Why does everything have to be so polarized these days?

Great Debates
21

As near as I can tell, one side is saying: We have to be able to hold people on bail, or else we have to let people loose pending trial no matter what other crimes they may commit in the meantime; and some people let loose pending trial do commit crimes, some of them awful crimes.

And another side is saying: Holding people on bail unfairly punishes the people who don’t have much money, while letting rich people buy their way out. And the people who were able to buy their way out on bail sometimes also commit crimes after making bail; some of them awful crimes.

And I would say: whether or not people can be held in jail awaiting trial ought to depend on whether they’re a danger to others, and possibly on how much of a flight risk they are; not on how much money they have or can scrounge from friends and family. But I don’t see why we have to let a child molester loose pending trial when he’s already been convicted twice of similar crimes and has already repeated his behavior while out pending trial; and I don’t think that whether we do or not should depend whether or not he can raise bail. And I don’t see why an abuser needs to be let out to murder his ex, just because he could raise the money to pay the bail, back before they changed the law in this state. (I’m thinking of two specific semi-local cases; though the first one apparently is now in jail. The victim in the second is still dead.) So maybe that is a middle of the road position? But it is a position against using cash bail, so maybe it isn’t.

ETA: @Mangetout: I think we’re talking about making statements on a message board, not about driving all day to show up at a legislative hearing, or even about spending hours calling up legislators or volunteering on a call line. And if somebody’s got the time and energy to make statements on a message board that are being criticized, they presumably have the time and energy to read and think about the criticisms; or else to just hit “close” instead of “reply” or “post topic”.

22

The law, in its majestic equality, allows rich and poor alike to buy their way out of jail!

23

Indeed.

24

Sure, that does make a difference in what people will express - if they don’t have strong enough feelings one way or t’other, they probably won’t post anything, but the post I was replying to seemed to be stating that there are issues where there simply doesn’t exist any ground in the middle.

25

Q: Why is everything so polarized these days?
A: Because one of the two polarized sides is walking down a well-trodden, well-documented path towards murdering a whole lot of people who aren’t just like them.

Settling yourself comfortably in the middle is a position of privilege. It means you aren’t in one of the groups that will be against the wall when the fascists finish taking over. It means you aren’t scared.

26

It means that you don’t think you’ll be in one of those groups.

Quite a lot of people have been wrong about that sort of thing before.

27

Yes, very fair. The folks who haven’t bothered to learn from history are also in that group.

28

Everything is so polarized due to the paradoxical situation we find ourselves in.

Everything sucks. Elections, healthcare, housing, employee and consumer protections, etc. are unacceptably dysfunctional. We are a society in decline, and a body in decline turns upon digesting itself.

Everything is great. I’m holding more computing power and data retrieval in my palm than the university I attended forty five years ago. But with great power comes great responsibility. And who wants responsibility?

Cited in the PBS American Experience episode on Eugenics, in WWI many army inductees had never held a pencil in their lives (like the Dalits of India who were prohibited from doing so). Gore Vidal once cited a survey conducted soon after Nov. 1963 where 60% of the Americans polled had never heard of John F. Kennedy.

But in 2024 we’re so much more informed. Well, only informed enough that we’re all self-entitled to absolute opinions. Hopefully that will evolve until we reach healthy self-doubt.

29

I’ve only just started reading this, but it purports to answer some of the questions you raise:

I’m only a short ways in so I can’t give you a review, but it’s generally been well-received.

So far, he’s proposed a spectrum that isn’t left/right, but rather with high-order thinking on one hand and low-order thinking on the other. High-order thinkers don’t let tribalism interfere with their beliefs, and are generally capable of holding them in various degrees of confidence, playing devil’s advocate, and so on. Low-order thinking is intensely tribal and virtually immune to evidence. We all engage with all points on the spectrum at various times, but it seems that current society is degrading into more low-order thinking.

The book hasn’t gotten much into the why quite yet, but one thing that’s come up is that sometimes a small number of people can shut down nuanced discussion with the application of not much power. It only takes punishing a small number of people for heretical views to get everyone aligned, whether they believe in the polar extremes or not. On the other hand, it doesn’t take that much pushback to make those people irrelevant. A few people need to be willing to risk getting fired, or having the media say bad things about them, and so on–but if they do so, others get much more comfortable expressing non-conformist views, because the power of the “inquisitors” is shown to be fairly weak.

30

I want to add a couple more reasons to @Velocity’s list and others.

A first, and this is by no means limited to political parties, is the polarization based on information and (perhaps more importantly) MISinformation.

So, staying out of politics for the moment, if all the information you’re given on a topic (take smoking as an example!) comes from a single source that you suport, you dismiss 100% the other side, even if their sources happen to be questionable. However, the other side is going to dismiss your sources with just as much fervor.

Both sides are arguing from an alternate factual universe, and sometime will continue to do so, EVEN IF THEIR SOURCES ADMIT TO ERRORS.

And of course, things get worse when a social or political agenda gets added to, and amplifies misinformation.

Back to the US and politics, anti-vaxxers were a minority, who could fall on either side of the political spectrum, from crystal hugging only all natural materials to rugged individualists who would say no just because they could say no.

And then, for reasons the Republican party decided that COVID vaccines and mandates were WRONG and all of a sudden in addition to some real information, and a metric ton of MISinformation, not getting said vaccine was the only answer as a gawd-fearin’ murrican. OMFG. And thus we have even Trump boo’d for mentioning his vax efforts, because that agenda became the facts for most of the MAGA movement.

But it boils down to information.

People are polarized because we can’t even agree on a common frame of reference anymore. You have a very hard time arguing, in presumed good faith, because the facts (and to many, that’s a dirty word) are NOT the same for both sides.

And that brings me to my last point. “In Presumed Good faith.”

It’s a presumption that while the norm (despite individual posts, posters, and the heat of the moment) on this message board, is rarely the case IRL. If you speak on a polzarized subject out there in the world, the people who want to talk about it are very often already convinced or decided, regardless of what facts may or may not be case. They want to WIN or score points, they don’t want to discuss merits. And to win, they just deny 100%.

And so, many people, who might agree 80%, or 90% like the OP or @Beckdawrek choose not to play the game. And for those who are playing the zero-sum game above, they choose to assume that everyone either agrees with them or is the enemy, and ignore the much quieter, much reachable members in the middle, to everyone’s despair.

I am reminded of an old post of mine about gun control. On each end of the debate there are extremes, where an compromise is equal to a total loss. Moving inward, there are those who are pro or anti-gun, but who figure a compromise and/or legislation gives both sides something they want but at least improves the situation more than getting stuck with one extreme or the other. And then there are chunk that aren’t passionate either way barring a personal event where after a mass shooting they want some improvement, or some attack want more protection. Either way, those in the middle tend to fall back towards apathy outside of the immediate stimulus.

The extremes, or the common sense moderates on either side, should be courting the apathetic, but instead tend to spend their time shouting at their opposites, or worse, those that seek compromise because, as said, the perception that “you’re supposed to be on my side” raises more outrage than complete opposition.

So, TL:DR the addtional factors for me are information/misinformation disconnect, the addition of politics to (largely) non-political issues, bad faith, and the zero-sum game mentality.

31

Things are so polarised because nobody wants to see things from other people’s point of view anymore. People think they understand the other side, but they don’t. For every one person who has an honest disagreement with people on the other side of an issue, and who’s based that disagreement on a patient, open-minded study and evaluation of their beliefs, there are a thousand lazy assholes whose understanding of the other side is restricted to Instagram memes, clickbait, tweet threads written by stupid people who think they’re smart, and other dumb bullshit. It’s all the more depressing because there’s no fixing it and it’s only going to get worse. Outrage, stupidity, and self-righteousness are all far too lucrative.

32

You know, this kind of makes me wonder.

On, say, abortion, I don’t think I belong here. I think the consensus hereabouts would be wildly against my position, in that I’d kick things off by enthusiastically agreeing with the Supreme Court majority that striking down Roe was absolutely the right call — but there’s no solace for me on the other side of the polarization, because the next thing out of my mouth would be that I likewise agree with the folks now voting to make abortion rights the law of the land in the wake of that decision. So — what? I doubt I’d be all that welcome on either side; where does that leave me?

And so it goes, on issue after issue, and I don’t even know how much detail I can go into; for example, I’m honestly not sure whether I’d be warned or suspended or banned here for mentioning my position on transgender individuals — but, for the moment, suffice to say that I know it’s too far to the left to satisfy plenty of folks on the right, even while I suspect it’s too far to the right for, well, this board.

But I can’t even test that without risking the ability to post here at all.

Oh, sure, on some issues I’m, uh, polarized all the way to the right, and on some all the way to the left — but time and again I find both sides polarized against, y’know, me. And I kind of wonder how many other people out there keep finding themselves splitting their tickets likewise.

33

Same place I’m at, if it makes you feel better. I think Roe v. Wade was a weak precedent that “deserved” to be shut down, while also supporting the state-level abortion rights laws that popped up (including the ballot measure in my own state), while also thinking Democrats dropped the ball in not getting a Federal law, while also thinking that RvW (ignoring the lack of constitutional basis) was actually a pretty good compromise because it explicitly didn’t assign infinite rights to either fetus or mother, and so on.

None of these things remotely contradict each other, but taken as a whole they are “off-axis” with respect to mainstream political belief clusters. And so as you found, anyone off-axis in this way is not welcome by anyone. Nothing to do but accept it.

34

Moderating

Before this becomes a hijack, drop the Roe Vs. Wade and abortion talk. You can of course start a new thread.

35

There are lots of folks who are particularly sensitive about a subject. For a myriad of reasons.

You just cannot know who these people are.
If you’re in a group and speaking your mind on some issue, or maybe just spouting off you’re gonna step on someone.

No amount of cajoling, citing, preaching, name calling or put downs will work.
I find it better to not do this.
If we’re all adults who care about our fellow earthlings and are not mean spirited, maybe you can get across an idea or two. And everyone goes home happy.

Just because you can is not a good reason to hurt people.

If you feel you’re that good join a debate team or write a book.
It seems silly to me to polarize social or family get togethers because you might think you’re the smartest cookie in the jar.

If it’s your official capacity/responsibility to tell others it’s my way or the highway then that’s a different thing.

36

Understood, but it is difficult to talk about polarization without having concrete examples. One of the key features of polarization is the idea that if you believe X, then you must also believe Y and Z, without having demonstrated any connection. And worse–if you disbelieve any of X, Y, and Z, then you are in the enemy camp.

It arises from tribalism and the belief that to make “your side” stronger, then everyone must be in perfect alignment, and that everyone else is a heretic. In that sense, it’s not even wrong, but is poisonous to effective discourse and to society as a whole.

We can talk in purely abstract terms like this, but it’s not as obvious what’s going on without relevant, contemporary examples.

37

I think part of what you are describing is a purity spiral. Groups demand greater and greater confirmity: a group of people who agree with each other 90% forms. But then it expells those who don’t agree 95%. Then that remnant expells those that don’t agree 99%.

Here’s one example of a recent one:

A classic one is the French Revolution–early revolutionaries were disposed of by later revolutionaries for being insufficiently revolutionary. Revolutions devour their own children.

38

That knitters article contains another interesting term:

39

This is true on social media. Off it, things are a little more hopeful. It’s a lot harder to make sweeping dismissive statements like “the cruelty is the point”, which demonizes the opposition and assumes that their arguments come from bad faith rather than different information, when you’re facing a real person that you have actual human connection with. Also, there is a large group of people who don’t care much about politics and therefore aren’t particularly politically tribalized - those people will probably be fine.

The big problem is that left and right are often operating from different facts - and this is just as big a problem on the left as on the right now. Mainstream, non-extremist news sources don’t generally lie, but they certainly can and do pick their sources to support a particular narrative - and more and more people not only avoid extremist sources, but even mainstream sources that don’t support their political side. So they genuinely don’t understand how people could possibly fail to see X when there’s so much evidence for X and absolutely no evidence for Not X (when in fact there is plenty of evidence for Not X, just printed in the other side’s news sources)

40

That term comes up a fair amount in the book I mentioned above. What’s curious is how strong a force it can be, and yet still be fragile. You can have everyone lying about their beliefs, and even have everyone know that everyone else is lying about their beliefs–and yet still have a situation where heretics are cast out (whether that means expelled from the knitting club or murdered on the street). And yet it doesn’t take much to break the spell–you often just need a few heretics, who give others confidence that they can join the unbelievers with relative safely. The whole thing can unravel rapidly once this process starts.

I have to admit, I am not a fan of some things that appear on this board. For instance, declarations of support for Ukraine, etc. via avatar, or threads where people declare they’re allied with some cause. These things are obviously not bad in and of themselves. But under the right conditions, they can develop into a purity spiral. The knitting thing started with a simple hashtag #diversknitty. Somehow it went in a toxic direction almost immediately. The SDMB seems to have some immunity to this sort of thing, but we shouldn’t be complacent. I was witness to the schism in the atheism community (also mentioned in the article). It can happen to anyone.