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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

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.

This Vanity Fair piece about Fox News and Trump is interesting for various reasons, but this quote at the end seems so relevant to what I was just saying:

But a person more sympathetic to Trump has told Lachlan that Fox should remain loyal to Trump’s supporters, even if the network has to break from the man. “We need to represent our viewers,” the source said. “Fox is about defending our viewers from the people who hate them. That’s where our power comes from. It’s not about Trump.”

I don't hate Fox viewers, and they don't need protection, but boy do they like to feel that grievance.