Lets flip back to the parent message :
> People on the left think that anyone on the right is a lunatic, and everyone on the right thinks the same thing about the left.
You thinking you’re right is ingrained in your belief system, and maybe reinforced by certain signals you pick up.
I think an exercise is to start walking or thinking a mile in the shoes of the opposite camp, can make a lot of difference.
A step further is to actually start a dialogue with someone from the opposite camp where you both actively try to see it from the others perspective.
I can't help but think that the recent militant/aggressive behavior of left-wing activists and the left-wing establishment and mainstream media almost completely ignoring the concerns of their citizens around immigration and globalization pushes a lot of them to the right, even if they don't necessarily agree with the other policies of those parties. This is interestingly enough happening both in the US and Western Europe.
That's why I think that the left digging in is a losing strategy. The more radical they appear the more people they'll push in the other direction. Currently that's 50-50 in the US and the Democrats didn't seem to learn much from the past 4 years. Neither have a lot of the people paining Trump as a monster and making him as the scapegoat for everything that's going wrong in the US (and the world).
> That's why I think that the left digging in is a losing strategy.
I think the meta is that lacking a scientific approach, we have to have some things we are not willing to compromise on. Yes, having almost seventy million people vote for 45 is alarming but we don't have any option but to dig in because it is clear that the right is not digging in. They are stuck in a perpetual tracter control beam right as to speak.
I know what the counter argument will likely be: you have to be in power to be able to do anything at all but this appeal to moderation is what I'd argue has allowed the right to go to the extreme right: the overton window.
The whole premise of "both sides" is flawed here. Of course, it is silly to think 45 is a monster and things will be good once he is no longer in the picture. However, it is just as silly to think that just because seventy million people voted a certain way that their grievances are legitimate. They are not. And as long as we coddle them with "both sides", we can't begin the work we need to do to to undo all the lunacy of the last four years.
The will of the majority is incredibly overrated. Just because a large group of people believes something does not make it true. Often, you need to teach people and help them understand. We have to understand that we can't default to a middle ground approach because there is no end to this spectrum: the right continues on its march right and if we continue reaching for the middle we will be where they were n - 1 time ago.
I can get behind one thing though: we have to be grateful to the 45 administration because he has exposed some serious systemic flaws that we must address if we are to avoid a repeat of the last four years.
This is how democracy works. If you want these 70 million votes, you better address the problem they complain about. In 2016, many, many of these votes (Those in MI for example), did not have a problem with the progressive advances. But they would have liked to see that their problems are also on Hillary's mind. They didn't, and she lost.
First of all, the mainstream media in the US is center-right, not left-wing in any shape, except for a few cultural issues. If you want to see left-leaning media, look at The Jacobin or Democracy Now.
The US is also not 50-50 - the democrats have won the popular vote by a slight or decent margin in the last 4 elections, and 8 out of the 9 most recent ones (the only exception was Bush 2004). That the US electoral system is so bad that this didn't matter twice in the last 20 years is another discussion.
> Neither have a lot of the people paining Trump as a monster and making him as the scapegoat for everything that's going wrong in the US (and the world).
These responsibility and reality denying assertions fuel division. Obviously Trump isn't responsible for everything wrong in the world. But he is certainly responsible for some. Trump hamstrung the federal public health response, gave speeches encouraging everyone to be irresponsible, pushed snake oil cures, stole PPE from states, sucked all the air out of the room for intelligent discourse, and seemed to generally do anything he could to make Covid worse (likely due to denial and disrespect of experts). If the office of the President had been vacant for the past year, we would be in better shape pandemic wise.
Trump was elected for very valid concerns, as I've been trying to tell my blue friends since 2016. Where he went after that was very destructive (and no, not in the "creative destruction" sense). This election should have been a landslide, but for a massive propaganda push discrediting outgroup media as "fake news". Propaganda driven groupthink is the real dynamic of our division, and until people start becoming immune to falsely authoritative sources, it's only going to get worse.
You thinking you’re right is ingrained in your belief system, and maybe reinforced by certain signals you pick up.
I think an exercise is to start walking or thinking a mile in the shoes of the opposite camp, can make a lot of difference.
A step further is to actually start a dialogue with someone from the opposite camp where you both actively try to see it from the others perspective.