That was me. 
But while I agree with most of your insightful post, I’ll still insist that these people are idiotic, not merely misled. Because millions upon millions of others who have the identical complaints have not become obsessed with Hillary’s emails, non-existent immigration crises, and Mr. Potatohead’s gender. It takes a certain degree of idiocy to not only be misled but continue to be misled, deeper and deeper down the alternate reality rabbit hole, while millions of your fellow citizens manage to live in a fact-based reality.
Do you want to cross an international border six times making your way westward from Virginia to Nevada? Because I don’t.
No, we don’t.
We have a small batch of people on each of multiple sides who hate everybody on one or more of the other sides. And we have a larger, but still far less than total, number of people on each of multiple sides who have been convinced by the news they’re being handed (and sometimes by actual experience with some of the small batch) that large numbers of people on another side hate them, and also that they’re the ones who are carrying the others; and a news delivery system which is highly conducive to encouraging this, whether in the interests of getting more clicks or in the interests of deliberately trying to tear the country apart or under the deluded impression that once demons have been conjured up the thing to do is to keep feeding and housing them in the forlorn hope that they can then be gotten to only eat other people. (It won’t work.)
That’s a damn dangerous situation, yes. But joining those who are trying to tear the country apart is extremely unlikely to improve it any.
– oh, good speech, @Stranger_On_A_Train.
The people who will freely pack up and move for that reason have, in many cases, already done so. And some will continue to do so; because some people indeed don’t give much of a damn where they live.
There are one hell of a lot of people, on both/multiple sides, who will not “freely” pack up their lives and move from the place they do want to live to places that, for whatever reasons, they’d already decided they don’t want to be. They would have to be driven; or shot on the spot. Me, I’m going for the latter. I’ve seen what happens, in some cases, when people pack up and go where they’re told because the powers that be have decided that Your Kind Don’t Belong Here.
But it almost certainly wouldn’t. Because that part would also become shitty; whether because of the terrible things it had to do to split off, because of economic collapse, or because of a perpetual state of near or actual war with the other part(s). Or, most likely, because of all three.
Reading this thread, I had an interesting thought that I investigated.
I graduated high school in 1972 in Irving, TX (50th reunion next year!!)
I searched my 1972 yearbook and came up with 93% White, 5.8% Hispanic, 1.01% black. The numbers in 2021: 8% White, 80.8% Hispanic, 7% black.
I think that demographic change will shift the politics and elections.
Yeah, and now both sides of that argument have nuclear weapons. That was NOT an improvement!
I don’t think anyone said anything that implied that people would be forced to relocate based on their political beliefs. That really isn’t necessary. People are overestimating how big a change needs to happen to make meaningful change. Shifting a lot of issues from being 48/52 to being something like 60/40 would massively change the agenda of each country even though a significant minority of each still supports policies against the grain.
Mmmhmm, the people who support Donald Trump and the people who support Bernie Sanders are exactly the same sort of people and no one is better than anyone else and all sides are the same! When you say stuff like this, you’re doing PR work on behalf of the bad actors. If Trump and the republican war on reality haven’t convinced you that they are uniquely bad actors and not everyone is the same, literally nothing could. You are dogmatic on the issue of declaring that all sides are the same and reality cannot affect your view.
It’s one side that’s actively trying to make the country worse. To disenfranchise voters, to deny the results of elections, to oppress women and minorities, to show blatant disregard for their fellow citizens by essentially being pro-covid, etc.
While we’re doing all of this, maybe we can ship all of the both-siderism people off to Alaska.
Hey, they do it in the EU…
Oh, wait, those people AGREED to do it.
Nevermind.
Dan
This attempt at making them to be equal is simply ignoring reality
I don’t have to be convinced by the news. I don’t even watch the news. I am convinced by the people that I interact with on a daily basis. They tell me how much they hate others because they don’t agree with them politically, and they tell me how much they hate others who look different, or speak different, or think different.
Maybe they are convinced by the news that they should hate their fellow citizens of this country, but it is not the news that comes to my shop and spews hatred. It is your everyday middleclass suburban whites. I had a guy come in yesterday who had a shirt that was an American flag made out of guns, and he told me in no uncertain terms that he was prepared to defend our nation from those Democrats who are trying to destroy it. This only stands out because it was yesterday, and I thought the flag made out of guns thing was a bit clever.
The few like minded individuals that I know in the area keep their heads down, they carefully feel out others to see if they are safe to express themselves, knowing that if they express their liberal sentiments to the wrong person, then harassment is the least of the consequences that they will face.
It is quite dangerous, and I do not look to join in with those who are trying to tear this country apart, that’s being done enough. I am simply pragmatic, and see that this country is being pulled apart, and don’t see a good outcome if things continue on this way.
It’s an abusive relationship, and all you are doing here is telling us that we should just continue to take it. That it is our fault, and that we should just do a better job folding the towels to appease the abusers.
Would you really counsel someone to stay in an abusive relationship because divorce is complicated?
In order to get away from those who hate us, we actually need to move to another country. That’s actually pretty complicated. If we have a time when we can move within the current country with knowledge of where the new borders will be, then more people will pack up and go to those areas that are more fitting with their view on civilization.
I don’t think that anyone should be forced to move if they don’t want to. No one at all is saying that anyone would be told where to go, not anyone at all, so I’m not sure what the reason for you bringing that up is.
OTOH, if we do split up, then I wouldn’t want to be in the conservative side if I were any form of minority, as you would lose all protections, and be subject to the hatred and abuse with the power of the govt, rather than the sometimes somewhat effective protection of it. We already get plenty of “Your Kind Don’t Belong Here.” in the areas that would certainly be part of the conservative split.
Depends on what terrible things you think are necessary for such a split. I’m not sure anything terrible has to happen, not sure why you would insist it must. There doesn’t need to be an economic collapse either, many of the less shitty parts of the country do just fine without any input from the shittier parts. No longer bankrolling them would actually only improve their economic situation.
You do have a point about war, though. It is likely that when the shitty parts of the country start becoming more shitty as they embrace their failed ideals, that they might start some shit, and blame their misfortunes on the part of the country that they left. OTOH, they would have difficulty maintaining any form of military, as that requires a strong government, taxes, and a good economy. So, they would more likely just turn to terrorism. Rather than an open war, we would have conservatives blowing up buildings and marketplaces with suicide and truck bombs, IED’s and the like. The liberal side of the split can then decide how it wants to respond to such provocations.
I think that a split country would be absolutly shitty for everyone who lives in the red side, and marginally better for those who lived on the blue side. I think that not addressing these irreconcilable differences will end up being extremely shitty for everyone.
We’ve got multiple people in this thread talking about splitting the country in two and people moving to one part or the other according to their politics, including people who are clearly talking about mass movements. I’m pointing out that that isn’t going to happen voluntarily; at least, not more than it’s happening anyway without splitting the country into two.
Good thing I said nothing of the sort, then.
But people saying “We have half the country that has an absolute hatred of the other half” are doing PR work on behalf of the bad actors. That’s exactly what they want you to think.
They’d convinced me of that quite a few years ago.
And one of the ways in which they’re bad actors is that they are most definitely trying to divide this country into two parts and set us at each other’s throats. Why do you want to help them do that?
Actually, they agreed to be able to, effectively, stop doing it. Or at least to ditch, among themselves, most of the difficulties and process usually involved in doing so.
Bolding mine; of my own post.
If you don’t watch the news, do you read the news? And if not, how do you find out what’s happening beyond the people you have immediate contact with?
Nope. I’m saying we need to fight it. But not by joining it.
No one has advocated forced relocation. Just splitting the country up would be enough to massively influence national policy. A lot issues that are now like 43/57 but artificially propped up by our system which favors the minority would suddenly become like 30/70 just by changing which states are making national laws. You don’t need to purge every single person that’s a political minority in their territory to make meaningful change. If some rural assholes stay in the better country, well, good for them. They won’t be powerful enough to hold back all the progress of everyone else anymore, and they will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into a better country and a better world.
What do you feel is the appropriate reaction to a cult-like people whose sole motivation is to spite and hurt you? Who would burn down their own country as long as you, too, were hurt in the process? Of people who would disenfranchise you and rule over you if given the chance, and who are actively pursuing those options now? Coddling them and pretending they have a valid worldview has clearly failed massively and only emboldened them like appeasement did.
Not to help them light the fire.
That’s not a solution. Being passive is losing. They are actively, currently in a slow coup. They are denying the results of past elections and will do so with future solution. They have been emboldened by their attempt at violent overthrow of government going largely unpunished and implicitly encouraged by their supporters in power. What’s your solution?
Publicize what they’re doing; show up to vote; support the people fighting them.
Will it work? I don’t know. I know that joining them certainly won’t work.
If someone wants nothing but harm for you, then trying to separate yourself from them as much as you can is not “joining them”, it is a rational reaction. Now, it’s wildly impractical in that case, so I can understand the objection on that ground, but there’s nothing wrong with wanting nothing to do with people who hate you and want you to suffer and there’s almost no chance you can actually change their minds because they are a toxic cult dedicated to making sure people they don’t like suffer above all else.
This reeks of “they hate you, you hate them, you’re all the same!” again. No, there is a substantial difference when one side radicalizes themselves and proves they have nothing but malice for the other side. Responding to that by wanting nothing to do with that side is not joining them or acting in the same way.
Well, it seems unlikely that any statistical distribution that includes the 74 million people who voted for Trump all fall below the median on intellectual metrics, and although his support is certainly strong among “non-college educated white males” I think that is an artifact of that being a highly disaffected group looking for divisive leadership rather than a cause of it. Although such an observation is purely anecdotal I’ll note that I know a number of highly intelligent people who have gone full-in on Trumpism, and despite acknowledging his clownish persona, stream-of-consciousness twittering, and even that his reputation as a successful businessman is mostly facade, still maintain that he is “better” than Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi (who always gets dragged into these conversations even though she’s never shown an inclination to run for the presidency) et cetera on the basis that he “speaks the truth” in his borderline incoherent fashion.
These aren’t stupid people but they are being mislead (in many cases with overt willfulness) by the notion that any change is better than no change. In one case, I highlighted the parallels with Weimar era fascism (of which there were actually several movements within Germany alone, and in many nations across Europe) with which he was familiar as a student of history, and the response was “Well, Hitler got the German economy back on its feet, didn’t he?” which requires a kind of cognitive dissonance that requires some surfeit of intelligence. It is notable that the rise of Trump was paralleled by that of Bernie Sanders, who while ideologically distinct from Trump uses much of the same rhetorical methods, albeit toward targets that are at least more factually appropriate. His solutions are no more workable than building a giant wall to keep out imaginary hordes of murderous immigrants (his pleading to “break up the banks” leaves me wondering if he thinks the US economy can be run on an ad hoc collection of credit unions and savings & loans) and he doesn’t advocate physically attacking opponents, but he is appealing on essentially the same basis and also to people who feel themselves left out of the “middle” of American politics and excluded from any influence over the economic decisions that affect them personally.
I want to specifically address your point of “misled but continue to be misled, deeper and deeper down the alternate reality rabbit hole, while millions of your fellow citizens manage to live in a fact-based reality.” Now, for certain anyone relying on Fox News and Facebook, much less overtly far-right propaganda sources is getting non-factual information by the bowlful, and much of it is so ridiculous that absent of context it looks like a badly written comedy sketch. But people who rely on these sources are enmeshed in the context of that belief system that has been built up via a long-running campaign of “Conservative thought” (which isn’t actually conservative in any legitimate semantic sense and is anti-intellectual at its core) and have rationalized that even if individual parts of it don’t quite seem to match to reality, the overall message fits into the worldview that they have adopted.
It is tempting to think of this as stupidity, or some peculiarity of right-wing ideals or somesuch, but it is actually just the human tendency to rationalize information to conform to a consistent belief about how the world should be, or as a political scientist would put it, “ideological belief”. This isn’t a phenomena restricted to just Fox News watchers; I guarantee that if you polled watchers of say, MSNBC or readers of NPR, you would find similar lines of reasoning about ideals and beliefs that are not strongly supported by fact. And that isn’t just an artifact of propaganda and willingness to be fooled but actually a neurological feature stemming from our construction of what we think of as reality from a disparate array of sensory information filled in by the brain’s predictions. If someone you trust or respect tells you that he saw Muslims jumping up and down for joy in New York on September 11, 2001, your brain forms a mental image of the scene and it becomes almost as real as if you personally witnessed this fabricated incident.
Many of our beliefs and political ideals are founded on things we believe are facts even though they are anything but. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer used their newspapers to sell the public on the thesis that the USS Maine was destroyed by Spanish forces in Havana Harbor even though they had no evidence and in several stories patently fabricated evidence, which advanced us inexorably into the Spanish American War, and yet, without a hint of irony the premier award in journalism is the Pulitzer Prize, coveted by chief editors and newspaper owners everywhere, which should give you a hint of how much you should intrinsically trust news, even that purportedly presenting the facts. You can whitewash any bias or motivation with enough “facts”; just ask Judith Miller, Michael Gordon, and the editors of The New York Times.
Give someone a reason to have faith in a source and they do not question the content unless they are well-trained in critical thinking, and we have done a stellar job in the last forty-odd years of quashing independent thought, critical analysis, or people actually looking to their own direct interests over some hypothetical ideology that isn’t even internally consistent much less advantageous to most of those espousing it. This is not to say that Trump supporters are right or that they shouldn’t be faced with the reality of what Trump and the GOP are doing and held to account for supporting it, but branding them as just being idiotic misses the real problem which isn’t how they are being mislead, but the fact that they’ve been so conditioned to not questioning what is put before them (and believing that parroting slogans like “Think for yourself!” is the equivalent of actually independent thought). Divvying the country up into “Left” and “Right” parcels certainly won’t fix that problem, and indeed, would exacerbate it, potentially to catastrophic levels. It isn’t as if if the people in MAGA country are just going to build a wall around themselves, as appealing as that image is.
Stranger
Remember, folks, the Great Replacement is just a white supremacist conspiracy theory.
No one is actively replacing anyone else. The melting pot is doing its thing! Being worried about it is foolish, at best.
A lot of it isn’t being misled, honestly. These are arguments that don’t appeal to reason, knowledge etc, they appeal to existing bias. Most of these people mostly think that “LGBT stuff” is bullshit. They think blacks are lazy. They think Mexicans are stealing jobs. They think it’s fine if women work, but they need to make sure they primarily raise the kids and cook and clean (paradoxically many of these people are women themselves.) There was a period of time from the 70s to early 2000s where the elites of both party at least paid lip service to what I’d call “decorum”, so no one had an obvious outlet for this stuff. Now the elites of the GOP are dead, retired, or aping the mob, and the new era of GOP leadership is openly appealing to these interests by expressing them in an open and honest way. That’s bad, because it has made these people actually feel like their petty bigotries were really “right” all along, and now that political leaders are “speaking the truth” about it, it’s okay for them to talk about it.
In my experience critical thinking and analysis, even in people trained in it, people very good at it in their career, is difficult for most people to apply to every aspect of their lives. I know plenty of people who have long and very successful careers in science or technological fields that require lots of high-quality critical thinking in their jobs–or at least at various points in their careers if not all throughout it.
It’s not unusual for people like that to have crazy and conspiratorial views about political issues that aren’t grounded in reality. It’s one thing to be trained in critical thought and skepticism, it’s another to live and breathe it in every aspect of your life. Plenty of people can do the former, I think the latter is a rare personality trait that simply isn’t present in most of the human population. A lot of people actively would not enjoy having to think critically about everything.
I remember that movie: Fifty Shades of Purple.
Sexy.