I've never learned anything from someone who agreed with me.
Beyond that, and perhaps more important. It's entirely possible that the reason the Wright Brothers succeeded in teaching us how to fly. (Oh yes, they developed the first practical airplane, but their real accomplishment was teaching us how to fly).
But back to the point, the reason they succeeded is that they believed in "productive argument". They could argue heatedly about issues, I do mean heated arguments, go to bed wake up friends the next day . In some cases they would wake up the next day and decide the other brother was right - and start the argument again.
Having been effectively disenfranchised at the House district level by gerrymandering quite a while back, I can definitely say it's had an impact on how I view politics and politicians.
As a libertarian, I marvel at the animosity that exists in the quadrant of the economic vs civil liberty matrix shared by communists, flanked by socialists and fascists, and the increasing closeness of the progressives (there is nothing any longer "liberal" about them) and conservatives with their overlapping amoeboid tentacles reflecting individual policies. Inter-political marriage is currently twice as opposed in polls as inter-racial marriages. Both major parties have no policies that can bring fiscal sanity nor civil peace to the nation. I agree with your analysis and I enjoyed "Nostalgia" (from an active guitar and Trombone player).
Thinking about yesterday's post on Disney, I can imagine that AI will have major impacts on the business, likely positive for the bottom line but not so much for the art.
Bob, you and I are similar in age -- I'm about a year younger. I don't recall JFK's campaign, although I do recall him being president, and certainly his assassination was the Pearl Harbor event for our generation.
I also remember the polarization of the 1960's: the Vietnam War, racial unrest, and campus riots. As a kid growing up in the Chicago area, IIRC I watched the 1968 Democrat Convention riot live on TV. So some things never change. Stuff like that goes in waves, as I've observed.
But I believe it's worse now -- thanks to social media. Before the internet we could turn off the TV or radio, close our magazines or newspapers, and set aside political enmity as we went about our day. Not now. With X, Instagram, TikTok, etc. polarization is at a fever pitch, and it continues 24/7, day after day after day. Where is the breaking point for this?
Here is one explanation. From my perspective, it is quite clear that almost all elected Dems either want to burn this country to the ground or know that if they object publicly, their political career would be over in a NY minute.
Most Dems hate this country. Don't believe me? Look at their policies in the Middle East and tell me they want what is best for this country. They are working tirelessly to make sure Iran gets access to the bomb. And while Iran hates Israel, we are after all "The Great Satan", are we not?
Look at their policies at the border. They don't want borders. Well, without borders, you don't have a country.
Obama said he "wanted to fundamentally transform" this country. You don't try to fundamentally transform that which you love.
Another reason that R's like me have such contempt and hatred for the Left is I know that if they could they would imprison folks like me. They already are!!! The J6 political prisoners. The pro-life folks who have been charged and imprisoned for praying and reading bible verses at abortion clinics.
Need I remind you that there are currently four (4!!!) separate active court cases in which the goal is the imprisonment of the current presumed nominee of the opposing party?
Folks like me on the Right understand quite clearly that this country is essentially over and we ain't getting it back. And do I hate those that did this? Yes, in spite of what the bible teaches me about my enemies, my patriotism is at war with my faith in this regard.
But my most bitter hatred is not reserved for the Left. It is for those in the middle who can't be bothered to pay attention to what is going on. All those kids for the last three or four generations who slept thru history class (if they were even taught it?) who now don't have the historical knowledge to realize that what the Left is doing today is the SAME GOD DAMNED PLAYBOOK they have used in every country they have destroyed!
BTW, I think your explanation of where the two parties are on the continuum is spot on. The Dems have moved the Overton Window so far to the left that they have made many of their older members into right wing extremists if they have remained where they were 30 years ago. And the R's have indeed moved to the Left, just not as quickly.
Another example of salient analysis, this time with a wonderful soundtrack! While I agree with your calculation of lost value listening to polls and pundits, I do think it is worth a reasonable investment of time to study what the candidates are saying, as difficult as that is to do in our soundbite driven media coverage. A few years after your vignette about the 1960 election, I was allowed to read a novel about how elections were being altered by computer aided polls (Fletcher Knebel as author sticks in my mind).The cover of the novel had an IBM machine and a cheering crowd around the candidate. As a result, I have always been wary.
I agree mostly. I nearly lost a good friend who was ranting about Trump before the 2016 election. I pointed out that Trump seemed to hold few, if any, opinions that wouldn't have been shared in 1995 by NY Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (my favorite post-WWII elected official). That sent him ballistic. I was gob-smacked. He angrily denied that ANY Democrat in the past 50 years or so was anything like Trump. I decided I'd rather keep a friend than argue the point, and he eventually simmered down. Now if he starts talking politics I grunt semi-intelligible "answers" until he moves on to sports or books or something.
As for social media, my wife is about as uninterested in "Politics" as it's possible to be and still vote intelligently. She is on a social App called NextDoor that I suppose is something like local gossip. She has been appalled by the "raving loonies" as she calls them who populate about 1/10th of the topics. Social media gives some terrible people the opportunity to meet other terrible people easily. Too bad.
This is looking like it’s going to be the third M.C. Escher Presidential election in a row…the only choice worse than the Republican is the Democrat and the only choice worse than the Democrat is the Republican. We are definitely in a kakistocracy.
On the topic of losing friends over politics, I lost a dear friend even though I agreed with her that Trump was not fit to be President and said I could not conceive of voting for him...BUT I had to admit that some of what happened while he was in office was pretty good: his Supreme Court picks, the Abraham Accords and the tax cuts for example. Click, end of friendship. On the other hand, I have quite a few friends and family members who are either Republicans or Democrats and we all seem to get along pretty well. I guess a lot depends on the strength of the relationship and the maturity of the persons involved.
I have been following the political sene for a long time. I ran for local office three time and lost three times. The last time I ran was because no one in my party wanted to run and I have a thick skin. I would say that I am a classical liberal. I believe everyone should have an equal opportunity and everyone should be personally responsible for themselves. Because my platform was that we were over taxed I did have people interested in what I had to say until they found out I was a Republican. Then some would politely walk away some would yell at me and a few even spit on me and told me I was ruining the country. I have come to believe that the reason we have become so divided and with so much rancor is that the Federal Government has too much to say about local issues. It was amazing to me the first time I explained how some insider deals cost the taxpayers money to be told that I wouldn’t get that persons vote because I was pro -life. How that even came up was a mystery until I realized I was a Republican and so had to be pro-life. Asking how that would affect anyone as all I wanted to do was reduce taxes was lost due to national politics. If DC stayed away from us I think we could find more common ground. But that has as much chance as a Republican being elected to Town Council in my town. BYW the last Republican on town council left in 1993. The latest time there was a Republican majority was before I moved into town in 1978.
The events of the Year 2020, Covid and Summer of Floyd, pretty much shattered my belief that politics is something that doesn't matter that much. When your being told "don't leave your house, don't breath the air, your kids school is closed, and roving mobs and burning your city and the authorities support it because your racist" that's it.
You know, it's not the heat per se about modern political debate, if I can grace it with a word it hardly deserves, that bothers me -- it's more the vacuity.
I mean...if I were a Trump man, I'd want to believe that a vote for The Don means a vote for balancing the budget, avoiding foreign entanglements, a strong national defense, reducing regulation, bringing order and the rule of law to immigration, rolling back the corrupt and corrosive regime of special entitlements based on race, sex, or some other victim status, and a robust defense of individual liberty. You know, the usual conservative kind of stuff, with of course a soupcon of culture war (e.g. abortion opposition) because this is America.
But I don't think that's actually true. I don't really identify any of those ideological passions as governing Mr. Trump's goal in seeking office, or intentions in holding it. I mean, I already have 2017-2021 as a guide, and his efforts along any of these lines were tepid at best. What I seem to be voting for is red hats and little flags, owning the libs with cutting tweets, and a lot of fierce social media debate. Even his (non-rabid) supporters seem to mostly like Mr. Trump for what he is not -- what he will not do. He won't abandon border control, he won't start any new wars, he won't propose huge tax or spending increases, and he won't appoint complete clowns who decline to define "woman" to the bench. The vast Federal colossus will lumber on for the most part, doing what it's been doing for the past umpty years, but at least it will wobble less. All well and good -- but hardly worthy of the kind of fanatical support or opposition that he raises.
Similarly, if I were a Biden woman (one hates to admit the possibility of a Biden man), I would like to think that a vote for Slow Joe is a vote for a trust-busting DoJ, an active EEOC persecuting companies that try to thwart unionization, protective tariffs, generous student loans, old age pensions, and disability provisions from the public till -- all the old lunch bucket Democratic stuff which, indeed, Senator Joe Biden imbibed with his mother's soy milk substitute and which propelled him to his Peter Principle level of political success in the US Senate. But of course, the modern Democratic Party hardly pays any attention to that stuff. They care way more about green energy than union drives. They care more about confused men using the girl's bathroom if they choose than whether granny is going to have to eat cat food in her retirement. When was the last time a Democrat visited a recently-shuttered factory, surrounded by grim men in hard hats, and said "Outrageous! Elect me and there'll be good union jobs for everybody, a chicken in every pot, all the children above average"?
And even then, if I was a Millenial Biden gal, say, I might at least hope I would be cementing a genderfluid social justice for all equitist state by throwing my vote into the Biden hopper. But that is also laughable. Biden had nothing to do with any of the "equitist" trends. They were probably as much a surprise to him as they were to his most committed ideological foes -- more so, even, as Biden has always been a bit slow on the uptake. He surfs those waves to the extent he can, certainly, since they have a home within his political party -- but who seriously believes he controls, or even has any significant influence over them? No, they are clearly the result of vast forces elsewhere in our nation, and Biden is not their leader, champion, or even competent apologist. So voting for Mr. Biden certainly avoids Mr. Trump raining snide Twitter/X remarks on equitist principles for 4 years, but little else. Not a worthless goal, if you're of that ilk, but hardly (you would think) enough to froth at the mouth like re-electing the doddering fool will usher in the millenium.
So the fierce debate centered around these candidates seems wildly overheated for the actual outcomes at stake. A Trump victory will not root out the equitists, even if he were much more interested in that result, and much more disciplined about pursuing it, than he is. A Biden victory will not cement equitism, either, so much as continue to feebly and chaotically enable it at the Federal level, at a level say 15% more than were Trump to win.
I don't really mind fierce argument over ideological direction -- provided the thing about which we are arguing to Do Or Not Do actually will have a significant steering effect on that direction, and one can look forward to an outcome more meaningful than who gets to raise a middle finger to the other guy and say ha!
Bicker, battle, broil and brawl? At first, I thought that was a law firm.
I've never learned anything from someone who agreed with me.
Beyond that, and perhaps more important. It's entirely possible that the reason the Wright Brothers succeeded in teaching us how to fly. (Oh yes, they developed the first practical airplane, but their real accomplishment was teaching us how to fly).
But back to the point, the reason they succeeded is that they believed in "productive argument". They could argue heatedly about issues, I do mean heated arguments, go to bed wake up friends the next day . In some cases they would wake up the next day and decide the other brother was right - and start the argument again.
Having been effectively disenfranchised at the House district level by gerrymandering quite a while back, I can definitely say it's had an impact on how I view politics and politicians.
As a libertarian, I marvel at the animosity that exists in the quadrant of the economic vs civil liberty matrix shared by communists, flanked by socialists and fascists, and the increasing closeness of the progressives (there is nothing any longer "liberal" about them) and conservatives with their overlapping amoeboid tentacles reflecting individual policies. Inter-political marriage is currently twice as opposed in polls as inter-racial marriages. Both major parties have no policies that can bring fiscal sanity nor civil peace to the nation. I agree with your analysis and I enjoyed "Nostalgia" (from an active guitar and Trombone player).
Thinking about yesterday's post on Disney, I can imagine that AI will have major impacts on the business, likely positive for the bottom line but not so much for the art.
Bob, you and I are similar in age -- I'm about a year younger. I don't recall JFK's campaign, although I do recall him being president, and certainly his assassination was the Pearl Harbor event for our generation.
I also remember the polarization of the 1960's: the Vietnam War, racial unrest, and campus riots. As a kid growing up in the Chicago area, IIRC I watched the 1968 Democrat Convention riot live on TV. So some things never change. Stuff like that goes in waves, as I've observed.
But I believe it's worse now -- thanks to social media. Before the internet we could turn off the TV or radio, close our magazines or newspapers, and set aside political enmity as we went about our day. Not now. With X, Instagram, TikTok, etc. polarization is at a fever pitch, and it continues 24/7, day after day after day. Where is the breaking point for this?
Here is one explanation. From my perspective, it is quite clear that almost all elected Dems either want to burn this country to the ground or know that if they object publicly, their political career would be over in a NY minute.
Most Dems hate this country. Don't believe me? Look at their policies in the Middle East and tell me they want what is best for this country. They are working tirelessly to make sure Iran gets access to the bomb. And while Iran hates Israel, we are after all "The Great Satan", are we not?
Look at their policies at the border. They don't want borders. Well, without borders, you don't have a country.
Obama said he "wanted to fundamentally transform" this country. You don't try to fundamentally transform that which you love.
Another reason that R's like me have such contempt and hatred for the Left is I know that if they could they would imprison folks like me. They already are!!! The J6 political prisoners. The pro-life folks who have been charged and imprisoned for praying and reading bible verses at abortion clinics.
Need I remind you that there are currently four (4!!!) separate active court cases in which the goal is the imprisonment of the current presumed nominee of the opposing party?
Folks like me on the Right understand quite clearly that this country is essentially over and we ain't getting it back. And do I hate those that did this? Yes, in spite of what the bible teaches me about my enemies, my patriotism is at war with my faith in this regard.
But my most bitter hatred is not reserved for the Left. It is for those in the middle who can't be bothered to pay attention to what is going on. All those kids for the last three or four generations who slept thru history class (if they were even taught it?) who now don't have the historical knowledge to realize that what the Left is doing today is the SAME GOD DAMNED PLAYBOOK they have used in every country they have destroyed!
BTW, I think your explanation of where the two parties are on the continuum is spot on. The Dems have moved the Overton Window so far to the left that they have made many of their older members into right wing extremists if they have remained where they were 30 years ago. And the R's have indeed moved to the Left, just not as quickly.
Another example of salient analysis, this time with a wonderful soundtrack! While I agree with your calculation of lost value listening to polls and pundits, I do think it is worth a reasonable investment of time to study what the candidates are saying, as difficult as that is to do in our soundbite driven media coverage. A few years after your vignette about the 1960 election, I was allowed to read a novel about how elections were being altered by computer aided polls (Fletcher Knebel as author sticks in my mind).The cover of the novel had an IBM machine and a cheering crowd around the candidate. As a result, I have always been wary.
I agree mostly. I nearly lost a good friend who was ranting about Trump before the 2016 election. I pointed out that Trump seemed to hold few, if any, opinions that wouldn't have been shared in 1995 by NY Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (my favorite post-WWII elected official). That sent him ballistic. I was gob-smacked. He angrily denied that ANY Democrat in the past 50 years or so was anything like Trump. I decided I'd rather keep a friend than argue the point, and he eventually simmered down. Now if he starts talking politics I grunt semi-intelligible "answers" until he moves on to sports or books or something.
As for social media, my wife is about as uninterested in "Politics" as it's possible to be and still vote intelligently. She is on a social App called NextDoor that I suppose is something like local gossip. She has been appalled by the "raving loonies" as she calls them who populate about 1/10th of the topics. Social media gives some terrible people the opportunity to meet other terrible people easily. Too bad.
This is looking like it’s going to be the third M.C. Escher Presidential election in a row…the only choice worse than the Republican is the Democrat and the only choice worse than the Democrat is the Republican. We are definitely in a kakistocracy.
On the topic of losing friends over politics, I lost a dear friend even though I agreed with her that Trump was not fit to be President and said I could not conceive of voting for him...BUT I had to admit that some of what happened while he was in office was pretty good: his Supreme Court picks, the Abraham Accords and the tax cuts for example. Click, end of friendship. On the other hand, I have quite a few friends and family members who are either Republicans or Democrats and we all seem to get along pretty well. I guess a lot depends on the strength of the relationship and the maturity of the persons involved.
I have been following the political sene for a long time. I ran for local office three time and lost three times. The last time I ran was because no one in my party wanted to run and I have a thick skin. I would say that I am a classical liberal. I believe everyone should have an equal opportunity and everyone should be personally responsible for themselves. Because my platform was that we were over taxed I did have people interested in what I had to say until they found out I was a Republican. Then some would politely walk away some would yell at me and a few even spit on me and told me I was ruining the country. I have come to believe that the reason we have become so divided and with so much rancor is that the Federal Government has too much to say about local issues. It was amazing to me the first time I explained how some insider deals cost the taxpayers money to be told that I wouldn’t get that persons vote because I was pro -life. How that even came up was a mystery until I realized I was a Republican and so had to be pro-life. Asking how that would affect anyone as all I wanted to do was reduce taxes was lost due to national politics. If DC stayed away from us I think we could find more common ground. But that has as much chance as a Republican being elected to Town Council in my town. BYW the last Republican on town council left in 1993. The latest time there was a Republican majority was before I moved into town in 1978.
The events of the Year 2020, Covid and Summer of Floyd, pretty much shattered my belief that politics is something that doesn't matter that much. When your being told "don't leave your house, don't breath the air, your kids school is closed, and roving mobs and burning your city and the authorities support it because your racist" that's it.
You know, it's not the heat per se about modern political debate, if I can grace it with a word it hardly deserves, that bothers me -- it's more the vacuity.
I mean...if I were a Trump man, I'd want to believe that a vote for The Don means a vote for balancing the budget, avoiding foreign entanglements, a strong national defense, reducing regulation, bringing order and the rule of law to immigration, rolling back the corrupt and corrosive regime of special entitlements based on race, sex, or some other victim status, and a robust defense of individual liberty. You know, the usual conservative kind of stuff, with of course a soupcon of culture war (e.g. abortion opposition) because this is America.
But I don't think that's actually true. I don't really identify any of those ideological passions as governing Mr. Trump's goal in seeking office, or intentions in holding it. I mean, I already have 2017-2021 as a guide, and his efforts along any of these lines were tepid at best. What I seem to be voting for is red hats and little flags, owning the libs with cutting tweets, and a lot of fierce social media debate. Even his (non-rabid) supporters seem to mostly like Mr. Trump for what he is not -- what he will not do. He won't abandon border control, he won't start any new wars, he won't propose huge tax or spending increases, and he won't appoint complete clowns who decline to define "woman" to the bench. The vast Federal colossus will lumber on for the most part, doing what it's been doing for the past umpty years, but at least it will wobble less. All well and good -- but hardly worthy of the kind of fanatical support or opposition that he raises.
Similarly, if I were a Biden woman (one hates to admit the possibility of a Biden man), I would like to think that a vote for Slow Joe is a vote for a trust-busting DoJ, an active EEOC persecuting companies that try to thwart unionization, protective tariffs, generous student loans, old age pensions, and disability provisions from the public till -- all the old lunch bucket Democratic stuff which, indeed, Senator Joe Biden imbibed with his mother's soy milk substitute and which propelled him to his Peter Principle level of political success in the US Senate. But of course, the modern Democratic Party hardly pays any attention to that stuff. They care way more about green energy than union drives. They care more about confused men using the girl's bathroom if they choose than whether granny is going to have to eat cat food in her retirement. When was the last time a Democrat visited a recently-shuttered factory, surrounded by grim men in hard hats, and said "Outrageous! Elect me and there'll be good union jobs for everybody, a chicken in every pot, all the children above average"?
And even then, if I was a Millenial Biden gal, say, I might at least hope I would be cementing a genderfluid social justice for all equitist state by throwing my vote into the Biden hopper. But that is also laughable. Biden had nothing to do with any of the "equitist" trends. They were probably as much a surprise to him as they were to his most committed ideological foes -- more so, even, as Biden has always been a bit slow on the uptake. He surfs those waves to the extent he can, certainly, since they have a home within his political party -- but who seriously believes he controls, or even has any significant influence over them? No, they are clearly the result of vast forces elsewhere in our nation, and Biden is not their leader, champion, or even competent apologist. So voting for Mr. Biden certainly avoids Mr. Trump raining snide Twitter/X remarks on equitist principles for 4 years, but little else. Not a worthless goal, if you're of that ilk, but hardly (you would think) enough to froth at the mouth like re-electing the doddering fool will usher in the millenium.
So the fierce debate centered around these candidates seems wildly overheated for the actual outcomes at stake. A Trump victory will not root out the equitists, even if he were much more interested in that result, and much more disciplined about pursuing it, than he is. A Biden victory will not cement equitism, either, so much as continue to feebly and chaotically enable it at the Federal level, at a level say 15% more than were Trump to win.
I don't really mind fierce argument over ideological direction -- provided the thing about which we are arguing to Do Or Not Do actually will have a significant steering effect on that direction, and one can look forward to an outcome more meaningful than who gets to raise a middle finger to the other guy and say ha!