In-Party Love, Out-Party Hate, and Affective Polarization in Twelve Democracies
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A study examines affective polarization in 12 democracies, finding varying levels of in-party love and out-party hate, sparking discussion on the implications for democratic societies and the role of emotions in politics.
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The issues arise when folks get distracted from common prosperity.
I meet so many people in the Rockies and New York who are up in arms about some imaginary problem, or a problem they have no influence over and which cannot affect them, one they solely know about due to social media.
Do we achieve common prosperity through regulation or deregulation? Welfare state or trickle down? Fiscal responsibility or speculation? Strong dollar or weak dollar? Free market or protectionism?
The parties (one in particular) can't even keep a consistent policy from year to year, I am not sure how we can hold hands and find the unified path to common prosperity.
Also plenty of politicians have said regulation is literal communism and literal communism makes a lot of people mad.
There are legitimate discussions which can be had about those approaches to achieving that common goal. The discussion is no longer in good faith where partisans deny that common goal or assume evil intent.
(Aside, every western Muslim I've personally met has been chill)
And where you are from matters a lot, you will probably answer very differently if you are from California or if you are from Birmingham UK.
That's why right shovinism is rising in eu
I suspect if you look at it a bit longer you'll see that the issue isn't "Muslim", the issue is "fundamentalism".
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes."
So your point "considered a "fundamentalist value" by someone else who doesn't share it" either a) directly contradicts the "No, the issue is wider", or b) you didn't understand what I was saying.
This is referring to house and senate republicans, not every unsuspecting voter. Not to say there weren't signs and messaging signalling this.
There are well known malign incentives for politicians and the political classes. Generally speaking these involve the expansion of the purview of the state and the time preferences dictated by electoral cycles. These are realist views around the incentives political actors find themselves subjected to. The extent of how much these incentives are perceived to dictate outcomes might correlate with the observer's cynicism. However, presuming that these incentives would only apply to one political party would be naive at best. At worst it would be divisive partisan tilting. The suggestion that it is specific to Republicans and the devolution of this thread is illustrative of the polling data.
How do you square that?
A less partisan view might find that it the actions of the political classes are not unprecedented. It is a progression of the form. Both poles represent false alternatives in this regard. The malign incentives are systemic.
I (embarrassingly) used to believe that it was just people with different ideas of what’s best. But they’re So So open about wanting to hurt people. I came to it reluctantly but it’s really the only explanation
Again, get offline. These extreme positions that have taken over both parties are the result of listening to twitter. Seriously that website is toxic. It causes fear and anxiety and governance by fear is terrible. Online democrats / left leaners seem to fear law enforcement. Meanwhile online Republicans / right leaners seem to fear everyone not exactly like them.
What ends up happening is that the political class ends up fielding candidates that are extreme since the online political class has disproportionate influence over that, and then normal people have to choose the best of two awful candidates.
No one can seriously say last election was a competition between America's best.
- Get money out of politics. Everyone complains about corruption, no one tries to do a constitutional amendment to get rid of Citizens United.
- Strong privacy protections for your online data. Does anyone like the fact that your data gets sold and then used against you by car insurance companies?
- Break up big companies that are taking their power too far. Seriously, take your Syscos, Nestles, AB InBevs of the world and break them up. No company deserves to have that much power over consumer markets, and the centralization of that power definitely makes prices higher. My conservative parents definitely don’t like how when Walmart and Rite Aid came to small-town midewest, all the local drug & grocery stores went out of business.
- Every American knows our private health insurance system sucks. I mean every person you meet either doesn’t have good coverage, hasn’t used it much, or has had had a terrible experience with it.
- We need to do away with police overstep like asset forfeiture, where the government can basically just rob you. I’m not talking defund the police, but you could sit the average American down, and probably come to agree that the police state has too much power and not enough accountability in a couple areas.
There are so many stories along these lines which could get republicans and democrats on a similar page, and it comes down to the frustrations we ALL have with the systems we live in. It doesn’t matter who you voted for, when health insurance starts scamming you out of a procedure you need, it’s frustrating on a deeply personal level. And we all feel like we don’t have much control over federal policy — partly because businesses & moneyed interests can protect their interests while everyone else struggles, no matter who’s in charge.
(And btw, this isn’t a elected officials on both sides are the same comment, more of a “we Americans have a lot of shared frustrations regardless of party”
Oops Americans don’t agree on queer rights and equality oops
- everyone should be treated equally and afford equal protection under the law, regardless of where they were born or what the colour of the skin is or what their genitals look like
Oops oops
This is absurd. You can't just wish away your sex. It's a material fact.
What’s absurd is looking at the world the way it is now, and thinking to yourself, “yes, this is the way it always has been, and must always be.” What a mire to live your life in. Such a pity.
Other than that we’re still at the point where most people will at least verbally agree with you that everyone should be treated equally (whether they believe it or not internally is another matter).
Points 2-5 are all "impactful for the average american" but most people will disagree with how and how far these should be implemented. Why did you signal out asset forfeiture as your example of police overstep but not no knock warrants, stop and search laws or the current ICE street gang situation? The problem with the view that all members of a nation share common struggle and therefore have the same political wants and needs is naive and these seemingly shared frustrations are often oversimplifications that disguise various political interests
I don't believe you. My guess is the demand comes from manufactured consent, not from people who deeply understand the issue.
Per Chomsky, the co-authored work is more Herman's than his, and anyhow the phrase and concept is from Walter Lipmann, 66 years before Herman and Chomsky's work with the title inspired by it (and 51 years before their first book on the topic.)
But, no, neither the idea that deliberate propaganda is a major source of political beliefs or the particular manner and mechanisms by which the US media is involved in delivering that propaganda is "projection".
> Very much, 'they don't agree with me but I know what their real interests are so I can speak for them better than they can for themselves' crap
Manufacturing Consent doesn't pretend to be an exploration of what the “real interests” of the public are; it can't be misleading "projection" at doing that, because it doesn't do it at all.
- "yellow cake uranium"
- "a land without people for a people without a land"
And no, they don’t want to hear about the importance of freedom to communicate being more important boy. I’m just gonna move this road we go do you wanna go out that way okay, because they believe that their communication will never cross these lines, so it’s irrelevant.
“But what if the government turns bad and uses this against you” carries far less weight, in a large part due to its theoretical nature, than “we need to stop this bad thing now”.
Heck, a lot of the governments likely aren’t thinking beyond “we need to stop this bad thing now so people vote for us” either. The immediate leap from governments wanting any form of oversight to “this is all part of the wider plan to subjugate humanity” that often comes up on this site is amusing but ultimately unhelpful and comes across as conspiratorial. Not because it’s wrong exactly, but because it posits a plan where it’s not very clear there is one. It’s just well intentioned people making well intentioned but poor choices as we stumble our way into mediocrity.
A lot of people want more freedom. It's easy to identify with this, until you get into details. For example:
- Lower taxes.
- Easier access to weapons.
- Lower age of consent.
These are all things that increase freedom, by some definition.
- physically violent,
- destructive to others' property, or
- expressing negative opinions verbally?
ICE prisoners are made to lap water off the floor like dogs.
My trans friends are making plans to flee the country in advance of their existence being criminalized
They say shit isn’t bad enough, until it is, and then it’s too late to leave.
I can both argue that it’s cruel to not have housing for everyone,
while also arguing it’s cruel to tax away 40-50% of an entire country’s productivity (people’s actual work) to pay for houses for people who have never worked or paid taxes in their life.
Who’s right? Who’s cruel? Both sides and both. This is why I find this cruelty argument so bad.
You could argue that the system rewards it in the short term which is all that matters.
There’s also one party with way less scruples when it comes to the methods it uses, which polarizes the other party against them.
There’s no way to make friends with someone who wants to „take care” of you by violent means.
Which system? This article compares 12 countries, which have wildly varying systems.
Come on let’s not pretend we don’t have a default.
> Thus, we follow these studies and define the in-party as the party receiving the highest score among all parties rated by the respondent on the party feeling thermometers.4 The out-party measure is drawn from the average of all other parties’ feeling thermometer scores, weighted by their respective vote shares.
By mixing all the other parties that aren't the in-party, they mix parties the voter is quite OK with, with parties that the voter deeply and passionately detests. I can't imagine this not skewing the graphs enormously.
For example, if you're right wing in NL you get to choose between the anti-Muslim party, the conspiracy theory anti-Muslim party, the farmers-against-immigrants party, the God-wants-the-death-penalty party, and the regular oldschool conservative right wing party (who call themselves "liberals", by the way). Most right-wing voters will have a strong preference among this lot, but at the same time they won't mind deeply if one of the other options wins elections instead.
But they hate hate hate the progressives! A few weeks ago right wing protesters attacked and trashed the HQ of one of the more progressive parties (D66). The hatred is very deep (and mutual), totally unlike what the graphs in this article show you.
So its interesting to see these dynamics.
It might be correct, but if the Swedes weren’t modest at all but deeply hated parties on the other side of the spectrum (but not the ones nearby), you’d see roughly the same graph.
Your point about skewed results is right though: reading through the paper's annex on dataset construction, no distinction is made between out-parties. An analysis based on political spectrum-based clusters of parties would have been more telling, though the current methodology is probably on point for the more echo-chambered people.
Fair, obviously I'm a leftie. But I don't believe that PVV voters are going to be equally angry when FvD wins the elections than when D66 does. I can make caricatures and still understand that about right-wing voters.
Plus we have the exact same on the left, you can choose between the closeted maoists, the educated-elites-pretending-to-care-about-workers party, the educated-elites-not-even-pretending-to-care-about-workers party, the God-loves-workers-but-hates-gays party and the party against the humans (but for the animals).
Seriously the only party I can't come up with an obvious caricature of is CDA but then again they don't really stand for anything so it fits.
Traditional media are still political thought leaders. In the US, the media is giving cover to the fascist takeover of government.
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