It’s almost like we’ve undermined our public education system, built an economy that keeps most of us pretty close to survival mode most of the time, and we’re constantly deluged with commerical and political advertisements that are designed to manipulate and mislead us or something
Unfortunately it’s extremely geographic. We’re pretty singular, but which “single thing” you get varies tremendously depending on where you are.
If you live in San Fran, “everyone” is a certain way. If you live in the rural heartland, “everyone” is the opposite.
On top of that, the number of people that can and are willing to speak the language of both sides is vanishingly small, due to the rhetoric and style of one side being extremely distasteful to the other.
I think ranked choice voting is probably our best, most realistic shot forward, by reducing the importance of the hard liners in the primaries.
The problem is it isn’t “both sides” when neither side really represents, I hope, most people. Ten years ago “republican” didn’t really have to imply mouth breathing fox news fanatic, and “democrat” continues more and more to mean “everybody that would be considered left in a european country but also the moderate right that don’t want to gas immigrants”. Any “side” has several if not dozens of wildly different and often barely compatible ideologies, thanks to our two party system.
To speak to a republican you have to simultaneously be prepared for them to casually support some horrific extremist idea, just be a sexist and/or racist insecure twat, or to just want less of their money going to government programs they don’t agree with.
Ranked choice voting, or frankly any voting style besides first past the post is the only way to fix that.
That’s a good point. It’s important to remember that each party is a huge coalition of different voters with different priorities, and there’s even independents in the middle.
That said, I still think it’s important that we stop hiding from and shunning what we perceive as evil, and start facing it down and punching it in the gut. With words, ideally, while we still can. It is possible to simply help people to see things in new ways, it’s just hard and unpleasant.
So a significant minority of voters
I don’t even know if I would say significant anymore, we’re gold fish in this country
It’s almost like we’ve undermined our public education system, built an economy that keeps most of us pretty close to survival mode most of the time, and we’re constantly deluged with commerical and political advertisements that are designed to manipulate and mislead us or something
Unfortunately it’s extremely geographic. We’re pretty singular, but which “single thing” you get varies tremendously depending on where you are.
If you live in San Fran, “everyone” is a certain way. If you live in the rural heartland, “everyone” is the opposite.
On top of that, the number of people that can and are willing to speak the language of both sides is vanishingly small, due to the rhetoric and style of one side being extremely distasteful to the other.
I think ranked choice voting is probably our best, most realistic shot forward, by reducing the importance of the hard liners in the primaries.
The problem is it isn’t “both sides” when neither side really represents, I hope, most people. Ten years ago “republican” didn’t really have to imply mouth breathing fox news fanatic, and “democrat” continues more and more to mean “everybody that would be considered left in a european country but also the moderate right that don’t want to gas immigrants”. Any “side” has several if not dozens of wildly different and often barely compatible ideologies, thanks to our two party system.
To speak to a republican you have to simultaneously be prepared for them to casually support some horrific extremist idea, just be a sexist and/or racist insecure twat, or to just want less of their money going to government programs they don’t agree with.
Ranked choice voting, or frankly any voting style besides first past the post is the only way to fix that.
That’s a good point. It’s important to remember that each party is a huge coalition of different voters with different priorities, and there’s even independents in the middle.
That said, I still think it’s important that we stop hiding from and shunning what we perceive as evil, and start facing it down and punching it in the gut. With words, ideally, while we still can. It is possible to simply help people to see things in new ways, it’s just hard and unpleasant.