Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I do mean it objectively. And it is sad. Look around us at all the polarization. Are these mobs of animated and often angry people all thinking subjectively about each issue? No. They're emoting, or they're sticking to some ethos. It's impossible to not do so as I think those instincts are hardwired into us. But it's worth recognizing this flaw in our makeup.
And I don't think people have to become robots to overcome this. We merely need to remind ourselves everything is subjective. There are endless scenarios we encounter, and hewing to some core set of "beliefs" can impede our ability to most effectively and cooperatively navigate them.
The "bundling" element of our politics, I think, has to go. I think it has a lot to do with this polarization because it compels people to get behind sets of issues rather than address each issue individually. It forms groups aligned against one another. It compels a devil's bargain with each vote, and it stifles innovation.
Right now, if climate change were a referendum issue, you might see a Green New Deal. But because climate change has to be bundled into a pile of other issues that split the people who'd vote to address it, it's going to be 85 degrees for the next three weeks in the Northeast, and Greenland is melting.
John McCain argued for unbundling cable packages years ago - for allowing an ala carte ordering of channels. We need to dust off his speech there and apply it our politics. This picking sides shit based on "beliefs" and "values" is just creating warring armies of idiots.
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I'm going to set aside the issue of why your beliefs about beliefs are sad and empty. You're confused about what polarization is. People have different beliefs. This is part of the human condition. People have always had them and always will. We have laws and politics in part so that we can figure out how to live together, notwithstanding their different beliefs. "Polarization" is a phenomenon in which the semi-random distribution of beliefs increasingly clusters around opposing poles. It's perfectly possible to have a complex society with a wide distribution of different beliefs, but no polarization. We do seem to be getting more polarized lately, but it's not because people have different beliefs.
I think what you say about polarization and climate change is not right. There is no progress on climate change because polarization among conservatives have increasingly caused that significant minority of the country to disregard the science of climate change and to oppose the government doing anything about it.
In my view, often expressed here, polarization in this country is driven by conservatives, who form their views in reaction to a mainstream that they see as hostile. Again and again, conservatives reject mainstream institutions as biased against them, and create their own crappy, politicized alternatives. The Washington Post begets the Washington Times. Harvard begets Liberty University. CNN begets Fox News. There simply are no left-wing alternative institutions of the sort, which means that liberals are in the mainstream institutions, which means that the conservative rejection of the mainstream institutions has its own vicious cycle feeding it. On the other side of the aisle, the left used to be subordinate to centrists, who favored bipartisan compromise, but since conservatives will no longer do bipartisan compromise, the centrist approach seems futile, which leads to secondary polarization on the left.
You are congenitally incapable of faulting conservatives for the way things are without finding equal fault on the left, so you're left to bemoan that our political system doesn't address climate change but unable to see or say that it's conservatives who are blocking progress.
