Comment by J-dawg
6 years ago
> people who are fed up with rational cost-benefit analysis and want to wreck their perceived enemies
I've been thinking this for a while, and it seems to be creating some nasty feedback loops.
At least some of the support for politicians like Trump and Boris Johnson comes from the fact that they continually piss off people who are liberal/progressive/left-wing/anti-Brexit (delete as applicable depending on who is 'the enemy').
In the same way, I've seen things written about progressive politicians to the effect of "he is upsetting a lot of angry old white men, so he must be doing something right".
"How much do they piss off the other team" has become something that many voters use as a metric. Perhaps even the only metric, for some people.
Yes - and this is partly due to the media, who absolutely love a two-sided punchup because it's clickbait to both sides and generates lots of furious refreshing of the comments section to show ads. It's basically a fancier version of professional wrestling.
It's very prisoner's dilemma. First side to back down from the partisanship loses. So it just keeps escalating. Traditionally the media and other institutions have leant on the left to back down and "be reasonable"; this has become a losing strategy, so people are starting to get unreasonable again.
And the root of the problem here is again that media are funded by advertising, so they need to stir outrage and pit everyone against each other to maximize profits.