Comment by ryanackley
7 days ago
I consider this type of thinking to be a form of tribalism because you're essentially saying there are two tribes. Each tribe has specific values.
A person's values are not a dichotomy (i.e. republican or democrat). You simply cannot put people into two buckets that define their overarching moral compass.
A person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat...or hate everything about Republican values except they got burned by Obamacare so they vote Republican. There is virtually an infinite level of nuance that can be a deciding factor in why someone votes for someone.
> person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat
The term you're looking for is political coherence, i.e. the degree to which you can predict a person's views based on knowing their view on one issue. Political elites tend to be highly coherent. If you know a Congressperson's views on guns, you probably know them on abortion and corporate taxes.
In the real world, however, votes tend not to be politically coherent. Instead, what we see in a hyperpartisan polity, is that a diverse set of views collapses after an issue achieves partisan identity status. Talking about a thing through a partisan lens is what causes the partisan collapse. Hence the effects of mass and then social media on the quality of our discussions.
(And I agree with OP that the author's "I'm above politics" stance is naively immature.)
> In the real world, however, votes tend not to be politically coherent. Instead, what we see in a hyperpartisan polity, is that a diverse set of views collapses after an issue achieves partisan identity status. Talking about a thing through a partisan lens is what causes the partisan collapse. Hence the effects of mass and then social media on the quality of our discussions.
nailed it imo
not above politics, just think productive discussion can't happen if people don't know why they support things beyond "the tribe supports it"
or acknowledge when a belief is tribal vs reason-based
> Political elites tend to be highly coherent
Coherence might not the word you're looking for. The policies of political parties and groups are born out of historical circumstances and the diverse coalitions they represent. Political elites are "coherent" in the sense that you can expect them to consistently follow the party line, and thus infer all of their views just by knowing one of their views.
The party line, i.e. platform of the Democratic and Republican parties, or any other large political party in the world, is, by itself, nothing coherent though. Many of their policies and claims do not make any more sense besides each other than they would make against each other. Realignments on issues are pretty common across the world. What is left-wing in one part of the world at one point of time might be rightist across space and time.
> Coherence might not the word you're looking for
Ideological and political coherence are the terms of art [1].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8827732/
This is a difference in the subject of coherence.
Logical coherence refers to the variation and predictive power of the reasoning.
Coherence can also be used to describe the variability and predictability of positions or states themselves.
If you measure the characteristics of some photons in a coherent laser, you know what the other photons are doing. They are predictable using a model.
Logic is a poor predictive model for politics. Tribe identification is a strong predictive model for politics
> transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat
This is the NYT if you want a high-profile example of this existing in the real world.
I worked with a guy who was a goldmine of odd but sincerely held political opinions that subverted the usual narratives. He was (I guess still is) gay but believed that trans people shouldn't serve in the military because he saw that they didn't get the treatment they needed. He wanted everyone to have guns as a protection against crooked cops-- he was from a small town. He was against single-payer healthcare because he thought the government would use it as a political weapon. He was was in theory anti-union because he thought union benefits should just be turned into labor protections for everyone instead of just being for union jobs and supported them only as a stopgap. He was pro-solar/wind and had an electric car not for any environmental reason but because he didn't want to be reliant on the greedy power company.
To me that just sounds like someone who arrives at his political views by thinking rather than blindly adopting whatever his peers believe. It's only odd because it's (sadly) rare these days.
Yea, holy hell... someone with _nuance_ in their views? Blasphemy!
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Realpolitiks...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik
> He was was in theory anti-union because he thought union benefits should just be turned into labor protections for everyone
Uh, hmm. So weaker unions result in labor protections for everyone? I gotta say, doesn't seem like that's really how the U.S. is playing out. If weekends off and an 8-hour workday didn't exist they certainly wouldn't be argued for now.
US has very strong unions, you don't have anything close to SAG-AFTRA in Europe since such strong unions are illegal. European unions are just big, but their are reigned in by laws much more.
So yeah I think weakening the protections unions from workers in USA enjoys would lead to more people joining them, since there is less risk in doing so. Most people don't wanna work in an industry dominated by something like the screen actors guild.
i mean, his views don't sound too odd. he sounds like a communist who's got a dim view of reform or socialism as a means to communism.
You're acting as if people are saying "democrat good, republican bad" as the meaning for associating values with who someone voted for, but missing the part that you can easily associate that someone has poor values if they voted for Trump.
Sure, you need to go a bit deeper if someone didn't vote for Trump to know their values, but voting for someone who ran on a platform of mass deportations, retaliation against his enemies, obvious idiotic economic policy, homophobia and transphobia, and racism, makes you a kind of shit person, and it's not really necessary to go any deeper to know their values don't match yours.
So you're saying >50% of the USA population are objectively shit people? If you're a member of the other 50%, you aren't automatically shit but you still could be?
Seems bleak dude. Also, consider that conservative media has indoctrinated people to think like you do...except in the opposite direction. i.e. if you voted for Kamala or Biden, you're the enemy.
Where are you getting >50% of the population from?
He did not even get 50% of the votes cast for president. More people in the USA opted out of voting for him than to vote for him.
MAGA isn't 50% of the population. Voter turnout was 63.7% for 2024, so I'm saying that ~32% of the USA population are objectively shit people, in the same way that Germans who supported Hitler were objectively shit people.
If you can't see that disappearing people without due process is wrong, you don't have good values. If you can't see that pardoning conmen, and insurrectionists is wrong, you don't have good values. If you can't see the use of Venezuelan prisons and Guantanamo Bay as extralegal black sites as wrong, you don't have good values. If you can't see that a president illegally ignoring the courts and congress is wrong, you don't have good values.
You could say that some of the other stuff that's happening is just an extension of the culture war, and that it's a matter of interpretation of whether it's wrong or not (DEI hate, transgender issues, abortion rights, etc). I don't agree, but those topics are harder to give a black and white answer on whether it's wrong or right.
Clear violations of the constitution, ignoring basic human rights, and doing straight up crime are black and white issues, and in general, most Trump voters support these things, and these are things he campaigned on, so even if they disagree with them now, they voted to allow it to happen.
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> Also, consider that conservative media has indoctrinated people to think like you do...except in the opposite direction.
I came to similar conclusion by reading conservative media. NOT by reading mainstream media that forever excuse, rationalize and sanitize what is going on among conservatives.
Also, note that he did not just said "they are enemy". He listed actual positions these people demonstrably have. All you have to do is to ... listen to what they say. Oh, and I also tell you some stuff they want for gender relations: they want women completely dependent on men economically, spousal abuse to be an accepted price for keeping families together.
The person you are responded to described really existing value differences. Musks "empathy is weakness" is not some kind of outlier claim, it is something conservatives were pushing on for years already. Especially in its far right circles. Likewise the Trumps "truth does not matter" philosophy.
You could also say that someone who voted for the illegal importation of millions of criminals and murderers, targeted conservatives, used law fare to try and imprison a former president, committed astronomical financial fraud and persons responsible for the deaths caused by these criminal aliens is a shit person who needs to serve the remainder of his pathetic life in prison.
Tribalism is just bad sociology, that's where the nuance is missing.