Comment by lallysingh
5 years ago
I think this comes down to a lack of trust in good-faith debate. People don't trust that someone "from the other side" will actually have the empathy and generosity required to have a good-faith discussion on a topic.
Also, I believe that we're constantly hearing so many voices trying to convince us one way or another, that our own discussions on those topics end up being attempts to convince others. That would explain "safe spaces" to some degree -- people don't want the pressure of having someone else try to convince them of something they don't agree with.
Some of it just the two-party system. The points don't matter, just which side of the line each person is on. I wonder if more parties would help depolarize the situation. I'm really not sure.
> That would explain "safe spaces" to some degree -- people don't want the pressure of having someone else try to convince them of something they don't agree with.
In my experience, it's more that people don't try to convince. Hell, the people who need safe-spaces, and the people they're trying to be "safe" from, don't even share the underlying epistemic assumptions that would allow them to "convince" each-other of anything less clearly observable than the sky being blue. The latter group, the people who other people need to be "safe" from, usually just scream, berate, harass, and often resort to violence.
(Note that I've avoided identifying "which side" is which. The answer is: it depends which side is dominant in your particular area. Boston and San Francisco and Brooklyn are left-dominant. Middle America is right-dominant.)
No place in the US is left-dominant (this is true of most of Europe as well). There are right-dominant areas and centrist-dominant areas. Left discourse (think Chomsky) is extremely rare and almost never accepted in the media.
This is untrue when applied to social/cultural political issues. For example, the prevailing view during the Democratic primaries that undocumented immigrants should get universal healthcare coverage is to the left of nearly every EU country. Trump’s order required enhanced scrutiny of immigrants from certain Muslim countries is tame compared to Macron’s plans to essentially nationalize Islam. (And Macron is the left candidate—his far-right opponent is now receiving 45% of the support in polls.) Canada’s point-based immigration system, supported by the left and the right there, which heavily weighs English language fluency, would be denounced as irredeemably racist by the mainstream left in the US. What we are seeing in the media now, with attacks on the country’s founding documents and historical figures, would be utterly condemned in say France.
On social issues, our left is as far left as anywhere else in the developed world.
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> Left discourse (think Chomsky) is extremely rare and almost never accepted in the media.
It must really baffle you that Chomsky signed this letter.
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I wasn't talking about "the media", but you're just being silly if you can go to a meeting of the Cambridge or Somerville City Councils (a majority of the latter are DSA members or allies, IIRC), or get involved in San Francisco's local politics, and think the Left (ie: the kind of Left that references Chomsky) is an insignificant force in those local contexts.
It's also experiential - people reaching out in good faith for debate have consistently had their hand chewed up in return; and then a whole audience that sees that exchange and cements their opinions further. I'd argue the problem is often the choice of venue, and the expectation that internet strangers are truly going to come to a debate in good faith, but it still sets a consistent tone.
> The points don't matter, just which side of the line each person is on
That's because it isn't just about ideas, it's about power. Politics and government now are not about coming to consensus solutions that everyone, or at least everyone but a small minority who just wants to game the system, can live with. Politics and government now are about imposing on everyone whichever set of ideas gets a slim 51% majority. That isn't the way it was supposed to work.
I personally would like to see a Constitutional amendment that would require a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress to pass any legislation, and a 3/4 majority required to override a Presidential veto. That would at least require some amount of bipartisan consensus, and therefore some amount of actually somewhat reasonable debate instead of just shouting back and forth, before a public policy was imposed on everyone.
"That would at least require some amount of bipartisan consensus, and therefore some amount of actually somewhat reasonable debate..."
What you would get would be a lot of back-room deals and strange bedfellows. Like now, only more so.
I'm not so sure. The back-room deals that go on now are not about getting the other side to vote for things they really don't want to vote for, as much as horse trading on which bills come up for a vote vs. getting stuck in committee or tabled. It would be harder for either side to get any value out of that if a 2/3 majority was required to pass a bill--back-room deals can't get that many votes to switch in the opposition party about something that's really contentious.
That's not to say that any bill that gets enough bipartisan consensus to pass a 2/3 vote must be good; plenty of bills that have passed in the past with that much consensus have been bad. But I think it might change the dynamics in at least something like the right direction.
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A) a 2/3 requirement would mean nothing gets passed, benefitting the only party that gains by obstructing legislation, the Republican Party
B) it doesn’t matter how high the bar is set when one side refuses to do their half of bipartisan responsibility (see impeachment)
When people are strictly divided, the barrier to pass something should be lower so that elections change things again. A government that can’t act might as well not exist. There’s no point in holding elections if legislators never pass any change. The liberal values that make the West free depend on civic engagement.
> a 2/3 requirement would mean nothing gets passed
Plenty of laws have been passed with that much of a majority.
> When people are strictly divided, the barrier to pass something should be lower so that elections change things again.
No, when people are strictly divided, they should try different things locally instead of having one side's preferred policies simply imposed on the other--much less having things flip again for everyone every time the party in power changes. That means it should be harder to pass Federal legislation that is binding on everyone, not easier. Federal legislation should only be passed if it has broad enough support to make it worth attempting to impose on everyone. Policies that don't have that kind of broad support throughout the country simply should not be enacted at the Federal level. They should be tried out on a smaller scale, in a state or locality where there is broad enough support.
> The liberal values that make the West free depend on civic engagement.
Civic engagement at all levels. Using the Federal government as a bludgeon to impose one side's policies on everyone is not "civic engagement". It's tyranny. Which is exactly what we set up the United States of America to protect against.
I think a big part of it is the public space. Let's say I'm on X side of a debate. I can, in good faith, try to talk to someone from side Y. I might find some such person, or even several.
The problem is, if we're talking in a public forum, anyone can come up (from side X, side Y, or both) and jump in not in good faith. And so I get, as Fellshard said, my hand chewed off, not by the person I was talking to, but by a bunch of drive-by conversation-killers.
Under current conditions, I don't think a real conversation can happen in public (which includes social media).
Your first point sounds accurate to me.
I think what we're seeing is the solidification of identity in such strong and unyielding terms that anything that threatens that identity immediately triggers a basic survival instinct. At that point, rational discourse is not possible.
Correct. Rational discourse has already happened, for decades. We appear on the cusp of a structural shift, and in that span of time rational discourse isn't welcome.
People talked about whether the US should enter World War I for years before the German navy targeted US merchant vessels. After the decision to enter, speaking out against the militarization was grounds for arrest. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fiery-socialist-chall...
We have more parties than the US and are less polarised[1]. I recommend more parties, but don't see any incremental way the US could get them.
[1] but then again, we had a mid-nineteenth century religiously-motivated civil war and it only killed a few hundred people. So maybe we support a plurality of parties because we're less polarisable, and not the other way around?
(rather than having a fabric of society, prone to ripping, having a dense irregular felt of society, of tocquevillean overlapping voluntary associations, FTW?)
Ranked choice voting would help considerably
We don’t want to convince each other, we want to destroy each other.
handwave I think it's more "disempower," in general. There's nearly no doing open shooting, but people out in the streets are extremely disinterested in a conversation about "Maybe cops aren't so bad, you guys."
People not willing to venture out their echo chambers is bad, but much better than being hell bent on taking away the livelihood of others for bad tweets.