the process.

Also, present day politics is in many cases determined by history.

Exactly! What makes history relevant is that we are still living in it.

Some of the best convos I've had are with ideologues, it just requires authentic empathy and effort, which means letting go of moral presuppositions and being willing to really listen to them without injecting your own judgments & opinions. If people subconsciously think you're trying to do that, it'll trigger their defense mechanisms and the convo will instantly shut down (or devolve into chaos).

People love to talk about what they think is important, but NOT when they think they're being setup or playing into someone else's hand.

Not the best title if that’s your message

the idea's that we're so tribal these days (maybe it's always been like this) that it's largely impossible

but here's how we can change that, etc

Well, I know a lot of people in the US who simply don't want to discuss politics at social events these days.

Which means the only input they get is ever polarised extreme feeds online, from social media algorithms and straight up paid adverts.

No, it can also mean they get too much extreme input from the people in reality.

There are lot's of people who won't stop, when you push the wrong button (speaking a wrong word).

People tend to moderate themselves and compromise a lot more in real conversations.

It's like all those videos of dogs barking angrily at each other through a closed gate, then suddenly becoming quiet and peaceful, their whole body language changing, when the gate is opened.

For sure people are more restrained in real life, than online, but the consequences can also be more severe if extreme positions meet offline.

I really don’t care. And honestly people I’ll tend to be socializing with are at least somewhat similar in political opinions. Just not interested in discussing political outrages at a social gathering.

If you insist on talking politics when the host or other guests don’t want to you’re a rude idiot.

Your country really needs more political parties.

Better than ruining real life relationships over politics. The only important impact most people have over politics is when they vote. Discussing politics has massive downsides and trivial benefits.

There might be very little alignment of political opinions within one's circle of friends, and any discussion would turn into an unpleasant discussion with the risk of ending the group of friends forever.

For most people, very few friendships form with an expectation of political agreement: activists met at a common protest or campaign, generic regulars of a popular political party or union, old style secret societies, and so on.

I think people can aim to meet politically aligned people at non-political events/places. I met most of my friends in venues that "members of the opposite tribe" just don't frequent. And I feel like it goes for both sides.

Yeah. There are exceptions. People can also have multiple circles. And it's not as if political opinions within a group are really uniform. But there does tend to be a certain degree of uniformity within many groups of friends.

Are you speaking from experience when you say discussing politics has massive downsides for your real life relationships? And if so, may I ask what happened?

that's always been the case, politics and religion are taboo

Of course they are, people get angry when they have to rationalize why they want to genocide some group of people different from them in mixed company.

It was a good essay- thanks for writing it :)

ty!

I've sent you a line on LinkedIn.

This gets more complicated when you replace "friend" with "spouse" (/partner) because there comes up the problem of consensuality in unavoidably unpleasant unavoidable decision-making..

(Assuming one marries for "love")

I believe having a partner with directly opposing political views is unsustainable. Partners with adjacent political views may be manageable, or even preferable to a fully aligned one, but those with directly opposing views are a constant source of drama and tension in your life. Political views often reflect deeply held values and beliefs.

Political views can change over time though. It can be unsustainable in the way of "one or both people moderates their political views".

That will leave a large group of people without any partners, since men and women vote very differently.

Then so be it, if your views keep you from finding a partner then maybe you should start thinking about compromise rather than falling deeper into extremism.

But, this is also why one political party in the US tends to vote against things like no fault divorce and other questionable policies regarding womens rights.

>> those with directly opposing views are a constant source of drama and tension in your life

I don't think this is true at all. The vast majority of people largely ignore politics, cast their vote, and move on with their lives. It's completely fine to have different political views if you both act like normal reasonable people. We see a lot of the 'kick, scream, and cry' types on both side in the media. In the real world, most people have more important things to be getting on with.

> It's completely fine to have different political views if you both act like normal reasonable people.

Yes, this is true, you can have different political views and still be friends/lovers/partners/whatver.

What parent said though was "directly opposing political views", which I'd also agree with is inviting trouble, as it'll leak out in constant tensions and frictions. Simple things like "We shouldn't drive as much as we currently do" can lead to heavy argumentation if the underlying reasoning cannot be understood by both parties.

In real life, people might not speak about parties or political figures, but their everyday actions are driven by their values and beliefs, which also ends up reflected by who they vote for. Politics is everywhere, even where people don't speak of it directly.

>> We shouldn't drive as much as we can do

I wouldn't consider this a political view. It's a lifestyle choice based on personal beliefs. Two people can be fully behind the idea we need to do something about climate change and have different ideas on how that should be done. And I think that's part of the problem in recent times - instead of politics being about the big ideas and how a country is run it's become about small personal choices. If a person has heavy arguments with a partner about how much/little they drive I would say they've got an issue with a need to control others, rather than just a strong political opinion.

> Two people can be fully behind the idea we need to do something about climate change and have different ideas on how that should be done

I'm not sure if you purposefully ignore what I wrote directly after what you quoted, "if the underlying reasoning cannot be understood by both parties". If a partner would discuss things like this in real life, I'd say this partner might have an issue with discussing in good faith with others.

My point was that it'll lead to friction if you disagree about what "big ideas" are worthwhile to try to implement or not.

Note that various surveys report young women and young men diverging a lot more politically. Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.

>Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.

What is the womans suffrage movement?

I may be extrapolating on a single statement too far, but I do feel that you are missing a huge chunk of history regarding all the rights women (at least regarding the US) did not have.

Womans rights have been political for the last 200 years if not longer.

This trend is certainly one aspect of the explanation for the decline in the number of long-term relationships.

The other being that once women have largescale representation in the workforce, can open bank accounts and credit cards on their own, and can support themselves financially, one of the key pressures to marry is removed. Once there was no fault divorce and women did not need to prove why they needed to divorce, one of the key pressures to stay married is removed.

That happened a long time ago though, much much longer ago than the number of relationships started to drop, so its unrelated.

Perhaps important, republicans from state lawmakers up to the VP are interested in repealing no fault divorce laws.

And that's just what they'll openly admit to! Rest assured, they would absolutely not stop at no-fault divorce. They would undo all of the progress you mentioned, and likely more.

I am the opposite of surprised. How else are terrible, low-quality men going to trap women into a life of unpaid home labor if they can control their own finances, reproduction, and choice to enter or leave a marriage.

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As the gender gap in voting patterns widens, denying rights to women goes from not only being an ideological project of the right but a political project as well. "We will win more elections if women have less social power" is not a good situation to be in.

It could also be the opposite causality. Because people aren't getting into intimate relationships as much (looking out for each other, caring deeply about an individual of the opposite gender), the two groups are naturally diverging into preferring "what's best for ME".

I think the political split between genders is MUCH stronger for singles. It's kind of a trap actually.

> Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.

That's a hand-wavy way of saying that a core pillar of one of your parties is to take away the rights of an entire gender.

Imagine describing 1940s Germany and saying "Ethnicity has become so politicized these days. I'm just interested in nationalizing the auto industry"

That would only be true if words weren't perverted for political leverage. Sexist used to mean "women can't do that" now sexist means "a woman experienced an unpleasant thing, and it carries more significance because of her gender, and if you dare dispute this you can expect to be cancelled".

How about “women can’t get certain medical procedures”? Or “women can’t vote”? Multiple prominent Republicans have floated reducing or eliminating women’s right to vote.

I don't know if you're a news buff, but they're actually actively saying "women can't do that".

That doesn't contradict what he said though, he didn't say the old sexists are no longer called sexist, he said the definition had expanded to cover many more than before.

Why even say it then? What's the point of countering "Well, the definition has expanded so much", when the thing you're talking about conforms to the old definition?

I said it because it's a dirty trick used by one side to make people think there's a crisis. When are you going to declare the problem solved? When every single living breathing human being conforms to your world view? Your argument is that someone, somewhere, said something terrible. Why even say it then? If course some people out of 8bn will have extremist views or utterances. Is that really a surprise?

What do you mean by women’s rights? The difference in support for abortion by sex is trivial. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...

Probably not abortion. While rights never happen in a vacuum, it is usually framed as a matter of fetus rights.

How about a woman's right to equal employment opportunity? 67% of women are in favour of DEI, while most men (57%) take the opposing view. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...

The primary political parties are definitely catering to those sides.

Seeing a 3 point difference in the support for abortion between men and women is *wild* to me.

Rest assured: Those 33% of women who say abortion should be "Illegal in all/most cases," would instantly carve out an exception for themselves if their own lives or livelihoods were in jeopardy from a pregnancy.

Also white/black, straight/gay, poor/wealthy etc.

We can find hundreds of dividing lines if we insist.

Ah yes, one sex is diverging to the other side because they are wrong on MY pet issue. (This is not grounded in reality)

Marrying purely for "love" and ignoring core values, mindset compatibility, what they want in life and so on is a recipe for disaster, or at least some deep regrets down the line. I haven't seen nor heard about a single success story a decade or two down the line. Whom to marry is probably the most important decision in our lives. One of reasons why marrying early is too risky - people still massively change till at least 25-30, it cal still work but chances are smaller.

Its a typical junior mistake to marry for love/lust and not think a bit on top of that, in this case I blame parents who don't have some hard talks with their kids explaining them not-so-rosy parts of adult existence. Like initial enormous physical attraction wanes over time, kids crush most of remaining, and what still remains are 2 people and how they treat relationship and each other with that lust tuned down eventually to 0, under various, often not so nice situations. But our parent's generation didn't figure it all out, in contrary the amount of actually nice relationships in higher ages ain't that high.

I didn't have such prep talk neither, nor do I know anybody who had, and had to figure it all on my own via rough trials and failures till finally figuring myself and women out, and then happy marriage (so far, hard knock on the wood). Its like expecting everybody to be sophisticated engineer, learning them to count on fingers and throwing them out and good luck, I am sure you'll figure it out eventually. Some do, some don't. Most don't I'd say.

This is the sort of thing they should teach in schools. English literature is a good venue for it.

> Whom to marry is probably the most important decision in our lives.

That's putting way too much pressure on it. Find someone you feel like you could spend the rest of your life with? Marry them, see what happens. If you get a divorce, so be it, it's not the end of the world and there is plenty of others out there, even if you're "damaged goods" or whatever your worry is.

I feel like the pressure people put around marriage it what makes it so damaging in the first place, people feeling like they have to marry in the first place, or if they're married, they need to try to stick together more than some couple who isn't married, and so on.

Just make a decision and learn from your mistakes in case you fuck up, it really isn't more complicated than that.

I'm going to assume you're a man and probably have a little less experience here than the average woman does.

This said, I am a man too, but a large part of my career was supporting lawyers and court systems, including family court systems.

Choosing the wrong partner is one of the biggest risks you take in your life, especially for a woman. This is one of those things that can easily lead to you being bankrupt with nothing. This can lead to you being abused or raped. You can end up with a child that you did not want to have. You can end up dead.

With states pushing to revoke things like no fault divorce (and women being the primary initiators of divorce) it's not hard see the traps women lived in the past coming back.

Then add the strongly religious connotations marriage has in the US and you quickly see why this is a rollercoaster that emotions and politics are not going to be removed from.

> With states pushing to revoke things like no fault divorce [...] Then add the strongly religious connotations marriage has in the US

Yeah, sorry about that. My comment kind of assumed living in a modern western country where women still have choice and religion doesn't run the country, but of course many here are in the US, so should have been a bit more specific.

> Choosing the wrong partner is one of the biggest risks you take in your life, especially for a woman. This is one of those things that can easily lead to you being bankrupt with nothing. This can lead to you being abused or raped. You can end up with a child that you did not want to have. You can end up dead.

Meanwhile FOMO has resulted in hypergamy. Long-term relationships have been on the decline because availability has resulted in situationships with the top 10% of men has become the norm. Your statement is inconsistent with a mountain of data coming from dating apps and is an appeal to emotion.

This is consistent with

> and probably have a little less experience here than the average woman does.

Which you use to insult OP's experience and inject your own mind-melting BS as fact.

Everything you state has a counter-argument for men that is equally valid. An alleged man would know this:

1. False accusation of abuse or rape - have an argument a little too loud and the neighbors call the police who is going to jail? It's the man, regardless of fault.

2. You can get baby trapped because our "progressive" society doesn't believe in the right a man should have to "abort".

3. Family courts are slanted 80/20 towards women. It's almost universally the man who loses rights to a child and gains a subsequent extra house payment in child support. Go hang out at bars and homeless shelters and figure out how many of them have been bankrupted.

4. Divorce court, despite income disparity all but disappearing, still leans heavily in favor of women.

5. There are nearly no programs for abused men, men who are going through divorce, men who got their children taken away, men who are suffering under the boot of child support/alimony, etc. In fact, you can go to jail for not paying these! Most homeless shelters will remove a man from a bed to provide one for a woman, especially if she has a child. How is this fair?

The man takes the highest possible risk entering a relationship all other things being equal.

> That's putting way too much pressure on it. Find someone you feel like you could spend the rest of your life with? Marry them, see what happens. If you get a divorce, so be it, it's not the end of the world

This is quite bad advice, because divorce can be devastating financially.

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Politics feels like an integral part of finding a partner nowadays. Which makes sense—values are important to agree upon.

The width of the spectrum of political views for 65% of people used to be relatively narrow.

That's increasingly not the case.

Capitalism "Choice is good!"

Politics "Not like that, not like that!"

I don't believe that political views used to be narrow, I believe the political views you were allowed to actually express were much more narrow and everything else was repressed.

Really depends on the region. There's lots of opinions/ideas/directions/parties in many countries with lots of overlap. In the US... I'm not sure how relationships, that actually talk about things, can survive if partners have different party preferences.

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What is the point of discussing politics? (not rhetorical). What physical changes in the world do you expect afterwards? You won't undo indoctrination. It just upsets people.

You can’t talk politics without first overcoming tribalism, so I suggest you start there, since in the US that is sadly the state of things.

If you start by talking about which sports team is better you will also cause these reactions. But politics should not be sports. It’s harmless to support a sports team that makes bad choices. Politics has real impact on people’s lives. It’s important to have exit criteria for alignments and affiliations with groups, to the extent they’re necessary.

> What physical changes in the world do you expect afterwards?

Just like voting, it has no effect in the small. You discuss to form and exchange opinions and ideas that become part of the whole. The benefits are in the aggregates. Thus it’s important that it has some other incentive. Where I’m from it’s not very tribalist, so we get the pleasure from thinking and discussing problems even without having an expectation that it will change policy. That wouldn’t work in the US outside very specific groups that understand the rules of engagement and the point of the game. But the discussions themselves are similar in vibe to board games or puzzles, that it’s somewhat fun even though it’s entirely useless (in the small).

Being friends with someone doesn't mean we both should agree on everything. It also doesn't mean we should try to avoid discussing whatever. If we agree on something, good. If someone is changing his opinion bases on a talk and arguments, good. If not, also good.

I am friend with someone because I like that someone and I enjoy meeting him and talking to him, doing things together.

That doesn't mean agreeing on everything. And doesn't mean being afraid of speaking.

If someone quits, being my friend because we have different opinions on X, so be it. I am not like that. I won't break a friendship because someone thinks differently.

I'll provide an opposing viewpoint. In the last 10 years, I've lost friendships and family because people in my life have voted for candidates that stripped rights away from women, minorities, etc.

Having a vast difference between opinions is fine, but some of their decisions are fundamentally against my core beliefs and have done literal harm to many people I know.

For that reason, terminating family and friendships has been absolutely worth it for me.

Until we can live in a world where fundamental rights are protected and respected, we have no common ground, and it's pointless to tiptoe around these insanely harmful beliefs while maintaining a facade of friendship.

I think essentially tolerating other peoples opinions and trying to understand where they are coming from is more useful than applying purity tests to your friends and family.

I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

I’ll be honest that I’m Jewish and certain posts about Palestine where friends or non Jewish family have specifically expressed values that I find anti-myself I have completely cut out of my life. (not all beliefs about pro Palestine are anti-semetic, but most are) But I believe that most views at the party level are just different priorities or different view points and tolerance is necessary, because they are not directly in conflict.

> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

I thought the GOP was pretty clear throughout the election cycle, from President to local office, that their desired world can only come to be through a drastic restructuring of the Constitutional status quo ante.

I don’t know that “I only voted for (e.g.) tax cuts, everything else is collateral damage and I’m not culpable for it,” is a defensible moral stance.

> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

Voting for a party explicitly demonstrates at least acceptance of if not outright support for its platform. You don't get to absolve yourself of support for kicking puppies because the FooBar party also includes a modest tax cut in its policy agenda that you really want.

It doesn't matter if the opposing party advocates for raising taxes or even eating kittens.

That's true even if realistically, there are no other parties capable of winning. You can support a third party, abstain out of protest, or even begin a grass-roots campaign to start yet another party. You can even try changing the FooBar party from within, so long as you don't vote for them until sufficient change has occurred.

Voting for a party explicitly demonstrates at least acceptance of if not outright support for its platform. You don't get to absolve yourself of support for kicking puppies because the FooBar party also includes a modest tax cut in its policy agenda that you really want.

Virtually no independent thinker is going to support either major party's platform, for the simple reason that both parties have a collection of inconsistent policies that are an incoherent ideological mishmash. Therefore you do not so much vote FOR a party as you instead hold your nose and vote AGAINST the other one.

Sure, but in the US, the choices right now are between a party that you might not fully agree with, and a party whose explicit platform is to strip fundamental rights away from women, LGBTQ people, and other minorities, all while dismantling the basic structures of democracy in order to guarantee their hold on power for as long as possible.

When you vote for a party, you may not fully agree with all their policies, but you are stating that the drawbacks are acceptable compromises. When you vote for FooBar, you might not want puppies to be kicked, but you consider it a tradeoff worth making if it gets you that tax cut.

If you are looking at the political landscape of the US as an independent thinker, and are questioning whether abandoning the principles of human rights and liberal democracy are a tradeoff worth making, then I really question whether your thoughts are really as independent as you would like to believe.

> and a party whose explicit platform is to strip fundamental rights away from women, LGBTQ people, and other minorities, all while dismantling the basic structures of democracy in order to guarantee their hold on power for as long as possible.

This certainly might be what you believe their platform amounts to. But it is most certainly not their explicit platform. Accuse people of what they actually have done, not what you believe their actions to be logically equivalent to. Otherwise there can't actually be a reasonable discussion, because you're giving off heat rather than light.

This is their explicit platform. Trump's presidential campaign officially ran on the basis of "Agenda 47", which clearly sets out their goals and aims. It includes dismantling the basic structures of democracy (in the form of heavy expansion of executive powers), and reducing access to healthcare for women and LGBTQ people. We have already seen evidence of the above, as well as events like the new administration arresting protestors without due process.

I think your point is that Project 2025 is not Trump's explicit platform, which is correct (although this doesn't affect my statement which was about his explicit platform). However, if it looks, walks, and talks like a duck, we also need to be willing to call it a duck. Project 2025 goes significantly above and beyond Agenda 47, the group behind it explicitly endorse Trump, and many of Project 2025's authors are involved in the Trump administration. Being an "independent thinker" does not mean accepting what both sides say at face value, it means looking at people's behaviour and drawing judgements based on that.

Actions speaker louder than words. It might not be their platform, but it's what they're doing. If you see your party taking action to strip away rights from LGBTQ groups, immigrants, women and you still support them, then I don't know what else to say.

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This is the problem with a two-party system. It makes every citizen either complicit in the worst party or the second-worst party.

You can't hold who they voted for against people in a two-party system. There just isn't enough choice.

You are giving a fully partisan version from one side, while ignoring the partisan view from the other. Not entirely your fault correctly stating what the other side thinks, in terms that the other side will agree with, is an extremely hard task. It sounds like it should be simple. But getting it right requires getting past our cognitive biases that the other side is wrong, which make it hard to actually see what they are seeing.

Here is a Republican take that is about as biased as your take on Republicans. "Democrats are fully infected by the woke mind virus, destroying merit in favor of DEI, promoting antisemitism in support of Hamas terrorism, and suppressing free speech in favor of totalitarian control."

Both partisan perspective have some truth, and a lot that is false. For example, while it is true that Trump represents a threat to democracy, threatening democracy is not part of the Republican party's explicit platform. Conversely, while it is true that there has been a sharp rise in antisemitism on the left, most of that really is antizionism. (That said, if you try to make Palestine free from sea to sea, where will over 7 million Jewish refugees go? You're unlikely to be more lucky than Hitler was in the 1930s in finding a country who is willing to accept them. What happens then?)

> "...women, ... and other minorities..."

According to polls, slightly more women voted for Trump in 2024 than in 2020 and significantly more minorities voted for Trump in 2024 than in 2020 (https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turno...). One party energetically claims to be on the side of the oppressed but the oppressed don't exactly seem to be flocking to be on the side of that party. Makes you think, doesn't it?

The Democrats cannot win as long as there's a substantial faction inside it unwilling to face the reality of what voters actually think instead of what they want to tell the voters to think.

I disagree, but I think moral purity is a less ethical way of living than practical action - best exemplified by the story of the Good Samaritan.

Similarly to “silence is complicity.” Refusing to oppose a party by choosing the other is indicating acceptance of what they will do.

This is a fundamental difference with how people on the (American) left and people on the right view politics. Those on the right frequently vote based on a single or a few issues, ignoring the rest of the platform that may be unpalatable. While those on the left frequently view voting as an endorsement of the whole person. Any unwanted policy tends to be a turn off. It's why you say "you don't get to absolve yourself of support for kicking puppies" while the right does just that. You would be better served understanding the values and motivations of your opposition rather than projecting your values onto them and judging them based on a strawman.

I would've probably agreed with this point 10 or 15 years ago. Someone saying "I would've liked universal healthcare, but lower taxes are more important to me" has an understandable position. I might not agree with their choice, but I can respect their decision.

However, these days the American political landscape looks a lot different. I understand having priorities, but if someone believes that a magical make-eggs-be-cheaper plan should have a higher priority than their friend (i.e., me) having basic human rights, why would I want to be friends with them? It doesn't matter if they personally agree with the politician's strip-their-friend-of-basic-rights plans or not, the fact that it isn't a priority to them at all says enough.

What basic rights do I have that you don't, and where are these codified?

In the US there are no federal antidiscrimination protections for LGBT people except in employment through Bostock (and conveniently, Trump's EEOC has stopped pursuing these cases). You can be evicted from your home for being gay but not for being black or Christian.

Access to gender affirming care for trans minors is banned in more than half of US states. The very same medicines are allowed to be given to cis minors.

In 13 US states bathroom bills prevent trans people from comfortably existing outside of their homes for more than a few hours at a time.

It has only been 22 years since sodomy laws were found unconstitutional. It has only been 10 years since gay marriage was legalized nationwide. Thomas wrote in his Dobbs concurrence that Lawrence should be revisited. Several state legislatures have passed resolutions calling for Obergefell to be overturned.

While less of a "basic right", the Trump administration has banned trans people from serving in the military. Visibility of gay or trans characters in media available for minors is also regularly threatened. Products for trans people sold at stores like Target have led to bomb threats.

> Access to gender affirming care for trans minors is banned in more than half of US states. The very same medicines are allowed to be given to cis minors.

The Cass report conclusions and recommendations should be listened to, it was a way better and more thorough study than the Netherlands study that begat all of the "gender clinics" in the US and elsewhere. https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20250310143...

> In 13 US states bathroom bills prevent trans people from comfortably existing outside of their homes for more than a few hours at a time.

As far as bathrooms, i feel uncomfortable in public restrooms. I don't know what the rate of people that feel uncomfortable in public restrooms, but those of us that do find family or single occupant restrooms, and know what places have those. No one wants to piss in a literal trough, i could be wrong.

I don't consider sodomy a basic human right, but i could be argued with, i guess.

I don't see what "bomb threats" have to do with human rights, in this context. Is there a human right to have products available at Target? If everyone boycotted Target (like they did with Bud Light), is that a violation of human rights, too?

I am unsure why people keep deleting their replies. It is possible to have a reasoned discussion about inflammatory topics.

This is how things often goes. "Oh those aren't actually rights."

You can think this, I suppose. But let me tell you that a very large number of LGBT people do consider these things to be questions of their basic rights.

i'm willing to listen to arguments about why any of those are basic rights. I am unsure about the housing, so i didn't mention it. Upon a quick check, Bostock prevents renters from being evicted or otherwise un-housed merely for being LGBT. Unless i see actual writing that shows there is a literal directive to ignore complaints, i cannot just accept your words. top results for eviction of LGBT sort of news is about people "behind on rent." If i don't pay rent for 2 months, i'll also get an eviction notice (sometimes called a pay or quit.)

there's groups of people that think all kinds of things are "basic rights" but it doesn't mean they are. I could say nothing is a "basic right" since any example you can give is violated globally. Maybe some stuff should be globally truly basic rights. But i am willing to listen to arguments that any of these things are a basic right as it stands.

just a for instance: Sodomy. saying it's a human right implies that sexual intercourse is a basic human right. I am unsure if you really want to make this argument.

Bostock applies to Title 7. The reasoning is that discrimination based on sexuality or gender identity is sex discrimination, which can be applied to other laws like the FHA but this is not established federally and the Trump administration is currently in legal fights explicitly in opposition to this position. So I do not think that it is fair to say that Bostock prevents renters from being evicted based on their gender identity or sexuality.

[Here](https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/removing-gender-ideology-and-r...) is an EEOC's "literal directive" pulling back on relevant cases. If you want specific cases then [this article](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eeoc-transgender-discrimination...) references specific ongoing cases that have been dropped by the EEOC.

And I do think the ability to have consenting and private intercourse without being imprisoned is a human right. I did not expect that this would be controversial.

the eeoc link doesn't mention housing or "rent." https://www.findlaw.com/lgbtq-law/housing-discrimination-pro... this says that HUD and DoJ handle those cases.

If you're talking about employment (which the EEOC appears to cover) - i've been fired for not cutting my hair short enough. I've been fired for refusing to wear a tie for a cubicle job. In the US, employment is at-will, generally. If that's what you have an issue with, then let's talk about that. Even if the issue is with hiring discrimination of any kind, i can get behind that, too.

And there's a subtle, yet perceivable difference between what you said, "sodomy laws" and your statement now about "consenting and private intercourse." i also notice you didn't mention "between adults."

I don't really want to have a side-channel discussion, here. The employment vs housing statements, you either had a typo, or it was a red herring, i am unsure. I feel like this is devolving, perhaps of my own fault, into a god of the gaps argument.

My original comment regarding the EEOC was about the impotence of Bostock in modern federal courts because the EEOC is dropping cases of Title 7 workplace discrimination brought by LGBT people. Although the US generally has at-will employment, there are certain reasons for firing people that are prohibited by law.

The discussion of housing is separate from that and is instead a point about the fact that LGBT people do not have federal protections in this domain. I thought that my post was very clear. LGBT people do not have any federal protections in many domains (housing for example). They have protections in some domains (employment, via Bostock) and even that is backsliding because of the EEOC's changing behavior.

Only adults can consent. The sodomy laws struck down in Lawrence were about consenting and private intercourse, both in general and in the very specific case of Mr. Lawrence.

I am extremely uninterested in any discussion that smacks of painting gay people and their relationships as in any way related to child rape.

> I thought that my post was very clear. LGBT people do not have any federal protections in many domains (housing for example).

https://www.findlaw.com/lgbtq-law/housing-discrimination-pro...

> At the federal level, you can find protections for renters in the following:

    Federal Fair Housing Act
    Bostock ruling
    The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Equal Access Rule

Like I said, depending on an agency's interpretation of how Bostock's reasoning could be applied to a different law is not protection in the modern Trump administration. This is like you saying that Bostock protects trans people via Title 9 because of the Biden admin's interpretation of Title 9.... which was undone by the Trump administration.

Federal legislation, or at least clear jurisprudence, is needed for this protection to meaningfully stick.

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Does it matter what drives someone to vote for a candidate if the outcome is all the same? It feels like we're discussing manslaughter vs. first degree murder. I don't want to be friends with someone who takes the life of someone else and doesn't feel remorse for it.

Maybe it's a good theoretical exercise, but life is too short for me to appreciate the various reasons that might drive someone to become an asshole.

First you try to argue tolerance and understanding, and then you say that "most pro-Palestine views are antisemitic" and that you cut off all contact with people who hold those views. Your hypocrisy is astounding and you should be embarrassed.

What I was suggesting was to be tolerant of more general views like choosing a political party or candidate and large complicated things, and reserve intolerance for actual directed hatred.

Yes that's why he called you a hypocrite.

I totally get where you're coming from. But regardless of their reason for voting for a candidate, if the net effect is that 150m+ women lost rights and other horrible outcomes, it's the same as endorsing it.

It's not though.

Looking at exit pool demographics might help if you're struggling to have any empathy for a Trump voter. They are largely working class and undereducated and astonishingly diverse for a republican candidate in recent memory.

Empathy is for people who did something for understandable reasons.

Trump hurt the poor the last time he was in office. Republicans literally WROTE DOWN ALL THEIR PLANS to hurt the poor and destroy the country well before the elections. Anyone who saw that and still voted for them gets no empathy.

There's an amazing ability for people to not believe Trump is going to do the things he says. See Venezuelan immigrants getting screwed over or the recent tariffs.

But.. You're going against your own principles here, you can't say that purity test bad and then have a purity test yourself.

Your purity tests are bad. Their purity tests are righteous.

Aha, thank you so much, I understand now.

I really should read the philosophical school of "me good, you bad" it sounds so convenient.

> than applying purity tests to your friends and family

It's more about watching people pivot towards unquestionable evil. "Empathy is a sin" is such a deep, dark line in the sand. I'm not going to just stand there and watch you cross it.

I think there is value in trying to understand the other "tribe". If for nothing else, then for practical reasons in figuring out how to defeat the other tribe at the next encounter.

I also think especially in today's political environment, political beliefs at least partially reflect an individual's core values. In some cases I may not want to associate with people that have fundamentally opposing core values to my own. For example this guy's interviews with his parents: https://www.tiktok.com/@thenecessaryconversation

> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for

I don't know, man. If they're really your friends, those should be non-negotiable.

Didn't these friends and family essentially apply purity tests to us?

I've cut off my aunt who still claims the 2020 election was stolen. The data I worked with to support fragile communities was removed/altered in the transition (CDC Social Vulnerability Index). I've already lost my job in the federal purge. I have a [former] coworker who was born intersexed that cannot be legally recognized by the government. I'll likely lose my right to marry due to my aunt's beliefs. My boyfriend will likely lose access to lifesaving medication with cuts to funding. My grandma is paying for hospice care with social security and claiming Trump is fixing the country. I'm renewing my passport; several friends have already left the country.

> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

I'm sure there were people who voted for the Republican party in the last USA election for purely economic reasons. However, "anti-woke" policies were absolutely the most important issue for a lot of people. Just this week the attorney general in my state posted an "April Fool's Day Joke" where the "joke" was him standing next to a LGBT flag.

Most views on Palestine are just different priorities or different viewpoints too. You can equally say that not all support for Trump is rooted in misogyny and xenophobia, but most is. Perhaps you should not recommend that other people engage in such tolerance when you won’t.

> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

Well, Alabama outlawed abortion except for life of the mother. A federal judge had to rule that the state can't prosecute doctors and reproductive health organizations for helping patients travel out of the state to obtain abortions. The Project 2025 plan is for the Republican controlled Congress to at some point pass the most restrictive federal abortion law they can get away with.

That is stripping away the rights of women to choose. There are many religious conservatives who support this.

That's one possible framing. But from their perspective, they are defending the lives of innocents from those who wish to do them harm. If one accepts their framing of the issue, that's a righteous cause indeed. Why is your framing accurate, and theirs inaccurate?

You're doing what so many people do in the abortion debate, and begging the question. You can't simply sidestep deep differences of opinion on moral issues by declaring your position to be right and theirs wrong. It's wilful ignorance of a whole lot of nuance that exists on this topic, nuance that must be engaged with if one wishes to be effective in having a discussion.

Their framing needs to acknowledge that the fetus is part of the mother's body, not an independent life, and that child birth has risks. Thus the autonomy of the mother over her own body has to be part of the discussion. Their framing can't depend on a soul entering at conception, or God/their sacred scripture telling them abortion is murder. That's not a rational or legal basis for compelling other people who don't believe that way.

If they want to enter a scientific discussion on viability and neural development for when to start placing limits on abortion, and how making victims of rape or incest carry to term is ethical, then we can have a meaningful discussion.

Otherwise, they can feel free to go have their own theocratic community in the wilderness where they don't choose to have abortion. Also known as Alabama these days, unfortunately for those stuck wandering the wilderness with them.

> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

In some markets, about one third of the entire Trump campaign advertising was fear-mongering about how dangerous LGBTQ people are. They wouldn't have spent so much on this if they didn't think it was a uniquely important to their constituents.

I think you're unequivocally wrong if you don't think that Conservatives in the US are above voting for a single issue.

I don't know enough about the Palestine/Israel conflict to be able to make an informed opinion on it, so I won't comment on that.

> I don't know enough about the Palestine/Israel conflict to be able to make an informed opinion on it, so I won't comment on that.

Wise, given the guilt & political climate. But, see also:

  Progressive except Palestine (also known as PEP) is a phrase that refers to organizations or individuals who describe themselves politically as progressive, liberal, or left-wing but who do not express pro-Palestinian sentiment or do not comment on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The issue is that I feel like there's an awful lot of opinions on this, and it's difficult for me to find objective information on this stuff.

I tend to be pretty progressive, so it's probable I would be more on the Palestine side, but I try not to express strong opinions on things that I haven't done at least a cursory amount of research on, and I also don't really want to be labeled an antisemite or racist or anything like that.

> I think essentially tolerating other peoples opinions and trying to understand where they are coming from is more useful than applying purity tests to your friends and family.

Most of the time this is just being an enabler, who excuses, makes up rationales and blames "the other side" for not being nice enough to extremists. Especially when we talk with about fascist close groups. People who say this achieve only limitations on the opposition to extremists. They rarely or never manage to move extremist into the center.

> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

Why are you so sure? There are plenty of conservatives who openly talk about it. It is not being tolerant when you decide that no one is allowed to do that observation. You are not being neutral here, you are biasing the discussion toward the extremism when you do it.

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> I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

Sure. But this is that age-old meme: You know those people (most people?) in 1930s Germany who supported the Nazi party but they perhaps weren't really for annexations and genocide. You know what they call those people? Nazis.

People who voted for Trump are responsible for the fate of Ukraine, the demise of Nato, the fallout with Canada and Mexico, the inevitable inflation and economic turmoil of tariffs etc. And that's of course even if they only voted for Trump because they hold "traditional republican values", or because of single issues like gun rights, migration or taxes.

> tolerance is necessary

Tolerance stops at intolerance. You can never tolerate intolerance. Apart from that, politics also relies on a few fundamental things like the reliance on facts and experts, and respect for the rule of law. Obviously you can't ever tolerate "politics" which starts to tamper with either of these. Luckily I can keep a tribe which consists of people who agree with this, which can vote for any party in my parliament, and is 98% of the population. I'd hate to be in the US though where the tribes cut down the middle of the population.

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I actually agree, I don't think people should merely dismiss differences on issues that strike at core values -- I think it's okay to cut friends/family off on huge differences in values. I have actually done this to both left and right-leaning friends.

But what I'm arguing is that most people do not actually come to these values by way of thinking, but rather by blindly adopting them en masse from their chosen tribe.

And when they choose not to be open to the possibility they might be wrong, then they have a religion, not a intellectually-driven view.

This is okay if acknowledged imo, as per this sentence in the piece:

"If someone is self-aware enough to consciously acknowledge their choice to remain in the bubble, that’s totally fair. I respect it like I’d respect anyone who chooses to participate in a more traditional religion. My issue is when this view is falsely passed off as an intellectually-driven one."

I can appreciate comparing these immovable political stances to a "religion".

One thing I've noticed, as people get more entrenched in their viewpoint, is that they stop accepting the possibility that they're wrong, and this flawed thinking starts to extend to the wildest corners of their position.

"Well, if I'm right about the person, the person is right about everything too. And anyone who disagrees with me is therefore wrong about EVERYTHING."

It's a very shallow viewpoint, and some people just refuse to accept that they're wrong sometimes.

One way people keep themselves in bubbles is by dismissing counter opinions as being tribal or trendy. Some opinions may appear that way because the people that have them seem similar. But it could also be due to them having similar backgrounds that led them to those opinions. For example, most doctors believe in vaccines, but that's not group think, it's based in evidence that they have studied. From the outside, it might seem like group think.

correct, but then those individuals could explain those views

popularity is not the same as tribal, tribal implies a blind following -- when individuals cannot explain why they believe something

My method to discern between beliefs with intellectual backing and those from the community is by presenting them with some bizarro counterargument. If they copy/paste specific phrases and keywords, it's from the community. If they engage with the argument and refute it, then they have given them proper thought.

> For example, most doctors believe in vaccines, but that's not group think, it's based in evidence that they have studied. From the outside, it might seem like group think.

I'm willing to bet that in most cases, that is groupthink. It's hard to tell, because the conclusion is identical to one based on evidence, so you can't infer from the opinion whether it's groupthink or not.

Sometimes you can tell by how someone holds a belief. Defensiveness, unwillingness to consider ways in which their chosen belief is not 100% wholly good, or shouting someone down are evidence of groupthink. For example: if someone brings up that in the past some inactive virus vaccines contained live viruses and a doctor claims that it never happened and could never happen, that's either groupthink or just a doctor sick of arguing with uninformed patients who has given up bothering with explaining the intellectual basis of his beliefs.

My personal suspicion is that the 1% don't exist, that everyone's opinions and beliefs are a mishmash of tribalism and intellectual conclusions, it's just that the balance is very different in different people. I try very hard to make my stances intellectually based and evidence-driven, yet I continually discover that more and more of my deeply held policy positions aren't as clear cut and the real world is more nuanced than I thought.

It's not like nuance is a binary thing (by definition!)

Ah, for some reason, this is the comment that reminded me specifically of Nietzche's Master-Slave Morality[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality

If you remove yourself from a group, how will they change their minds without a dissenting opinion? I had to do it myself eventually, for my own sanity, but I believe this is still a real problem I am no longer addressing among my loved ones.

In my case, my goal isn't to change anyone's mind. It's to preserve sanity -- I can't in good faith "pretend" to get along and have normal conversations when people are actively engaging in behavior that directly harms myself and others.

Could you give an example of behavior that "directly" harmed yourself or others which caused you to sever ties?

Politics is almost always indirect, usually with multiple levels of indirection.

People proudly voting for parties and policies that demonise trans people, of which I know many. I cannot be your friend in good conscience if you're willing to destroy the lives of my other friends.

That is, by definition, indirect. So that doesn't qualify as "directly harming" anyone, even if your analysis of those policies is otherwise accurate.

No it isn’t. When people see the anti trans party winning elections they see that as permission to bully trans people. The vote directly leads to abuse.

Yes, it very much is indirect. Direct would be the "anti trans party" passing a law saying that you must bully trans people.

Your definition of direct is terrible

How are their lives being destroyed?

Being told that you have to follow the same rules as everyone else for e.g. spaces designated to be used solely by the opposite sex, doesn't seem so bad.

I don't believe you're asking this question in good faith, but there are many, many attempts at erasing them from public existence: https://translegislation.com/

Please define "erasing them from public existence". Provide concrete actions that are actively being taken, not vague concepts of "bad things".

I would recommend clicking on the link and scrolling down.

Not answering question.

I did. It's almost nothing but intentionally obtuse terms that mask the actual issues being discussed.

For example, what exactly is "gender-affirming care"? Because I suspect that includes giving life-altering drugs to young children.

Gender-affirming care is good and needed to protect kids.

A lot of people strongly believe this to be true. However, the evidence does not support this.

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I don't think they're arguing in a good faith with you.

"“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

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"destroying and erasing" trans people = not overtly pushing for there spread and acceptance

Assuming you're actually arguing in good faith, the "erasing" bit has been quite obvious and blatant.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/us/stonewall-inn-national...

Removing people from information about a historical event doesn't look good under any lens.

Doesn't this change make it more historically accurate? In 1969, the year of the Stonewall uprising, the "TQ+" hadn't been invented yet as a cultural concept. The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar and was being targeted for that reason.

Not really, no, especially considering the involvement of trans people in the event itself.

For example, see the section regarding "Zazu Nova" on the current page

https://www.nps.gov/ston/learn/photosmultimedia/virtual-fenc...

and before the erasure

https://web.archive.org/web/20250202042345/https://www.nps.g...

Interesting to see the difference and I agree that's an inaccurate edit. For historical accuracy it should describe Zazu Nova as a gay man who was also a transvestite or drag queen.

You do realize that "gay man", "transvestite", "drag queen", and "trans woman" are all different things right?

None of them implies the others. And using any term besides trans woman would be disingenuous, as trans people existed before before 1969, with that exact nomenclature already existing. Just because the letters might not have been attached to an "LGBT" title, neither T or Q are new. Only their increased acceptance and knowledge is.

And deleting references to those is, as you can see, seen as an obvious attempt to walk back on that public perception and acceptance.

While ( as often is ) a very summarized version of the history can be found on the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history , the sources should lead you to more detailed info, if you do care about learning about the historical accuracy.

The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar so we know that Zazu Nova must have been there due to being a gay man. As the previous iteration of the website describes Nova as "queen", "she" and "transgender woman", this means that in 1960s terminology Nova would almost certainly have been understood to be a transvestite, possibly a drag queen.

Sources on the web refer to Nova having involvement with the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries group, which fits with that description also.

This is an oversimplified strawman argument. Biological sex is a complex subject. The cultural understanding of sex is complex. If I has a man take my 2 year old daughter to the men's room is that a bad thing? (For the record I don't have any children)

I don't think anyone is arguing that you should be barred from taking your hypothetical two-year-old daughter into the men's bathroom if the need arises. That's really not the issue.

but I thought "Being told that you have to follow the same rules as everyone else for e.g. spaces designated to be used solely by the opposite sex, doesn't seem so bad."?

Perhaps think on that a bit more then. Consider for example that female-only spaces don't exclude women who are pregnant with male babies.

I am bi, my "friends" would hate LGBT people, constantly talk how we're pedophiles and so on, and kept voting for parties against equal rights.

If your "friends" were calling you or your other friends pedophiles (and you are not) then yes, absolutely, you should not be friends with them.

So, basically, you believe that everyone who doesn't strictly adhere to your own ideologies is insane.

You're pretty much the exact kind of person that the article talks about.

They said nothing remotely similar.

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I'm jealous of you. I've got a limited number of family members and friends and find it difficult to get more of either. I don't think I'm in a position to burn them on politics so I'll just have to take them as they are.

Wow. This is well put. Thanks. I wonder how those so quick to write others off will reflect on it at the end of life.

+1. I had to cut a lot of people out of my life after seeing the Democrats' response to October 7th. I cannot be friends with anybody who votes for candidates that support exterminating Jews.

+1. I'm cutting people out of my life who think it's justified to harass families on the street or write Nazi symbols on their property because they happen to be riding in a particular brand of car. Fascism/Nazism should not be tolerated.

I agree that’s why Musk should driven out of society

The question then becomes how to convert a member of a tribe to ones own correct tribe. It's a very tough question to answer.

It's like spycraft during the cold war. A double agent must pass as being in both tribes for the good of their country. They literally isolate themselves from their homelands tribe to embed themselves in another. They are forever changed. They can't go back. In other words: to change another changes oneself too. It weakens ones own group identity.

Almost all people would never want to risk their identity to change another person for the good of their group. It's very risky and very painful.

Another way that the article suggests is to let people change themselves.

Lol. "Liberal" people create an echo chamber by eliminate opposing opinions and then are surprised that people elect far-right candidates.

> Until we can live in a world where fundamental rights are protected and respected

It wasn't hiding from uncomfortable things, opinions and people, that created the world where you can even think about women or minority rights, or even know how to write to express your opnions. So this approach will not create the world you described.

indeed. This kind of attitude is contrary to what is needed to produce the sort of world desired.

The conceptualization of what fundamental even means is very much subjective, so posing such a condition to dialogue is, in principle, the negation of possibility of improvement on either side.

this is the core kernel of what a tribe even is in my opinion: pose a subjective condition, divide people based on it.

The subtle art of not giving a f** had a great chapter on the importance of deciding your values, that is, what's important to you. The parent advice clearly stated what's important: living in a world where fundamental rights are protected and respected.

Clearly defined values are fine until we get more specific though. What values? Whose responsibility? And what's holding is back from achieving what we want even if our party is in charge? Is it a matter of excluding people who disagree with us? More money? Or is the utopian vision we're attempting not presently achievable?

So is an agreement on fundamental rights for everyone what you want to live your life on? Or do you have other priorities in the meantime where you can agree with people on more immediate matters?

How does having less friends actually benefit you though? It just seems dumb, because presumably you were friends for some reason.

I don't see how cutting them out creates a positive. It's like "Javy thinks men can become women", now I have one less person to play disc golf with.

What's the point of that? People can have different opinions, it's not their only character trait.

I don't have friends for the sake of "having friends". I choose the people I want to hang out with because I enjoy their company and like/respect them. Being around them makes me happy.

Similarly, people I dislike (rude or mean people, for example) make me unhappy when I'm around them. Cutting them out of my life is a net benefit there too, because I'm happier without them.

> how does having less friends benefit you?

Quality over quantity for a start.

> people can have different opinions

Not every opinion deserves the same level of tolerance, respect or acceptance. If someone I know starts goose-stepping I’m not going to write it off a “just a difference in opinion.”

The other comment I made here was flagged, though it very clearly doesn't have anything in violation of the rules. It's clear that people here are using flagging to try to censor opinions they don't like.

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Elsewhere in this thread I've said that you can have non-judgemental, solicitous conversations with anyone, just to learn how they feel or think about something.

But I agree with parent that it's perfectly justifiable to draw lines that limit potential relationships. You're not obligated to welcome everyone or tolerate views in others that have unbearable consequences for yourself. Vote with your feet.

I haven't talked to my grandmother since Trump won the first time in 2016.

It wasn't just that she voted for him, but the fact that she actively supported all of his policies around immigration, including mass deportations that would have included my wife (who was on DACA at the time). She has also said some extremely disturbing stuff about what should happen to gay people that I don't even know that I can post without breaking some form of TOS, which would be horrible already, but slightly worse to me because my sister is gay.

It's easy to say "just be neutral and don't talk about politics around her", but there are some issues with that.

First, you don't know my grandmother; no matter how much I try and avoid any political subject she will keep bringing it up. She will divert a conversation about my job as a software engineer to somehow a rant about how Mexicans are stealing American jobs (this actually happened). I could just roll my eyes and bite my tongue, but this brings me to my next point:

Second, neutrality isn't neutral. I don't really know who started this myth that somehow avoiding the subject is "not taking a side", it's just a lazy way to endorse the status quo. If I keep trying to be amicable with people who actively want my wife to be deported, then that's sort of signaling to my wife that I don't give a shit about what happens to her. I don't want to signal that, because it's not true. At that point, my only option is to either stop talking to my grandmother or talk to her and constantly push back she says something racist or horrible, which isn't productive.

Before you give me shit over this, all of you do this. You all draw the line somewhere. You probably all draw it at different points than I do, but you absolutely do draw the line. If your best friend suddenly joined the Klan and became the Grand Wizard, you probably wouldn't continue being friends with them, even if you could avoid talking politics, because that would signal that you're ok with their racism. You also probably wouldn't be friends with Jeffrey Dahmer even if you could avoid the whole "killing and eating people" topic.

As it stands, I don't really feel bad for cutting her off. I absolutely do not make a concession for age on this. If you're going to live as a grownup in 2025 then it's not wrong to judge someone by 2025 standards. I don't give a fuck what the world was like when you grew up, you have to live in the world as it is now.

Maybe try understanding that expecting everyone to hold their nose and vote for the dog shit alternative "opposition" candidates provided is not a good litmus test for friendship either.

And I say this with all sincerity: I'm also disappointed in my friends continually voting for Democratic candidates after Obama, as it's clear the DNC will do nothing as long as they can rely on these votes. They put up losing and awful candidates while supposedly our democracy depends on it.

If I were to cut them off as friends for being part of the problem, that sounds unreasonable right?

Why does it sound unreasonable? If it's problem that affects you deeply enough, if you sincerely believe that they're a core part of that problem, then I don't see why the person you replied to would be opposed to it.

Possibly, but I've seen a lot of passionate types also very often have double standards. E.g. "That's different!", etc.

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Whataboutism is outsider tribe X also does thing B therefore B is not to be argued about.

Instead maybe consider that it's thinking in tribes that's the issue at root.

Personally I think it's impossible to stop being in a tribe. One should, if free, only be able to choose the tribe to join. We can't choose not to join a tribe. Most people either are not free to choose or not willing to consider that they can choose. Freedom to choose a tribe is very scary.

Looking at how other countries do politics might help. For example did you know that conspiracy and paranoia is a characteristic strategy used in American politics? It's not used as much in other parts of the world.

It's incredibly difficult for a person to see themselves as being paranoid or to believe in a conspiracy theory. But paranoid people who believe in conspiracy theories make great tribe members. It is literally a way to make people think of things as "us vs them"

Priceless! Maybe you should move to the UK. Might be a job opening on the Guardian newspaper where you'd be welcomed with open arms. They think much the same about the British Conservatives and as for the new Reform Party - I guess they are beyond contempt.

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> The only people I have seen preaching moderation and apolitical discussion are those who voted for a particular candidate and either regret it and are too proud to admit it or are in peak cognitive dissonance.

Hello. I preach moderation and apolitical discussion. You were vague about what "particular candidate" you meant, but if you meant Trump I didn't vote for him. In fact I did not cast a vote for any presidential candidate this year because none of them was someone I wanted in office. So, you now have seen at least one person who does not match your description.

I preach moderation and apolitical discussion because the toxicity of political discussion is tearing our country in two. It is the single biggest threat our society faces today. If we cannot learn to resolve our differences (which starts with genuine attempts to reach each other even when others' actions seem reprehensible to us), this country will die. People do not, as a rule, choose evil. They are often mistaken about what is good, or disagree with each other on the best way to achieve good ends. But to round that off as "they are evil" is intellectually lazy and toxic to a civilized society.

> You cannot not discuss politics when the political scene that dictates your daily life is governed by objectively evil people and subjectively less evil people on the other side of the aisle.

If people were objectively evil, they would be considered evil by all. The fact that this has not happened is by itself proof that these people are not objectively evil, and that their evil is a matter of subjective views. If you wish to change others' views, the first step must be to recognize this so that you can formulate a plan of persuasion. Blasting people as "objectively evil" feels good, but accomplishes nothing.

> I preach moderation and apolitical discussion because the toxicity of political discussion is tearing our country in two. It is the single biggest threat our society faces today. If we cannot learn to resolve our differences

No, MAGA led by Trump, assisted by the Heritage Foundation and the tech billionaire Yarvin disciples are the biggest threat, because they have power and are in the process of implementing an autocratic takeover. It's crazy to me how many moderate, apolitical people don't see this. But I was that way a few months ago and started paying attention.

> They are often mistaken about what is good, or disagree with each other on the best way to achieve good ends.

I don't think there is any agreement to be had anymore. They don't care about the Constitution, they just want a king/CEO to force things through. What can you say about a president talking about a third term, making Canada a 51st state, claiming Greenland will 100% join the US, saying allies have been ripping us off, deporting people without due process because they had suspicious looking tattoos, calling for impeachment of judges because they ruled against Trump. Refusing to pay agencies what Congress already approved. Forcing big law agencies into making deals.

Rand Paul gave a speech tonight about how the president doesn't have the power to tax the American people, which is what tariffs are. MAGA is out to win the culture and political war. Permanently. Wake up.

agreed actually, I'm not preaching moderation or apolitical-ness, I'm arguing for merely acknowledging when a view is reason-based vs tribal in nature

see my reply to rdegges

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Have they eaten two plates of food and enjoyed two drinks and then announced, “I’m a proud republican and support Trump 1000%?” Because that’s what we’re getting and we’re banning neighbors and friends we’ve had for 25 years over it.

I guess I just don't see "tribalism". I know it's a popular description though for the divisiveness we find ourselves in politically.

But I consider the things important to me, the beliefs, the issues: and they, all of them, align with a progressive, left-leaning ideology. I'm not just glomming on to everything one "tribe" or another stands for ... one group actually reflects everything I believe. (I think I could split a few hairs here and there, but we're still talking perhaps 95% alignment.)

But I don't think that is too surprising. Others, smarter than me, have gone into great detail about the underpinnings of left-leaning or right-leaning world views in people. Fear of change, empathy ... a number of ideas have been put forth. By this reasoning it naturally follows that those of a certain "personality" will also share common beliefs, ideologies.

The implication instead seems to be that unless you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum you must be "tribal". That feels dismissive.

My thought is that if someone aligns exactly with X political ideology, they aren’t really thinking for themselves and are just adopting whatever their tribal group believes about X subject. I see this all the time - collections of beliefs that otherwise have nothing to do with each other, but are adopted by the same people because “that’s what X group thinks about it.” This is very rarely a conscious thing.

This becomes even more obvious when you look at how these collections of beliefs have changed over time, which to me just shows how they aren’t based on any fundamental intrinsic personality traits but are trendy and groupthink-based. Ditto for geographic differences.

So I don’t think being a centrist implies one is not tribal, rather that the degree to which your beliefs on a variety of issues align with the “default” of a group implies how tribal you are.

In other words, a politically thoughtful and independent person probably has a basket of opinions that don’t fit into neat left or right, liberal or conservative, etc. categories.

Maybe one counter indication of tribalism is how often you disagree with your "tribe". I'm fairly left leaning too, but I also find myself disagreeing with a lot of left leaning policies or talking points. Maybe that's a good sign.

Arguing with leftists all the time is the sure sign that you're a leftist.

(seriously, this is a significant asymmetry between the two that has been there for at least a century. There isn't one lockstep leftism, there's thousands of micro factions arguing about most things)

why do you think the political right is any different?

the right is good at presenting a facade of cohesion. those differences are better-hidden from view until the common enemies of the right are destroyed and they need to begin eating each other.

It's only a good sign if they're able to speak out, and aren't terrified of expressing their dissent in public.

Both the left and the right seem captured by a small minority of radicals, using social media echo chambers/purity spirals to shut down often-quite-reasonable disagreement. And we're clearly past the point at which we can just ignore 'social media politics', given how much it seems to have led to the current state of things in the US.

At the risk of sounding pessimistic, and as someone who also identifies himself as leftist: If the end result is voting between black/white binary choices, and that act of voting is itself one of the most important self-expression, does the fact that I disagree with them in a few points matter?

> and that act of voting is itself one of the most important self-expression

That's what lobbyists want you to believe, at least. It makes their job a lot easier if they are the only ones carrying out democracy.

You need to select someone trustworthy enough to not botch your message, sure, but usually all political parties put up people who are trustworthy enough. What is much more important is your expression to the hired after they are on the job. That is the only way they are going to know what you are thinking. They are not mind readers, surprisingly.

>does the fact that I disagree with them in a few points matter?

Perhaps not, but you're also lending legitimacy to a system that is abusing you.

But this isn't a board game that you can quit and go home. You are subject to your government rules regardless of if you participate or not. So it is probably better to try and get political representation that you agree with 60% of the time, rather than one you agree with 5% of the time.

Even better is to try and get a democracy than to live life by the whims of a dictator. Getting to choose your favourite dictator is of little consolation.

this is exactly it, from here: https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

This essay feels shallow and dismissive to me. The sentiment is that you can't be a smart, independent thinker whilst going too far left or right. As with many of his essays, my take is that PG - who lives a highly privileged life - is basing this opinion on the caricature of reality that he gleans from the media and internet forums. It's easy to think what he thinks when the only representation you see of the far left is mindless "woke"ism.

Firstly, does he think that Marx was dumb? And leading left-wing figures like AOC, Sanders, Varoufakis, Zinn, or Zizek? No, for all you might disagree with them, they're smart and independent. They did not acquire their opinions in bulk. I even admit that right-wing figures like Shapiro, Bannon etc... are smart and independent, even though I think they're snakes.

Secondly, the essay overstates the degree of uniformity within the far left and right. Have you not seen the animosity between anarchists and Trotskyites? They only agree insofar as believing we can do better than capitalism. And those on the far right who have a global free market ideology will be at odds with those who want to restrict movement and apply protectionist tariffs.

[EDITED TO ADD] Thirdly, he presupposes that the distinction between right and left is purely one of logical competence. This is captured by him saying "both sides are equally wrong". But personal values also drive the polarisation. Those on the right tend to highly value tradition, loyalty, and family. Those on the left tend to highly value universal welfare and the environment. It's not really possible to label these "right" or "wrong", they are expressions of our fundamental desires for ourselves and the world. If you start from different axioms, you'll tend to get different corollaries even if perfect logic is applied.

It's the technocratic or perhaps "enlightened centrist" tribe. There's similar vibe in the post, and even though there's some introspection about the author's own tribe, he doesn't seem to question whether his political thinking could be tribal.

It's indeed typical for this tribe to off-hand dismiss thinking that they deem somehow "ideological" without even really trying to figure out what the thinking is. Also a lot of self-congratulation, exceptionalism and motivated reasoning is exhibited, but these are typical features of any tribe.

You are describing the problem of getting a picture of a party or movement from media and without interacting with them.

That could explain the second issue I describe. Maybe the first. But I do not think he has such an excuse for the third.

Ye sure the third point is a attempt to differentiate left and right on a fundamental level.

If I were to do that, I would say something like "pull the ladder up behind you or tear it down before you" with a comical touch. I don't think it is possible to keep such descriptions short or stringent.

>In other words, a politically thoughtful and independent person probably has a basket of opinions that don’t fit into neat left or right, liberal or conservative, etc. categories.

That doesn't stop them from voting a straight red or blue ticket every time if that's what they've been indoctrinated to do.

We've all encountered some old man who by all accounts should be a republican. They own a small business, have conservative social views, like their guns, minimize taxes, etc, etc. But they vote a straight blue ticket because that's what they learned to do back in the 1960s. And on the other side is the stereotypical southern white woman who believes in every social thing the democratic party has but still votes red because she was raised in a religious household and came of age during the peak of the right's lean toward peddling to christians.

Sure, but to be fair, we’re talking about political discussions and not strictly voting behavior. It seems like a given to me that most voting behavior is only a vague approximation of what people actually think and want.

This is such a great contrast:

> But they vote a straight blue ticket because that's what they learned to do back in the 1960s.

and

> but still votes red because she was raised in a religious household and came of age during the peak of the right's lean toward peddling to christians.

There's no explanation for why the old man votes "blue" other than he learned it in the 60s. OTOH, the woman votes "red" because "she was raised in a religious household" and started voting when The Right was "peddling to christians".

"peddling" -- that's a pretty negative term.

I don't know if it's ironic or demonstrative that an article about how difficult it can be to have political conversations produces a comment thread with such biased viewpoints.

At the risk of sounding very arrogant, I've found this incredibly obvious even when I was just 18 years old. Decades have passed, plenty of my beliefs have changed, but this one hasn't.

The chance that one "ideology", whether it's liberalism, conservatism, anarchism , fascism or any-ism is always the right answer to every single societal question, is 0. It's comparable to the idea of exactly 1 of the (tens of) thousands of religions being the true one, correct in everything, with all of the others being wrong.

And this extends to politics. Where I'm from, the political landscape is very different from the US, with at least 5+ different parties that support different policies in various ways. At the same time, it's similar - there isn't a single one that approaches things on a case-by-case basis, each of them being ideology-based.

> So I don’t think being a centrist implies one is not tribal, rather that the degree to which your beliefs on a variety of issues align with the “default” of a group implies how tribal you are.

Absolutely, "centrism" is an ideology in itself. This is also why the usage of the word "moderate" in the article and by PG is very unfortunate. That word too comes with a whole lot of baggage, and saying that independent thought leads to one being "moderate" in the way that most people think of that word, is straight up wrong. We need a different word, but I'm not great at coining those. "pragmatic" is the best one I can come up with. I can feel a "pragmatism is an ideology!" coming, but "the ideology of not looking at things from an ideological perspective" is entirely different from anything else. I'm sure the bright minds here can give better words.

> In other words, a politically thoughtful and independent person probably has a basket of opinions that don’t fit into neat left or right, liberal or conservative, etc. categories.

Very much so. And as the article points out, this is unfortunately a very lonely experience, so it's completely logical that most don't opt for this, instead choosing the warmth of a dogmatic community.

Funny that you say pragmatic, because that’s exactly the word I tend to use when describing my own political beliefs. The best that I have come up with is “pragmatic with a propensity for…” and a few sub-categories that more accurately define what I’d like to see politically happen.

For example - preventionism. It seems to me that many issues could be avoided or eliminated entirely if we tried to prevent them from happening in the first place, rather than choosing between two actions, both with unavoidable negative consequences.

Another is aesthetics. For some reason, the simple desire to make public spaces more beautiful is not really a policy position adopted by any political group, at least in a primary way.

And so maybe the solution is an issue-based political system in which votes and resources go toward specific issues and not parties. (Or work toward eliminating those issues in the first place.)

Some states such as California have a non-partisan ballot proposition where citizens can vote directly on issues. It generally works fine, although it's not clear whether the net impact has really been positive.

On the one hand it defeated affirmative action repeatedly in one of the most left wing states, on the other proposition 13 created a class of landed gentry and permanently screwed the state’s tax base.

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PG has two different terms for it in his essay: unintentional moderates vs intentional moderates

https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

That's what represents the two circled areas in the graph, though I realize if people don't have that context it could be confusing

added an explanation to clear things up

fwiw, I don't think that's arrogant, I've met plenty of high schoolers that understand this concept

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> saying that independent thought leads to one being "moderate" in the way that most people think of that word, is straight up wrong

Agreed. Independent thought usually leads to one being moderate when that person is already living a comfortable life.

You’ve hit the nail on the head. The platforms of political parties are amalgamations of specific interests and agendas, and not necessarily a cohesive world view born of an aligned set of principles. Most (all) political parties have positions that conflict logically, spiritually, or practically. Yes, that includes your preferred party on the right or left.

So anyone who’s views align perfectly with a party are probably just parroting what they’ve heard because no sensible individual would arrive at that set of values naturally on their own; it would - and does - take some serious mental gymnastics to hold these contradictory values in your head.

You're correct. Most people's views (i.e. moderates) are ideologically inconsistent with party-line. The loud X/bsky types refuse to decouple, and will double down even if the facts are wrong. Mind you on social media blue-tribe is much further left than the Democratic party.

You don't have to consider yourself part of a tribe. Others will consider you anyway.

You are a man or a woman, young or old, Asian, White, Black, Latino, straight, gay, rich, poor slim, fat, etc.

The technical terms for the first few in that list are sexism, ageism and racism. While it is true people do that, it is considered a bad idea because it doesn't capture reality in a productive and meaningful way. And doesn't seem relevant to keiferski's comment.

The aim should be that people have to voluntarily associate with their tribe. It might be the hermit tribe where all the hermits sign up to be alone together.

To be fair, I've rarely seen a group fighting itself more than the progressive left. If tribalism truly exists, it exists mostly on the right.

Right but that’s because there are more micro interests on the left. It’s still tribal though. If I start to bring up deregulation of building housing, there will be a strong immediate backlash by certain factions on the left. I see it more that there is little room for discussion, within these different groups there are only binary options and if you are with them on all talking points, well you are the enemy.

> If I start to bring up deregulation of building housing, there will be a strong immediate backlash by certain factions on the left.

I do suspect that if you what the deregulation actually meant to both left and right people you'd find two (probably overlapping) camps aligned on NIMBY and Housing prices go up as your largest groups.

Structural and safety engineers regardless of political affiliation will tell you why deregulation of some standards is a bad idea.

Emotional investment is a subtly different issue to package-deal opinions.

I once read an interesting article that said in multipolar political systems, coalitions between opinion groups happen after the election; whereas in two-party systems, the coalition forms before the election.

So you get people who think taxation is theft allied with people who Back The Blue. You get people who think life is so sacred abortion should be banned allied with people who'd like to see an AR-15 under every pillow. You get people who think nazi flags and the N word are free speech, allied with people who think books with gay and trans characters should be banned.

And personally I'm pro-environment and think nuclear power has a part to play; I think we should help the homeless by increasing the housing supply and letting builders do their thing; that the police should exist but need substantial reform to stamp out corruption and brutality; and that women's issues like abortion and trans women in abuse shelters should be decided by women, not men like me. But I'm in a political coalition with people who think nuclear power is bad, that we need rent control, that we should defund the police, and so on.

In an electoral system with proportional representation, largely unrelated views would all be different parties, no party would have a majority, and after the election they'd form alliances to build a ruling coalition.

But because of America's electoral system, someone has to take all those views, duct-tape them together and call it a consistent political ideology.

This is a very interesting take, and I agree with your perspective.

I think the "anti-woke" messaging was a particularly effective example, because in reality this means completely different things to many voters (some of those contradictory).

Your nuclear position is interesting, and has become significantly more common over the last decade I feel. Personally, I disagree-- In my view, nuclear power is not on a trajectory where it is ever gonna be competitive (levelized cost) with renewable power. This will lead to renewables "ruining" electricity spot prices whenever they are available which is very bad for nuclear power economics. Nuclear power also shares basically the same drawback with renewables that it wants to be paired with peaker plants for dispatchability (instead of operating in load-following mode itself), but renewables basically just do it cheaper.

At this point, it would basically take a miracle for me to believe in nuclear power again (a very cheap, safe, simple, clean, quick-to-build reactor design) but I don't see this happening any time soon (and honestly the exact same argument applies to fusion power even more strongly-- I think that is an interesting research direction that will never find major a application in power generation).

I will concede however that nuclear power that was built 10-30 years ago (before renewables were really competitive) was and is helpful to reduce CO2 emissions.

> But I'm in a political coalition with people who think nuclear power is bad, that we need rent control, that we should defund the police, and so on.

I don't think that's true though. I think you're just listening to the loudest voices.

Not even the loudest voices. Biden said "fund the police" at a State of the Union address. The people with the most power and influence within the left wing of US politics are not in support of defunding the police.

> that women's issues like abortion and trans women in abuse shelters should be decided by women, not men like me.

This got me wondering... Thinking in reverse, are there any issues that you think should be decided by men only?

Underlying your thought, seems to be the idea that some people should be excluded from certain political/ideological conversations.

Whereas for me, I see all people as individuals, each with a right to their opinions. Ie, I wouldn't start from a point of separation as this bakes in special interests, sexism, racism, etc.

> This got me wondering... Thinking in reverse, are there any issues that you think should be decided by men only?

Access to viagra?

>This got me wondering... Thinking in reverse, are there any issues that you think should be decided by men only?

Military conscription and field duties would be an example I can think of.

For example, in my European country we have mandatory conscription for men over 17 but there was a referendum a while ago if this should still be kept, and it was funny that women also got to vote on whether men get conscripted or not lol. And guess what, most women (and boomers) voted in favor of the mandatory conscription of young males by quite a margin and unsurprisingly the only ones who voted against but got outvoted, were the young men.

Yes this discriminates, but your example illustrates the exact reverse way to what I meant. Being subject to conscription is like a negative right/loss of rights - men are being forced to potentially put their lives on the line. Can you think of a female equivalent where females are ordered by the government to put themselves in harm's way?

In both cases it seems like the discrimination is not in favour of men. Apparently men ought not to get a say in "women's issues", but it is also right that men be forced to put their lives on the line.

If that is correct, it is the case that men have less rights.

They answered your question "are there any issues that you think should be decided by men only?"

In this sentence, you are looking at different parts of the equation depending on case 1 and 2:

> Apparently men ought not to get a say in "women's issues", but it is also right that men be forced to put their lives on the line.

No, in the first case it could be argued that men shouldn't have a say, and in the second it could be argued that women shouldn't have a say. In the first case women are (potentially/allegedly) negative affected, in the second (young) men.

> Can you think of a female equivalent where females are ordered by the government to put themselves in harm's way?

Anti-Abortion laws in the US would be such an example.

If absolute gender equality is what we're after, I think the premise is flawed form the start.

Men have less rights by nature/biology because they are expendable (women are the reproductory bottleneck of the species) and they are the only gender with the physique optimized for physical fighting and hard labor, hence the famous line "women and children first".

We can say it's unfair and imbalanced but that's not gonna change biology and the status quo when push comes to shove and an enemy invades or a natural disaster hits and human meat is needed for the grinder, hence why there's no sympathy towards men and why much less societal help available to men in need (men have 10x the suicide and homelessness rates than women).

Men and women can never be equal in absolute terms outside an utopia of peace and prosperity, because evolutionary biology and gender dysmorphia has engineered our bodies to be good at completely different tasks meant to complement each other in order to ensure the survival and procreation of the tribe/species.

> If absolute gender equality is what we're after, I think the premise is flawed form the start.

I thought we were talking about some sort of equality. Re the OP, who mentioned that they wouldn't participate in certain "women's issues", I couldn't think of an equivalent example where women shouldn't participate in "men's issues". That fact alone strikes me as unequal - it can't be that one sex (or race, or whatever other distinction) should have rights in law, that others don't have. Such a circumstance would an example of creating inequality, which I think is the antithesis of the OP's point.

These questions are not straightforward. Presumably we don't want to initiate or institutionalise inequality.

this is probably my favorite comment on this post so far, super interesting

if you can find the article I'd love to read it

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> The anti-abortion people do not care about actual outcomes. There's no interest in safer obstetrics or early years care or preventing school shootings, they're hyper-focused only on abortion.

That is consistent with the position. School shootings are explicitly banned and there'd be a strong consensus that obstetrics should be done to a high standard.

Someone has to draw a line between sperm and human for when the anti-murder laws kick in. The line is fundamentally arbitrary except for 2 logical points (moment of conception and actual birth [0]) that are broadly unpopular choices. It is certainly easy to disagree with any particular line choice but it is all but impossible to rank them theoretically except by letting the political process play out.

[0] Theoretically we could even find a third one and draw the line some time significantly after birth when awareness really starts to build up; but that is a can of worms no-one wants to open because babies are very lovable and probably protected by hard-coded emotions built up from evolutionary pressure.

It's really simple to me:

- abortion should only be allowed if needed because of health or exceptional cases like rape - abortion should not be used as a form of birth control, use condoms or the morning-after pill

I'm fine with states deciding the details. I think it should be mandated that it's always allowed when health is in danger (I believe this is already true), and it should be mandated that even if a state allows abortion "just by choice" (so, as birth control), it should definitely not be allowed after 9 months even.

> The anti-abortion people do not care about actual outcomes.

I'm anti-abortion, but I really, really do care about outcomes. So if you want to discuss this with me, I'd love to.

-

> You get people who think life is so sacred abortion should be banned allied with people who'd like to see an AR-15 under every pillow

I don't understand the problem with this... Not wanting to kill unborn life but still wanting to be able to protect yourself and your family when someone breaks into your house.

It's statements like this that make me question the intellectual honesty of people. It doesn't take much thinking to understand it, right?

> I don't understand the problem with this... Not wanting to kill unborn life but still wanting to be able to protect yourself and your family when someone breaks into your house.

The point (as I understood it) isn't that they're incompatible, the point is that they're disparate beliefs and one doesn't necessary imply the other, but our political system treats them as if they do. There simply is no party for people who support abortion and gun control or for people who oppose abortion but like guns, but there are people with those beliefs.

Oh, like that! Yeah, fully agree. This is one of the reasons the conspiracy theory "they both answer to the same group of overlords" is so big. I still wish I lived in America, though.

> It's statements like this that make me question the intellectual honesty of people. It doesn't take much thinking to understand it, right?

It isn't a matter of intellectual honesty. People who think assault rifles should be banned don't necessarily believe that you shouldn't be able to protect yourself. (It doesn't take much thinking to understand that, right?)

The issues are much more complicated and intertwined than people are willing to deal with, making it easy to fall back on a couple simple ideas like "don't kill unborn life" and "let me have an AR-15 to protect myself." But when you start digging into the ramifications of unwanted children, the social programs required to support them, the impact on the parents, etc.; and what it means to let every tom/dick/harry own and carry whatever weapon they want, even if there's a background check and mandatory training; you get into details for which there is no clear best, or even good, solution. We do have reality to deal with.

People only have so much energy to spend on understanding issues that don't affect them personally, and different people are affected by different issues. So of course there will be wide gaps between perspectives and how those perspectives are expressed. That doesn't mean anyone is being intellectually dishonest.

Typically with this view

>I don't understand the problem with this... Not wanting to kill unborn life

The people in question have zero scientific understanding of what's entailed here which leads to states like Texas where doctors let pregnant women die rather than risk being charged by the Christian Nationalist state.

These issues are nuanced and complex and require actual understanding rather than short political quips and people yelling "of course it's simple".

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The graph in the article of "what the political spectrum actually is" where independent thought was only found in the middle was so funny to me that I had to do a double take. Maybe this is a joke or April Fool's prank or something?

I read the article quickly so maybe I'm misreading it but if that graph is serious it really undermines his position as a thoughtful moderate to me. But maybe he really does believe that everyone on the left and the right only has groupthink. I agree with you that it's definitely not all tribalism

European here. I'm on the left, but I don't hang out much with people from the left: they're really often driven by ideology and cannot for the life of them come up with working political plans to push the needle. They're completely rejecting the complexity of compromise and gradual change towards the ideal, convinced that any act that isn't absolute is a betrayal of their values.

Sure I mean a lot of people on every political leaning don't have practical policies but that's besides the point (people can even have bad independent thoughts so impractical policies aren't inherently relevant). The graph isn't even "often people who disagree with me are tribal" it's "literally only some people near me ideologically are independent thinkers".

Edit: this is the graph, everything outside of a group of moderates is 100% on the "groupthink" side of the graph. It's an inherently condescending way to look at people who you disagree with and a disservice to your point if you're trying to get people to listen to each other. https://images.spr.so/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/j42No7y-dcokJuNg...

I think you're taking the graph way too literally.

The Republicans and Democrats are both coalitions made up of many different groups, and their policies are constantly shifting depending on which individuals get elected and which of those sub-groups hold more power, as well as due to different sub-groups shifting allegiances.

It's statistically almost impossible that someone would agree 100% with the platform of the Republicans or Democrats at any given moment. Even if you just pretend there are exactly two stances on a given issue (R or D) you'd still be looking at like 2^1000 different possible outcomes (for 1,000 different issues). The more perfectly someone claims to align to one party, the more likely it is that they're doing so out of tribalism than because they actually matched the exact one-in-a-zillion set of opinions.

The graph isn't "agrees with Republican" and "agrees with Democrat" as the axis (I also would say you can agree with people and still be a free thinker, viewing positions as independent doesn't really make sense, there's underlying ideology that heavily correlates them but all of this is besides the point). The idea that the far left is agreeing dogmatically with the democratic platform is clearly factually incorrect to anyone who has met people actually on the far left (they rarely even agree with other people on the far left) and a similar thing can be said about the far right.

The really obvious example of this is look how much of a thorn in the side of the Republican Congressional leadership the far right has been. Agreeing rigidly with a party will not put you at the edge of the graphs at all (for most parties globally it would put you somewhere in the middle)

The graph X axis could just as well have been labelled "agrees with Republicans" and "agrees with Democrats"; perhaps it would've been clearer that way. But really, any polarization axis would've worked.

The ideal graph would have two opposing labels dynamically generated according to the beliefs of the reader to be along a polarization axis for which the reader exists in the middle.

It's not just that the axes are wrong, there's a fundamental problem with the idea of the graph in an article about considering viewpoints and overcoming tribalism. Fundamentally the author put a graph in the article about tribalism and not considering other views where only people close to him ideologically are "free thinkers" (it's especially weird since "free thinkers" are congregated where most people are). You can sorta see this problem with the rest of the article, there are a lot of claims about how other people think badly and how he thinks is good. This is his perogative but it makes the article deeply insular and not really about how to understand and reason with other people.

It's particularly frustrating to me since from my experience I think both sides thinking he is farther away ideologically than he is is from then is from this tendency. I have the opposite problem, people generally think I'm much closer ideologically than I am even though I'm uncompromising in my principles (I'm very far left and even a vegan, which is anathema to many people). I've found if I listen to people and, more importantly, am willing to understand and speak to their values the more my experience is the exact opposite of the writer's. People's political views are often irrational but also they are driven by a diverse set of underlying ideologies and values and if you think "independent thought" is going to cluster in particular spot in an ideological spectrum and everyone else is just subject to groupthink (but you aren't somehow) then of course talking to other people who aren't ideologically close to you is going to be miserable.

Even more so when you see how quickly these coalitions will shift their beliefs or take on new beliefs when they’re signaled to do so by leaders of the coalition.

You often see this in real time during political conversations (both online and offline). Someone will say, “No one on my side ever said X, that’s a vicious smear perpetrated by the other side.” Someone will response with an example of a prominent leader on their side saying X. The first person will suddenly do a 180, and start explaining why X is just a commonsense position and it’s silly for anyone to be offended by it.

AI's ability to sift through text is almost to the point of being able to pick out these idiots so they can be ignored.

We're not too far off from a future where anyone can mouse over their username and a browser extension will tell them whether the username they are mousing over is consistent in their beliefs or if they're a flip flopping POS shill for whatever color party they're peddling the policy of.

This is why I don't talk politics with anybody I respect. It would quickly make me a misanthrope.

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This. 100%

Same behaviour, or should we call it helplessness, can be witnessed in democrats responses since this whole thing went into round 2.

I'm shocked on how little actionable and constructive goals are part of the "conversation".

I think you're talking about a subtly different thing. OP was simply saying "it's very possible to be a rational independent thinker and yet be non-centrist". What you're saying is "a lot of people I've met who are more left than me are impractical".

Relating to your point, I would add something based on my experience in the UK. In the last 30 years we've twice had a Labour leader elected. Both times campaigning as a hard-nosed centre-left pragmatist, and with some on the left echoing similar sentiments about compromise and pushing the needle.

Blair admittedly did some good stuff - Lords reform and minimum wage. But he also introduced and then tripled university fees, greatly expanded private initiatives in the public sector, and engaged in an activist interventionist foreign policy culminating in the invasion of Iraq. These are changes whose ill effects we're still reeling from as a country.

Starmer is looking to shape up very similarly, from his U-turns on private school charitable status, tuition fees and the two-child cap, to his reluctance to condemn the Gazan genocide and cuts to disability allowance.

Was it better to have these as prime minister Vs the conservative candidate? Yes, probably. Can they really be said to be pushing the needle? I doubt it.

American here. Otherwise, fairly similar.

Not saying that our right is much better. Their top "virtue" seems to be competent campaigning & hard work in pursuit of political power. (Which, obviously, worked for them.) Vs. our left seems too busy holding low-effort ideological purity beauty contests to particularly care about being in power.

I've heard that some of the brighter voters, who voted for Democrats due to "Trump is the worst choice" arguments, are waking up to just how low-functioning the Dem's are. Not saying that that'll do any good - but it's nice to hear.

> They're completely rejecting the complexity of compromise and gradual change towards the ideal, convinced that any act that isn't absolute is a betrayal of their values.

Interestingly enough, this also describes a member of the Trump Party (formerly known as the Republican Party).

it was meant as a visual specifically for Paul Graham's article here: https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

I should probably generate a new one or just remove since it appears to have sent this message to multiple people

But yeah I don't think it's entirely tribalism, but I do largely agree with PG's essay, though I'd understand a contesting of his statement that "the left and right are equally wrong about half the time"

But which is it? Do you agree with Graham's essay and your own graph, or do you disagree?

It sounds like you believe in the graph, but don't want to turn people off. Just own your belief.

FWIW I think you should disagree with Graham's essay and your own graph. Saying that "left" and "right" were both 50% wrong is like saying the same about "federalist" and "anti-federalist". Even if the sides are 50% wrong, the free thinkers would be widely distributed.

Ironically this seems like an example of the tribalism my essay is about -- I agree with his essay, but only partially agree with the graph

I think the hump could be slightly shifted left or right, but the points on the graph are the averages of an individual's entire collection of views

I don't believe an independent thinker would come up with a set of views that perfectly match the left or right's doctrine since at least some of those views are somewhat arbitrary -- in that sense I agree with him

There are also centrist doctrines. Even explicit ones like the radical centrism.

A major problem is trying to project a hugely multifaceted phenomenon like political outlook into one, or even few, dimensions. And then even discretizing the one dimension. And then categorizing (other) people's thinking or ideologies into these.

Another problem is assuming that there is some universal "optimal" or even good policy. Instead there can be even fundamentally contradicting interests or goals between e.g., dare I say, classes which can lead to well informed

I'm not claiming you don't appreciate these, but the conclusions to me seem to require such problematic assumptions. The intent is likely something like trying to simplify complex phenomena into something manageable (i.e. an ideology), but these tend to be very leaky abstractions.

I think the issue might stem from the fact that (as I read it) the essay is talking about "for the people who are moderate (in the middle of the left/right axis), some are distributed higher on your graph, while some are lower". Which says nothing about "for the people who are distributed higher on the graph, how many are in the middle of the left/right axis". Your graph makes explicit an answer to the second question which the essay avoids. (There is a bit of an implication in the last two paragraphs, but PG is explicit it's only about people he knows).

You even say so in your essay. I'd say an issue is people picking up on the graph but ignoring what you wrote.

I don't think the graph agrees with the essay.

In the essay, the "unintentional moderate" is defined as someone who holds all kinds of views, some from the far left, some from the far right, some from the middle - but by chance the average of their views makes them a moderate.

I had to go looking for that, because the graph doesn't show that at all. I think the graph is a bad take on the ideas in Paul Graham's article.

I read that I think he means it is tribal thinking if you have a desire to convince instead of search for truth in a curious way.

I didnt read that people on the left or the right are always tribal. But yeah, its easy to go that way when you are not able to see the truth in opposite viewpoints.

Yes, you're misreading it. Independent thought vs. groupthink is the vertical axis.

What he means is that according to the graph if you call yourself an "independent thinker" then you can't be an extremist. You are automatically a centrist. All the dots on the "independent thinker" half are all centrist. None are left or right. An interesting bias that he's admitting to. Made me roll my eyes and stop reading right there, and just skim the rest for all the "independent thinker" tropes.

If you want to feel superior and virtue signal, just label yourself an "independent thinker." It's so easy.

I was thinking that as well until I read the caption on the graph, which I might still take issue with, but which was also a bit more nuanced since it was trying to visualize someone else's viewpoint.

It's common in tribalism to see ones own tribe as rational and the other tribes as groupthink.

We can see this in discussions about misinformation today. "Brainwashed masses" is a tribal concept about a tribe.

Yes, that also struck me as nonsensical.

If he were really trying to demonstrate a 2d Gaussian, it would instead be a circle or elipse of points with highest density at the origin.

perhaps in the end he was not

It's not uncommon for people who decide they have "discovered" the "real political spectrum" by simply adding a new axis to the traditional left-right spectrum to coincidentally idealize one pole on that new axis, viewing all variation on the left-right axis as indicative of distraction from what is important.

Asserting that people varying on the left-right spectrum also cluster around the anti-ideal pole of the idealized axis while everyone closer to the ideal pole clusters around the left-right center is not as common, but reflects the same cognitive bias, though it is particularly amusing when that axis independent thought (ideal) vs. groupthink (anti-ideal), such that freethinkers are asserted to by ideological uniform even outside of the shared commit to "free" thought, while sheepish adherents of groupthink are more ideologically diverse.

(And, yes, that graph is deadly serious -- as well as, IMO, hilariously wrong [0] -- and fairly central to the theme of the post.)

It's even more funny that this "free thinker" is decrying tribalist groupthink, asserting (as already discussed) that free thought exists only in an extremely narrow band in the center of the left-right axis, and talking about how they can't talk politics with anyone outside their group and are "desperate for like-minded folk". The lack of self-awareness is...palpable.

It's even more funny that all the ideas he embraces and purports to have trouble finding people he agrees with are the standard doctrines of the rationalist/EA/longermist faction that is so popular in the tech/AI space (and the conceit of being uniquely free thinking is also common to the faction.)

[0] Actual free thinkers are, IME, distributed widely -- not necessarily evenly, but certainly not clustered in one spot -- across both the left-right axis and a number of other political axes [1][2], such as the authoritarian-libertarian axis, so both the distribution shown and the assertion that the "real" political spectrum is two dimensional with only freethought vs. groupthink added to the classic left-right axis are incorrect.

[1] For a number of reasons, including both differences in life experiences and thus perceived probabilities on various factual propositions, but also on fundamental values which life experiences may impact, but not in a deductive manner, because you can't reason to "ought" from "is".

[2] Free thinkers do differ from groupthinkers in that their positions in the multidimensional space of political values are likely not to fall into the clusters of established tribes, but to have some views typical of one tribe while other others fall out of that tribes typical space (and possibly even into the space of an opposing tribe.) But there are enough different tribes

posting my explanation of the graph from another comment here

"it was meant as a visual specifically for Paul Graham's article here: https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

I should probably generate a new one or just remove since it appears to have sent this message to multiple people

But yeah I don't think it's entirely tribalism, but I do largely agree with PG's essay, though I'd understand a contesting of his statement that 'the left and right are equally wrong about half the time'"

One quality of “tribal” that I think gets overlooked is that those that are part of a “tribe” are not willing to be wrong.

I feel like those that are more in the middle - in addition to be “accidentally in the middle” as pg says — they’re open to hearing the other side, and even open to being wrong.

Those that I know that I might define as “tribal” — and that goes for either side — are certainly not open to being wrong, and not even really open to listening to the other side — even a rational discussion.

Some may pretend to listen and maybe even engage in a discussion, but only out of being polite, not out of genuine, open curiosity.

It's natural to internalise the groups we belong to. In other words they become me. Or my identity is formed by the group.

When social scientists say something is socially constructed that's approaching this.

It's hard to see oneself apart from the group one belongs to. In fact to separate oneself causes real pain. In the article it says that people don't want to look outside their tribe; I would say that people shouldn't even think about looking outside as it will cause trauma. It would literally cause psychological identity wounds.

One aspect of politics is this pain avoidance.

The most visible example of tribalism is when groups fail to update their ideas and beliefs as facts start to come in. You can't escape the religious parallel.

This occurs clear across the political spectrum, but a standout example is record-breaking levels of immigration in European countries like Sweden and Germany. Instead of realizing the policy failure and acting to fix it, the line becomes "it was the right thing to do, it was just done poorly."

By definition, reason can only take you so far in politics, as it’s the arena in which decisions must be made without complete information. No matter how well reasoned your arguments, no matter how well informed you are, you’re still going to resist switching allegiances. So, imo, politics is just about 99% loyalty.

Looking at it from a left-right one-dimensional space, the middle would be the non-tribal choice. The political spectrum is however not a one-dimensional space, and countries with multiple political parties, with center parties, can demonstrate that well in polls and self tests. It is perfectly possible for a single individual to be in 50% agreement with every single political party, from left, center and right, agreeing to the individual policies from each party that they find to be correct and disagreeing with policies they disagree with.

As it happens, if I personally looks to what is important to me, I find that from the extremest left to the extremest right, the best political party get 60% support and the worst get 40% support. They all have some policies that I strongly support, and some policies that are terrible, and the middle of the gang is exactly the same.

To take an example. I am in strong support of the green party when it comes to train and bike infrastructure, fishing policies, eliminating lead in hunting ammunition, getting rid of invasive species, and banning heavy fuel oil in shipping. I strongly disagree with their support of using natural gas as a transactional fuel in the energy grid in hopes of green hydrogen (a pipe dream), and their dismantling of nuclear power. I also strongly disagree with their political attempts to mix in the war in Gaza with environmentalism, as if taking up the flag for either side in that war has any relevance in nation/local politics on what is almost the other side of the world. That is one political party out of 8 that my country has, and the story is similar with all the rest.

Looking at this as a non-American. American politics is seems very much tribe minded as an outsider,left vs right. And where someone stands largely can tell you about their views on a lot of other things. At least that's how it is portrayed in media. I know in practice a lot of people are more nuanced.

Most countries have sometimes up to 10 political parties and what party/ies someone supports often does not say much about their views on different social issues. In the USA it seems you can't want a secure border and civil rights for minority groups.

Is it really likely that an intelligent person like yourself could hold 95% intellectual alignment with one of the two lowest common denominators (largest pluralities) in a country on complex political topics? Consider how much each party's platform has changed in the last 20 years, and how much more they will change in the next 20. I would say it's more likely that someone like yourself is quite intelligent and creative and is instead unaware of those deeply ingrained tribal instincts.

Media in the US, especially now via incessant social media feeds, fuels this. It showers us with information showing how the "other side" is bad. So you can have a correct opinion that the other tribe is bad without any quantitative metrics to compare how bad it is compared to your tribe, which is also very bad.

Btw, regarding the basic personality traits thing. I found this paper very interesting [0]. Sort of refutes the "conservatives lack empathy and fear change" angle. On average, I suspect most liberals and conservatives have very similar averages across most personality traits and are mostly just a product of their environment.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34429211/#:~:text=Our%20meta...

I think the claim is that a lot of people stick with the tribe regardless of how closely it matches their world views. It might be dismissive but it resonates. I've seen people keep voting for the same parties even when the policies have shifted very significantly.

Since you are left leaning, presumably American, a good example is the Republicans. The current policies and values of the Republicans seem to be very different than let's say those of 20 years ago. But you don't see a lot of movement, i.e. you don't really see people saying because your actions of policies changed I'm going to re-evaluate my support for you. Maybe the other team is now closer to my world views. It's a lot more common that people just keep voting for their camp or team. I'm sure there are studies, this is very anecdotal. There are also many e.g. single issue voters, they only care about a single issue and nothing else.

Independent thinkers, who dive deep into issues, who challenge beliefs, who weigh multiple issues and considerations, who potentially shift their position when the goal posts have moved or they've evaluated new information, are rare. It's much easier to stay in an echo chamber/team/tribe. We see this all the time, another example is the pandemic. It's lack of nuance.

You see this in the political discourse. Instead of debating things of substance it's more of a rally around the team approach. You're never going to see in-depth discussion/analysis on tax policies, or security policies. Anything that doesn't meet your world view is automatically discredited whether it has merit or not, It's going to be they bad we good/polarizing/conspiracies etc. This pushes people farther apart and I think it also pushes policies farther apart. Maybe sometimes it is that simple but plenty of times it's not.

A lot of this is due to the failure of the American political system: there is simply no room for a third party. A lot of people don't want to vote for "their" party, it's merely a strategic vote in an attempt to keep the worse of two evil out of power.

If you vote for a third-party candidate, you might just as well not have voted at all. The parties will only genuinely start caring about policy when that gets fixed, and voters will only start looking into politics when there is more than one option on their side of the aisle.

There is room for third parties, but it's a hard road and in my lifetime, I've not seen any parties really try to take the road.

You've got to get your party organized at all levels and running candidates in most contests. Everyone seems to want to run a Presidential candidate, but if you're going to run only one election, it should be one you have a chance of winning. A lot of federal office holders previously held state or local office. If you want to seriously contest federal offices, you need to have candidates with elected experience. So, start with local districts, city council/mayorship, maybe county offices. From there, work towards state office. Then you can pick up some house seats, and eventually senate seats too. When the time is right, maybe try some of your seasoned politicians for President.

Thing is you don’t even need a deep dive. Some things sound fishy. Some things are obvious political spin. This alone should stop people from identifying with any party.

world views change with time and parties lead&follow the process at the same time.

that will be shown strongly in a locked 2 party system like the usa has.

you say it is strange that not more people switch camps, but this is not accidental, an extreme amount of effort and resources are spent to maintain this.

exactly

I think there sadly exists an overlay in a lot of politics, basically tribalism, but I think the better phrasing is "teams" as in "team sports".

You don't like a team for an ideological reason, usually physical closeness or some other arbitrary connection.

For many, the team is the extent at which they analyze politics. You see this when conservatives will reference historical events in terms of the name of the political party. For example, it's relatively common to see someone say "Oh the Democrats are bad because during the Civil war they were on the side of slavery". Their analysis doesn't include the actual policy or ideology at hand, it's simply the team "Democrats". It doesn't matter to them if the flavor of policies that the early 20th century dems supported are similar or even the same as the policies modern Republicans support. Only the team.

I think there exists multiple layers of "tribalism" or "team sports" in politics that effects people differently. The bottom layer is sadly "<Name of party> good, <name of other party> bad". I think at some point we must acknowledge that some people are simply stupid. If they think making an argument based on the politics of a party 100 years ago is convincing, they might just not have the facilities for critical thinking.

A lot of those people are now @-ing grok on twitter to explain even the simplest of jokes.

Thanks, I came here to say the same. Sports fandom is the better metaphor.

It’s lazy participation.

> one group actually reflects everything I believe

If you swap “group” for “religion,” this is how I feel about Catholicism. Make of that what you will.

> align with a progressive, left-leaning ideology.

Cooperation and scalability are two objectively good principles that our species can apply effectively... if and only if there is a genuine desire for cooperative, scalable, positive outcomes.

If social/political discourse has degraded to the point that cooperative, scalable, positive outcomes are off the table, look to those who have taken control of the discourse. Propaganda undermines language itself.

The difference between destructive behavior and constructive behaviour... has a bias.

I think it refers to people, who I have run into quite a lot, who when faced with a new fact about politics or the behaviour of politicians, back the team over the idea.

Like if you were to say consider yourself a progressive. I would consider you a progressive, unless you for instance, supported something incredibly conservative that was performed by a "Good Guy" politician on your team.

For instance, we used to have this chap Daniel Andrews. Who was for better or worse, a mild progressive. He took a very hard stance on Covid related issues. Progressives, backed the man regardless. Conservatives criticised his every move. However, his own human rights review, found that he had violated the human rights of citizens in certain circumstances.

If you mention this to his critics, it reinforces their team. But if you mention this (incredibly obvious good faith criticism) to his supporters, not only does it reinforce their team, but they immediately seek to identify you as someone on the other team. A "crazy anti lockdown conservative" or similar. - That for me is the essence of tribalism.

To be fair I think this is a symptom of social media rather than just political awareness.

I've seen another example over the last few days.

Quite a few people who have been vociferously pro-EU and in favour of their protectionism, tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers have been going crazy over the US imposing tariffs, even though the US rates are far lower than the EU's.

A similar group has historically been strongly against government corruption but recently have been attacking efforts to uncover and stop corruption in the US Federal government.

> efforts to uncover and stop corruption in the US Federal government.

Unserious. The big cheques in Wisconsin don't count? The presidential cryptocurrency?

> even though the US rates are far lower than the EU's

What does "far lower" mean to you? Can you give examples? Because to me, the view "Trumps tariffs are only matching what foreign nations already do" is just factually wrong.

Personally, I just think blanket tariffs as a significant form of government income is highly detrimental, from a foreign policy perspective (=> alienates allies, encourages retaliation), as a tax-substitute (because it's basically a regressive "tax-the-rich-less" scheme, which, given meteorically rising wealth inequality, is the last thing we need) and also for economic development (because there is neither the workforce, nor the actual desire, to build up low-margin manufacturing in the US-- making those products 30% more expensive is not gonna change that meaningfully).

> A similar group has historically been strongly against government corruption but recently have been attacking efforts to uncover and stop corruption in the US Federal government.

I don't have a lot of beef in this, personally, but if you're talking about doge:

I just have to look at their website, and what I see are numbers that don't add up at all, containing a lot of cuts for purely policy reasons, wrapped in highly partisan messaging.

I'd be strongly against that even if they advocated for wheelchair accessibility and gay rights on their twitter, or w/e.

Corruption, to me, is if you buy influence on government policy by spending money on officials, and that is exactly what I see under Trump.

Both of these are basically strawman arguments - there are legitimate, non-tribal reasons to be against the actions taken re: tariffs and the purported anti-corruption tasks. For example, a person can be strongly against government corruption but also be strongly against the current efforts/methods being used for a multitude of reasons. And similar for tariffs. (Not having those debates here, just pointing out that I don't believe those examples hold up.)

You uh seem to have consumed some tribal coolaid lmao.

> US rates are far lower than the EU's.

This is a lie. And no, VAT is not tariff. And no, Trumps formula does not measure tariffs.

> efforts to uncover and stop corruption in the US Federal government.

There were no such efforts. There were efforts to knee cap both transparency and agencies that used to act against corruption. Trumps previous administration was drowning in corruption and there is no reason to think this one is different. Musk is effectively giving government contracts to himself.

agreed -- I also think social media exacerbated this

Always remember that internet conversations are carried by a small group of antisocial losers, and a most of media articles complaining about society are specifically targeting that small but loud group.

An average person has a lot more in common with you than with the imaginary protagonist of this blogpost, who is really smart and wants to show that everyone else is really dumb.

Like other normal people, I discuss politics with friends; both with the ones I mostly agree with and the ones I mostly disagree with. We need to understand game theory and military strategy to have a useful conversation.

>By this reasoning it naturally follows that those of a certain "personality" will also share common beliefs, ideologies

Is this not borne out in your own life experience? Because it sure is in mine.

> I'm not just glomming on to everything one "tribe" or another stands for ... one group actually reflects everything I believe.

I don't think that's unreasonable, but if you're in the US, you should really re-evaluate if this is true just because there are several significant issues over which the parties have flipped over the past few decades (and more if you go back further).

Obviously you didn't specify a party, but as one example: In the 1990s, the left wing party was where the free speech absolutists were. If you were a big "free speech" enthusiast back then and you still are now, then great! If your views have changed, that's fine, too, but there should be alarm bells going off in your head that your views changed along with the tribe.

In the US, you vote for one party or the other. It reduces to tribalism, so why do the extra work to get to the reductive result?

How do you avoid being "tribal" if you are not centerish?

just by being able to understand why you believe what you believe, for each individual view

center-ish is not a requirement, but a correlation -- rarely will someone independently come up with views that 100% match the somewhat-arbitrary positions of the left or right

And what if "middle" is a tribe too ;)

Tribalism is part metaphor, part euphemism. What it’s really getting at is cult behavior. Agreeing with someone on a lot of things isn’t tribal and isn’t cult.

The actual problems of “tribalism” are exactly those of cults: worship of a leader or ideology, zero tolerance for criticism, cutting you off from other support networks, conspiracies, narratives of doom, promises of salvation, framing enemies as degenerates and deplorables, claiming exclusive ownership of truth and morality…

Red and blue alike have cult wings.

Tribalism is just really bad pop-sociology, by people who can't be arsed to read and do their homework on a vast subject matter.

If you think these beleifs are inherent in the temperament of people, that doesnt explain the change of these beliefs over time. Progressive, left leaning ideology had different stances 20 years ago, let alone 50 years or in China or India.

Sometimes this is easier to see from the outside. For example, if the conservative right all independently arrived at the same conclusion based on personality, isnt it strange how the consensus all moves together and changes over time

My impressions were they meant values and you meant policies.

I think you are probably right.

If you find people with shared values, and follow their changing policies, That still seems like tribal behavior to me.

>Others, smarter than me, have gone into great detail about the underpinnings of left-leaning or right-leaning world views in people.

People also change. Until 25 maybe 30,I was left leaning in many issues.

Now I am mostly right aligned.

Martin Luther King was pretty clear what he thought of "the middle":

> I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice

I think holding political opinions on the basis of what a famous (historical) person feels about them is sort of the thing being criticized here.

Sounds like a kind of dumb thing to criticize, then. Picking the side of Martin Luther King Jr. on civil rights is…uh…kind of a difficult position to argue against.

Yet, huge swaths of the US electorate to this day oppose Martin Luther King Jr.'s goals, message, methods, and outcomes.

It's an example of when "not being tribal" is wrong, because one side wanted to keep denying civil rights to a group of people. The correct side was to protest and put pressure on the system. Take the war in Ukraine. There isn't a middle ground between resisting Russian aggression for Ukrainians and fighting back. You either resist, or you get conquered. Not all issues and situations have some happy middle ground where both sides are equal parts wrong/right.

you can be "not tribal" and still protest/put pressure on the system, has nothing to do with being moderate

tribalism refers to how you get your beliefs, not what you do with them

yep, this is the "intentional" moderate which I also classify as tribal

distinctly different from the "accidental" moderate who could harbor indignation against racial prejudice as one of their views

https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

The person receiving the pointy end of a spear doesn't much care whether you explicitly chose to stab him or whether you stabbed him because you are following your tribe.

> The implication instead seems to be that unless you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum you must be "tribal". That feels dismissive.

It's not about where you are on the spectrum. I know neoliberal moderate Democrats, people who would have voted for George H.W. Bush in 1988, who are more tribal about current U.S. politics than any socialist I've met. What makes it unpleasant to talk politics with them is a combination of two things: the narrow set of answers they're willing to accept on every topic, and the anger and suspicion they broadcast at anyone who says anything else. For example, they have an acceptable set of answers for why Trump won in 2024 (racism and sexism) and if you suggest any other contributing factors (like arrogance, elitism, and various screw-ups in the Democratic party) then you must be on the other side, blaming the victims and making excuses for Trump supporters. You can say a dozen things morally condemning Trump and the Republican Party and then make one strategic criticism of the Democrats, and they'll look at you like maybe they can't ever trust you anymore. They'll parade their emotional distress and look at you sideways if you don't have the energy to mirror it. All this without being especially politically informed, politically engaged, or politically radical, or caring if anybody else is informed, engaged, or radical -- they judge themselves and others purely by fervor and narrowness.

yep, this is exactly it -- it's not where you end up, it's the inability to separate from a group

there are tribalists on the left, right, and in the middle

> You can say a dozen things morally condemning Trump and the Republican Party and then make one strategic criticism of the Democrats, and they'll look at you like maybe they can't ever trust you anymore.

I think some of this is a consequence of a decade or so of bad faith "wolf in sheep's clothing" online discourse.

I remember way back before Trump's first term, before GamerGate, before the alt-right when people would "joke" about racist and neonazi stuff on 4chan and elsewhere. It was framed as "We're just kidding around because it's fun to be edgy. It's ironic. Obviously, we're not really racist neonazis." People, mostly teens, took the bait and thought it was all in good fun but over time those ideas sunk in and actually stuck.

The next thing you know, we've got white supremacists parading in broad daylight.

If you poke around the dark (and these days not so dark) corners of the Internet, you can literally find people with toxic fringe beliefs discussing how to subtlely soften up their targets with seemingly innocent "just asking questions" when the ultimate goal is to (1) obscure which tribe they are actually a member of and (2) persuade people over to their tribe without them realizing it.

When you're in an environment where people like that do actually exist and participate in discourse, it's reasonable to wonder if the person you're talking to really does share your beliefs or not.

How are those two situations remotely similar? A criticism of the Democratic Party should not be seen as a morally reprehensible "joke" that you have to walk back like "ha ha, just kidding, I would never criticize the party."

The idea that the Democratic Party is a flawed, mundane institution full of fallible people who make mistakes is not a toxic idea that we need to keep out of the discourse lest it "sink in and actually stick." It's more like medicine that the party is trying to administer to itself with one hand while the other hand tries to bat it away.

> The idea that the Democratic Party is a flawed, mundane institution full of fallible people who make mistakes is not a toxic idea

It's not about the idea which, as you say, is entirely reasonable.

It's about when you're interacting with someone—a stranger on the Internet—and they say something, you're both taking in their idea and also trying to guess at who they are and what their larger agenda is. And for better or worse, we've all spent the past decade or so living in a giant digital commons surrounded by strangers some of whom do have toxic hidden agendas that they are trying to get other people to believe, or at least to not fight back against.

In that environment, when someone criticizes your tribe, it's reasonable to wonder if that person trying to make the tribe stronger by pointing out its fixable flaws or if they are trying to make covert psychological inroads to eventually get you to believe something awful.

This is a real thing that does happen. Years ago, I watched one of my closest, dearest friends, get slowly radicalized by a white supremacist. My friend went from being a totally normal non-racist person to a full-on white supremacist that I had to cut ties with completely.

If the person who radicalized him had said, "Hey, I'm gonna try to get you to hate black people" on day one, my friend would have kicked him to the curb. But he didn't. He was friendly, charismatic. Asking rhetorical questions like, "Affirmative action to lift people up seems like a good idea, but what about poor white people? Who helps them?" That kind of stuff. A tiny step at a time over and over again until one day my friend was no longer my friend.

If you find yourself talking to a person who's ultimate goal is to get you to violate your values, there is no good faith discussion to be had and the best recourse is to identify it as soon as possible and get the fuck out.

With that kind of thinking, tribalism is inevitable.

But you don't have to see it that way. That way of thinking is making excuses for Nazis and Trump supporters. You're saying that once they heard the honeyed words of thinly veiled edgelords on the internet, they couldn't help but be sucked in. Sorry, they could help it. If the only way to stop someone from being a white supremacist is to protect them from the so so compelling case for white supremacy that people are making on 4chan or gaming Discords or wherever that stuff happens, that's on them. They hear the other side as well. They hear enough to understand that the "tiny steps" bringing them to white supremacy aren't arguments, they're little tastes of a way of thinking that can't stand on its own intellectually but offers them comfort and validation. They choose it for social and emotional comfort. You can't rationalize it as intellectual seduction.

The upside of that is, the ideas themselves don't have any power over you if you don't feel an aching need for the warm comforting embrace of a bunch of Nazis. The ideas aren't persuasive. They're the thinnest possible cover for an emotional decision.

I think paragraphs 4 and 5 were more relevant than paragraph 2.

I think one of the distinguishing characteristics of tribalism is the inability to have low-stakes conversations about politics. To somebody who is deep in tribalism, every private ephemeral one-to-one conversation they have is a vital battle which very well may decide the fate of the world, so their vigilance and inflamed passion entirely justified and rational. Being a part of the tribe ruins their humility, the tribe is important, they are wed to the tribe, any political discussion they have is on behave of the tribe, and therefore very important. Alliance with the tribe confers importance to themselves and they thereby lose their humility. They lose the ability to recognize that the conversation isn't actually important, that they can relax and treat the other person like a human rather than a faceless representative of the enemy who they have a vital responsibility to defeat.

You are right that you don't take part in tribalism, because you first have a value structure and then you looked critically at the political landscape and found where you have the largest overlap.

But tribalism is absolutely an issue in the modern age with huge swathes of population falling into social media echo chambers. People first find their tribe, and then they define their own personality by the views of that tribe, not the other way around.

Just look at all the people spewing "own the libs" or "maga fucktards". A significant portion of the population doesn't vote based on rational analysis, but by being part of a crowd. They don't even care or know what they vote for, as long as they are sticking it to people they perceive as enemies.

I think this is basically the terminal/minimum of the modern social network algo optimization. Everything is maximally polarized, nobody is willing to engage in good faith discussion with people who hold different views. Everyone has a known enemy and known allies and they can be fed what they like to hear and thus continue being addicted.

I don't know how to get out of this :(

The United States especially is having a face to face with tribalism - if you live here and you don't see it you are basically blind.

We have parents posting that they are glad their child is dead instead of getting the measles vaccine, an entire pandemic that was ignored and downplayed, an election denied.

These are all simple examples of tribalism - choosing the tribe over ones own self interest and well being. Most sane people don't offer their children up to Baal.

I think tribalism is being thought of as a pejorative when it isn’t. It merely is a phenomenon. What you describe above about yourself is pure tribalism of how you identify with the liberal tribe and could never even picture yourself as a member of other tribe. This is no different to me than a rabbi or priest talking about the tenets of their faith and how that leaves them no option but to be a member of that religion due to the moral underpinnings of those tenets that they believe in.

Tribal politics happen when we take these various tribes in our society and essentially blind them to their biases to the point where they can’t imagine at all why someone would even be in that other tribe. A complete loss of critical thinking ability emerges once it becomes us and them and not some of us and others of us, one species, no tribes, many ideas.

Do you actually believe all liberals are good and can do no evil? Do you actually believe all conservatives are cartoonishly evil idiots? I’d hope you could see the nuance but your description makes it seem like there is one way but the highway. And the reflexive counter argument from the liberals is “but racism” but then again, explain the phenomenon of the black or latino Trump supporter? Clearly there is more nuance going on in what is sensible to people than what we can gleam out of the black and white painted descriptions from the thought leaders in our tribe.

Just in the last election cycle, we saw tribal Democratic voters try and silence those protesting the Biden administration and then immediately go "we have always been at war with Eurasia" and do the exact same thing for Kamala.

And MAGA goes beyond being tribal: by any objective measure, it's a cult.

Plus you see an awful lot of people who will criticize one side for doing one thing while supporting the other side for doing the exact same thing. Obama, for example, was the Deporter-in-Chief (~3 million deported), Biden continued the Trump policy of using Title 42 to deny asylum claims and Kamala proposed building the very same border wall that all Democrats protested when Trump proposed it in 2020.

I'm a leftist and any leftist will have seen so many liberals who love progressive aesthetics but turn into a jack-booted fascist the second you want to address any of the underlying economic issues. For example, tell people "house prices need to come down" to solve any number of issues such as homelessness and see how they react.

> The implication instead seems to be that unless you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum you must be "tribal". That feels dismissive.

On this, I 100% agree. There are several reasons why:

1. Intellectual laziness. People think they're "above the fray" by bothsidesing everything;

2. Ignorance. This is particularly an issue for Democratic voters in the US. Both Democrats and Republicans are neoliberals. US foreign policy is bipartisan. Full-throated support for capitalism is bipartisan. But a large segment of Democrats tell themselves they're good people for wearing a pride pin while at the same time thinking homeless people should die in the stree; or

3. Deception. This is particularly the case for Republicans who will try and center their positions by appealing to "common sense" and label Democrats, who are a center-right party, as "the far Left" or "the radical Left".

So, yes, people do use "tribalism" as an epithet to silence legitimate criticisim but there is also tribalism.

I'm 52. For me, there was a time when it was considered impolite to talk about sex, religion and politics. Then it became super fun when done with open/questioning/rational/critical minds, and a lot of progress in my own thinking was achieved from the usually non-threatening but lively debates and fights among friends and family for ideas. Then it shifted in the last ten or fifteen years. When social media started having friends of friends, the tribalism kicked in. It was explained very well in a talk between Maria Ressa and Jon Stewart. She is brilliant, and well worth listening to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsHoX9ZpA_M

Everything is because of increasing wealth inequality, it is the root cause of almost every societal problem. It was easier to have non-threatening debates because everyone felt more secure. When people are stressed and afraid, the debates aren’t just intellectual exercises but things that could mean the loss of real opportunities in their lives. This is a trend that has been going on for a very long time, Pikkety showed mathematically that it’s easier to make money when you already have money and this runaway process is nearing an extreme.

I firmly believe that if wealth distribution today was the same as it was in the 70s-90s, the culture wars would be significantly dampened or non existent. If people could still buy homes, afford to have kids and healthcare, we would all be able to talk about religion, sex, and politics without this extreme tribalism. It’s happening because there are way more “losers” in the economic game now, it’s become a life or death issue, and people are looking for who to blame.

I largely agree. Recently I'm somewhat minded to think the issue is actually about the huge expansion of the rentier class. The problem began with the adoption of neoliberalism and the mainstreaming of the idea that you could reasonably "earn" money by simply having money. Prior classical and Keynesian thought railed against such rent seeking and sought to eliminate it as a parasitic drag on the economy.

Since the decision was made post GFC to bail out the banks and protect capital over the normal person that just wanted a house to live in, the position of the rentiers has been consolidated hugely. We have Rachel Reeves thinking we in the UK can build a growth strategy on the back of financial services (which generally means "rent-extraction services"). A rational system would separate the GDP from the real economy from the income from rent extraction, and seek to eliminate the latter.

To the common man, they see themselves working longer and harder than they used to and getting a smaller and smaller slice of the pie. It turns out when your real outputs have to support a sizeable portion of the population who have dedicated their lives to the art of rent extraction to live like kings, you don't see much of the gain.

I have many contemporaries that have gone into finance. A vast pool of intellectual capability, shuffling money around playing zero sum games, and ultimately protected from loss by the power of the state.

> It was easier to have non-threatening debates because everyone felt more secure. When people are stressed and afraid, the debates aren’t just intellectual exercises but things that could mean the loss of real opportunities in their lives.

You’re right that people feel less secure, but that doesn’t mean that they are correct when they feel that.

By pretty much any measure, I believe that people in 2025 are far more secure than they were in 1975, 1985 or 1995.

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affordability & inflation & services =/= wealth inequality

It roughly does for inelastic goods like housing, education, and healthcare

All of these can be more elastic. See: zoning reform and prices in blue cities vs red cities, single-payer healthcare in every developed country other than the US. Inequality is not the distinguishing factor.

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> Then it shifted in the last ten or fifteen years. When social media started having friends of friends, the tribalism kicked in. It was explained very well in a talk between Maria Ressa and Jon Stewart.

Also by Jon Stewart on Crossfire in 2004: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE&t=310s

The critique about what passes for debate is as apt today as it was then.

Agree social media is a big problem. It lets people live in an imaginary reality echo chamber.

However in the real world and 1:1 you can still have good discussions with smart people who disagree with you. And we need to have those.

yeah I actually also enjoy it when the other party is more interested in learning than winning

will check this out, thanks for reading!

Very much this. The world has changed. It used to be that assuming other people have a low capacity for political reason was itself a "political position" - namely elitism. Folks like Orwell come from a long, long tradition of the educated and socially astute working class. Social media turned the joy of everyday political banter, rational scepticism, and good-natured disputation into a bourgeois pissing contest with seemingly life-or-death stakes.

> but lively debates and fights among friends and family for ideas

The missing ingredient is "intellectual honesty". It used to be the case that when you talked to people on the right they would

    - refer to events that actually happened and true statements about the world
    - accept them in the context of wider events (although there's always been a risk of making policy from one exeptional incident)
    - make an argument that followed logically from those

I can strongly sympathize. The image with the squares and circles hit home hard, from an early age, it's been pretty lonely. Depending on your environment it can be super hard to find others part of the 1%, so you really need to treasure them when you do find them.

One point of criticism:

The usage of the word "moderate". It seems PG's article is the one to blame here. The word "moderate" when used about politics means something to people in English. And given that meaning, saying that independent thought leads to one being "moderate", is straight up wrong. What the article is really talking about is that independent thought leads to a set of beliefs that is unlikely to be a very good fit for any particular ideology, and therefore, political party. That's true! But that's not "moderate". That's.. diverse, pragmatic, non-ideological. Those words aren't ideal either, but "moderate" is definitely not it.

The 99%/1% is also greatly overstated in a way. Firstly, it's definitely dependent on locale, culture, subculture, environment, as the writer already says themselves. More importantly, if you manage to somehow get people 1:1 in an environment where they feel safe, it turns out that many actually aren't that tribal/ideological after all, and they do actually have beliefs that span different mainstream tribes. But then that conversation finishes, and they go back to being a tribe member.

I'm pretty sure there's plenty of experiments that directly show the above. That when you give people policy choices that are non-obvious (e.g. they've never thought about), and then make them vote on them, they'll often vote against their tribe. But if you'd beforehand tell them which tribe voted which way, they'll always vote with the tribe.

There's a specific explanation saying that that's not what it's saying

I can call something "purple" and then give a specific explanation I mean "computer" by it, but I just shouldn't be using purple like that in the first place. The word "moderate" is too entrenched, gives people an immediate instinctive, emotional reaction based on the established meaning of the word. This is not the word to repurpose here.

> After seven years in San Diego, my wife and I have decided to uproot our family and move to the Bay Area. While there were many factors (a new job opportunity, family), a significant reason was finding a community of truth-seeking people.

Funny. The lack of truth-seeking and truth-telling is one of the chief reasons I moved away from the Bay Area.

You'll find unquestioning dogmatism everywhere you go unfortunately.

For what it's worth, the odds for rationally evaluating political ideas tend to go up around folks that have gone to universities that are known for some decent level of intellectual rigor.

Still not great though, some of the most dogmatic people I've met in my life were professors and undergrads. But those that were the opposite more than made up for that.

It sounds like you're describing what I know as trait openness?

Discussion of new ideas is an "openness" thing.

Funnily enough personality traits are a strong predictor for political preference. Personality traits are also a predictor of career choices.

You can't say that and then not share where you moved to. Now I'm curious. I don't live in the Bay Area so not defending it in any way.

Haha. Tucson.

curious where you moved?

I completely understand it could not have what we're looking for, which is why this was only one component among larger ones (family + new job)

Tucson :)

I like it. There's an easier answer to "why don't people move from tribe to view". It's because it's painful to question one's own beliefs, and that's how that change happens. In fact such a move appears masochistic to many, since it almost never pays to undermine loyalty in favor of principle.

I hypothesize that we're seeing the influence of the legal system on the public turbo-charged by Citizens United money. An attorney is paid to be a "zealous advocate" for their client. This means never spending effort on anything that might be against the client's interest. Self-reflection is stochastically against their interest, so why even risk it? Considering alternative views might be against your interest, so why risk it? Therefore, in this new zeitgeist, such behavior is not just perverse and painful, but even unethical and wrong.

The problem, of course, is that for this system of adversarial argument you need an impartial judge. In theory that would be the public, but it turns out flooding people's minds with unethical lawyer screed 24x7 turns more people into lawyers, not judges. "The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it." This could very well refer to the value of dignity, honor, integrity, fairness in debate, respect for one's opponents. These are always under assault, but in the last 10 years they have been decimated to the point people don't remember they ever held sway and young people don't know what politics was like when they did.

Challenging your own viewpoints is not just hard, it's downright dangerous. You can really lose your sense of identity and question your own morals if you are not well-grounded. It's much easier to dig your heels in and try to limit your self-reflection to be more "safe". (I still think you should question your viewpoints, but I don't blame people for being a little afraid.)

This is especially true if you have a history of being somewhat cruel to people on the basis of a conclusion you're not really 100% sure you agree with anymore. Now if you question it, you have a lot of guilt to contend with.

OTOH, I am the kind of person who feels great joy in discovering that I have been wrong about something, I have learned something better, and I have deepened my understanding. It could be about anything. Challenging my viewpoints is very enjoyable.

It surprises me that most people don't seem to feel that way and I struggle to understand why. Apparently, people often feel angry and alienated by the truth. I think that never makes sense, but I've learned to accept that people simply feel threatened by the truth sometimes and I can't usually convince them otherwise.

I feel this way too, it's in one of the footnotes actually

"[8] Few things give me greater joy than a discovery-ridden conversation with smart friends, and this is only enhanced if I learn something I previously believed to be true is actually wrong. Seriously, come prove some core belief I have as wrong and you will quite literally make my week."

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for writing! This is a very well written essay that I need to read repeatedly.

Ty! I wrote it for myself / to send people to when we encounter the same conversation loop haha

You have to be wrong to learn. Sure it can be frustrating to try to make or do something difficult. But you've never done it before, of course you're not going to know all the correct answers! It just makes it all the more sweet when you do make progress and start to know more about a subject.

I generally agree, but some views wind up being pretty central to one's identity. It's easy to give up a viewpoint where the stakes are very low, but the stakes can potentially be very, very high (on a personal level.)

I suppose, but there is no such thing as objective morality, it's all subjective. That’s not to say people shouldn’t feel guilt or hesitate when evaluating their past actions, but we often act based on the best framework we had at the time.

Morality evolves, both personally and culturally, and trying to hold a static identity in the face of that change just leads to more internal conflict. It’s uncomfortable, yeah, but clinging to certainty for safety’s sake can be more corrosive in the long run.

I would say as I've gotten older, I've actually tried to be a little more grounded in my beliefs. Our political world is so crazy, that I think sometimes, it can even be hard being committed to basic kindergarten morality. "Look at all these bad people doing bad things and being successful, maybe I should do bad things to be more successful" is a challenge to your viewpoints that is worth cutting off at the roots.

Yep agree with this a lot, identity-shattering is dangerous indeed

I totally disagree. "Shattering" one's identity (which is a completely fictional idea, only existing inside one's head) is essential for finding one's place in the universe.

Failure to adopt an accurate perspective of one's place in the universe is the greatest source of human anxiety.

Plus, if you can't discuss something like politics with people, are they really your friends at all? Not very good ones at least...

Sorry I should clarify, I personally agree with you and share your opinion on shattering identifies being a positive

But I understand why someone may not want to I guess

"since it almost never pays to undermine loyalty in favor of principle"

nailed it imo, thanks for reading!

.. "we will need writers who remember freedom" Ursula Le Guin

Both of our best ways at getting to the truth - Journalism and Science - rely on entertaining and following all sorts of contradictory ideas and then comparing them with observed reality.

Universities in particular need to be physically safe spaces, where ideas of every kind can be mercilessly attacked.

We are losing what took so long to build.

They become too entangled with identity. The advantage of holding one's identity loosely, and attributing it one's actions, is it facilitates changing one's mind about certain things, or updating beliefs in increments.

Thoughtful perspective on the social risks of political discussions. However, respectfully engaging with differing viewpoints is valuable for personal and societal growth. Perhaps focusing discussions on understanding each other's underlying values and experiences, rather than specific political positions, could lead to more productive conversations.

I have no reason to "respectfully engage" with beliefs like 'trans people should all be put in jail' (https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/texa...) or 'kill all the Jews' (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/nazis-r...).

On the flip side, one black man has reformed hundreds of KKK members through conversation alone.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Courtesy:_Daryl_Dav...

Sometimes you have to fight¹, but other times engaging with an open mind² really is the most efficient strategy. Shouting at the opposition only cements them in their own thinking; to change minds you have to understand and engage them where they’re at. And yes, this is way easier said than done and can be quite frustrating.

¹ You probably won’t convince a fascist dictator to change their ways by appealing to their better nature, and it would take too long while irreperable damage is being done.

² Even if the other side believes in something appallingly hateful.

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This can be done, carefully, through in-person conversations. I think it may be nearly impossible on social media, whose primary purpose seems to be to enforce group identity.

This. I try to meet everyone where they are when entering into political discussions. I’ve learned a lot from people as a result of this and — I’d like to think — have successfully communicated an understanding of my own perspectives. Being able to sit down and talk to someone you disagree with is so important and I feel it is something we have gradually lost over time.

The perspective of the article is completely delusional. The idea that the author thinks they are above the petty "tribe" politics and have based their views on rationality and scientific evidence is complete bollocks.

The author has less self-awareness that the classic "I voted for the guy everyone else is voting for" guy. At least the later has a hint of consciousness about his own limitations.

Every ideology under the sun thinks they are based on objective truth. In reality our political views are shaped by the friends we have, our family, our upbringing, our social class, the media we consume, the experiences we made, our deep core vales and so much more. Most of it is not even conscious.

If you think you are above it all, you are just deluding yours. You just enjoy being in the enlightened centrist tribe or whatever.

Not choosing a stance is also choosing stance. If you see injustice and decide to stay neutral you decided to side with the oppressor.

In the end it is up to you to decide which tribe you want to belong. Do you want to march with those that fight for human dignity and social progress or those that want to oppress the many for the benefit of the few. Or do you want to sit by the sidelines while other people are striped of their human rights?

I'll just add one thing I learned: what people do is way more important than what they say or what their politics is.

I now find it much more practical to focus on things we can agree on and actually do something about in the real world and try to build from that.

Generic political debates are not very actionable and they are risky for social reasons mentioned in the article, so I think they are largely a waste of time with negative externalities.

I like this, but what we do, is vote. Between work and kids there is no more time “to do”. I donate to UNICEF but that’s it.

Work and raising kids are important activities that are a great way to take the measure of a person.

What more do you really need to look at?

Work, raise kids, vote to let women die rather than remove an already-dead fetus--yeah, sorry, people dying does kinda matter to me, actually, and I don't think that's crazy or can be dismissed as "tribalism".

That is not the point I was making.

But also literally nobody is voting for that.