Yeah, this is Standard Right-Wing Nutbag Ploy A, the ever-popular “Both Sides Do It,” which instantly invalidates any argument.
I totally get that Trump lies more than Biden. But Biden still lies by a non-insignificant amount. My point is that, when a person is a member of team-Biden, they never, ever acknowledge he has lied. Ever. Because… groupthink.
But I’m going to end this. I don’t want to derail this thread with Trump vs Biden political junk.
I’m a member of team-Biden, and I freely acknowledge that he has lied many times.
I wasn’t talking about “lies”, I was talking about stupid. Lies aren’t inherently stupid, but Trump is.
I just want to amplify this by saying that – outmoded though the notion of serious tribalism really is – being excluded from, or simply not a member of, the tribe can often have serious consequences.
Which, IMHO, are a direct result of all of the dynamics of tribalism, many of which you aptly highlighted.
You are a marvelous example of what is wrong with this country.
Trump is not anywhere near the first person to figure this out. It has always been this way.
Something has certainly changed since Trump was able to get elected in 2016 following principles that everyone said were certain to destroy his political viability.
Pretty much of a tangent, but the word “credibility” was recently excised from my occupation.
I conduct administrative hearings and decide applications for Social Security disability benefits. A significant element of my decision-making has always been the assessment of subjective allegations. For decades, that was considered a “credibility assessment.” You considered the extent an individual’s subjective complaints were consistent with and/or supported by other factors such as medical records, etc.
For some reason, it was determined that assessing credibility somehow improperly questioned an individual’s character. I can’t explain it, because it never made sense to me. So now we CANNOT mention the word credibility. Instead, we assess the degree to which subjective allegations are “consistent with” other evidence. As far as I can tell, the analysis is the same.
Sorry for my digression. But at least in this one area, there was a determination that assessing the credibility of allegations is a bad thing. 
It is a change in modern U.S. politics but it is nothing new in the history of humans.
We’ve often talked about market segmentation and how the political parties identify, and market to, their intended constituents.
Now, this will be The Mother of All Self-Serving Generalizations, but …
A large percentage of Americans are still quite religious. Whatever your thoughts on religion, it requires belief in things unseen … things unprovable.
While there are very smart, very rational, very well educated people who fervently believe, ISTM that this is the minority of the very religious.
Meaning: there are a whole lot of Americans who spend a lot of time steeped in a profusion of very specific, very detailed … fairy tales.
This is a pretty easy target for demagoguery.
They are primed for acceptance, ‘trained’ not to challenge authority, not generally predisposed to skepticism and probing questions, not inherently facile with rational argument and logic, and … used to being controlled by threats and fear.
Generally (I really can’t emphasize that enough), they are the credulous where we are the incredulous.
Which doesn’t mean that Liberals can’t be, or aren’t daily, manipulated, too, but as I said in another thread … I think we’re generally less likely to buy bullshit made from whole cloth.
Also … all politicians lie, but there is the frequency, and the consequence (ie, what’s at stake) of these lies, in aggregate, that simply has to be considered.
But in history, when there was a “He said, she said” kind of dispute, people trying to figure out who was lying and who was telling the truth had to rely on very bad evidence most of the time, because prior to TV and radio, most things were just reported based on the word of people who were there. Even after TV and radio became common, it was very hard for the average person to find recordings from weeks, months, or years previously.
So if someone said, “Candidate Bob once said he loved communism!”, it would be very difficult to find an original source to confirm or deny that.
But now? We’ve got cameras everywhere. All news shows are streamed on the net. There are archives where anyone can go and see exactly what Candidate Bob said on Tuesday three weeks ago. We can see for ourselves if he really said he loved communism or not.
And yet, despite that, we still have tens of millions of people falling for the “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own lying eyes?” tactic.
People have always preferred beliefs to facts. It’s just that now there are more facts available to ignore.
I think there has been a steady decline in character in individuals and, consequently, in our nation as a whole. There would have been a time 30 years ago when a guy like Trump would never have been nominated by a major party much less elected by the general populace. He would have long ago been disgraced as a cheat and a liar and probably would have been in jail by now. I pick him as an example, but there are many examples in entertainment, sports, politics, etc where people are given a pass for things that would have ruined them 3 or 4 decades back.
You think this just “happened”? Why?
Yeah, you’d like it just fine if folks like me just continued to extend our trusting nature to those in the GOP who vote with, support, and enable Nazis, racists, and woman-haters just because they issue the occasional statement of faux-outrage about their worst excesses. We’re stupid and trusting, but even that has its limits–your time is up.
I think you’re taking too rosy a view of past partisan politics. I agree that there was a passing phase (and not the first) of “good government” reform-mindedness in the post-Watergate era, when politicians in general felt something of a responsibility to clean up their “crooks and liars” image. But I don’t think that the passing of that phase is indicative of any “steady decline in character”. For example, “yellow press” journalism around the turn of the 20th century was just as irresponsible and counterfactual as its modern conspiracy-theorist counterparts.
Good question. I don’t think it “just happened”. I think it happens to all societies that become rich and privileged and jaded. “Me” becomes more important than “the good of all”. “My rights” becomes more important than “social good”. I think that this has been repeated throughout history. “Rights” has a very important sister called “Responsibility”. Somewhere along the way, she dies.
I used to think all empires fall because it is inevitable that a stronger one arises. I think the real reason they fall is because they rot from the inside out.
Which “group” getting their “rights” recently do think think is main cause the downfall of the decadent West?
I suppose I’m more interested in seeing a more factual based discussion of the merits of each side, rather than painting each side as “Nazis” or “Communists”. But as they say “wish in one hand, shit in the other and see which one fills up first”.
But looking at the data you presented, it would appear Biden is more “credible” than Trump. I might have questions about how the data was sampled