Ralph Reed: toxic as a kid at University of Georgia, still toxic today.

My judgement may not move the conversation any further. I'm too emotionally wound up. I could do without the personal experience of the community which spawned this artificial divide. But then again, it's all I have, so I might as well use the hard lessons as well as the good times.

Never been in the same room as the founder of the (so-called) Christian Coalition. I hope. Grew up in Athens Georgia around that time, it was considered a small town. It wasn't all bad, but it took thousands of miles and decades of years before I could enter a Christian Church without wanting to run away.

It's John McCain's fault.

Not because he was bad - he wasn't. He was an honorable man. So honorable he got rid of earmarks, the allocation of funding to particular projects.

The result of this being that there is very little reason for people to cross the aisle. Previously, you had to keep working with the other party to keep the gravy train on schedule. Now?

For bonus points, ask if the cost of gridlock are higher or lower than the cost of the earmarks.

Disclaimer: this is my perception. Many will disagree and many will downvoted, but I want to put it out there in case it resonates with anyone and generates good, enlightening conversation. I hope people read and respond in the same spirit of good faith.

Perhaps Newt was a catalyst in Washington, but I think the broader cultural change was less related. Even as a lifelong liberal, I recall the 2000s as being a period of liberal snark toward conservatives, especially in the media and on the emerging Internet (I know some will argue that conservative policies are horrible so they deserved to be treated this way, but such arguments miss the point of civility: you debate bad ideas; you don’t attack people). It wasn’t the sort of ruthless display we see today, but it was relentless and it went on for more than a decade. Conservatives generally maintained decorum, but eventually the dam burst and the resentment cascaded over and Trump arrived on the scene to personify the middle finger that many on the right wanted to give to those they felt mistreated them for so long.

None of this is meant to impute blame or innocence on anyone, but to serve as a framework for understanding how we got here as that is prerequisite for getting black to a healthier state.

None of this is controversial or offtopic. Looks like the downvotes just proved your point. Folks don’t even respect a fellow liberal try to engage in a completely reasonable and civil way, forget any hope of them respecting a conservative.

The ironic part is that you allow a partial pass due to bad conservative policies, but during the time period to which you refer, the liberals were anti-gay marriage (DOMA anyone?) and ramming through “tough on crime” laws that they now decry as racist.

The clearest example of this that I have personally experienced was in a discussion a few days ago about the fires in Oregon. A state senator had his house burned down, and my suggestion that we shouldn't be celebrating this guy's misery brought a level of vicious attack I was completely unprepared for.

Like, I get it, it's ironic- he opposed a climate change and wildfire bill and his house burned down. What really scared me though was realizing I don't think the reaction would have been much different if he himself had burned to death in the fire.

Ouch. I have so many complicated thoughts trying to process the implications of that story, which I won’t try to sort out here. People are in denial about this, especially younger people with a fairly narrow view of both history and global politics, but what we are seeing is foreshadowing a civil war, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to see what might avert that outcome. There’s no question in my mind that we haven’t seen the worst of the riots and the violence yet. With the police forces being neutered all over the country, the inevitable response will be federal forces, and I think that is by design. Once that happens, we face a major escalation that will be very hard to unwind. We’ve learned now that these events are not rooted in any principle of justice (despite their clever PR that still appears to be fooling most) which means they can’t actually be avoided. They’re going to continue to capture any event they can to advance. I’m not even sure they realize what they are doing. Honestly, you can see the same ideological possession in so many of the comments in this thread.

Every time the police shoot a black man, unarmed and possibly in the back, there's a huge outpouring from the conservative media about why they deserved it and the police were right to murder them.

That, more than anything else, has contributed to the coarseness of the discourse. Well, that and the 4chanisation of everything. Maybe the right could rein in the "libtard" and "cuck" discourse a bit too? Oh, and the death threats that prominent women get.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ocasio-cor...

That’s not the case at all. There is an attempt to explain why the shooting was justified, and it nearly always is justified, which is an important analysis. It’s not as though there is a pattern of unarmed killings.

> It’s not as though there is a pattern of unarmed killings.

There's at least one a month that makes international news? And several thousand demonstrators in the streets for hundreds of days that think they're not justified? And it turns out that the police lie about events unless there's footage, and sometimes even then?

Here's the latest one: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/police-shooting...

One a month spread around different individuals in the country with over 700,000 cops and a total of over 50 million interactions a year, which includes dealing with all of the violent criminals who usually don’t want to go to go willingly and are often armed, then yes, one a month is incredibly low and indicates that this isn’t a pattern.

Even basic statistics knowledge should make this obvious.

It doesn’t matter that people are rioting. It turns out they routinely lie about events until there is footage too. Crowds riot about dumb/wrong things all the time. Sports games come to mind.

You just linked to an example where a wanted violent criminal was reported to police for violating a restraining order against a woman he previously allegedly raped, who then disregarded the cops orders, decided to fight with them and put them in a headlock, refused to comply again after being shot with tasers, refused to comply again when the gun was drawn, and instead reached for a deadly weapon while in lethal striking distance of an officer. I think you proved my point, not yours.

The underlying deeper point is that you are assuming you, or your point of view is good, and perfect, and his is bad. And because he made a mistake he should have his house burned down (and should die).

What you are missing is that you also make mistakes as a human being, and when you have terrible consequences of that happen, it might be nice if people on some opposite side of a political spectrum don’t laugh at you about it and say you deserved it, but stay quiet because they also know they are fallible and make mistakes.

I am truly shocked you are ok with someone dying because of some mistaken political point of view. This tbh has no place in a supposedly civil place like HN (or America? Or the world??)

Not only that, but there is no evidence that the fires had anything to do with climate change. You can not attribute individual events to climate change. There is also an argument that they were as bad as they are due to poor forest management.

I am a liberal as well and had a similar perception and that bothered me a bit. But, as fair as I want to be I couldn't help but notice the Republicans always favored the irrational, the fearmongering, and their discourse wasn't simply the other side of things but crooked perverted politics. Maybe the liberal snark was a reaction in the first place. And what we're witnessing now is the reaction to that reaction.

“Republicans always”

This is the language and thought pattern that is the problem. It is not okay to use this kind of language.

I'd wager you're getting voted down for "conservatives generally mainted decorum" in the decade after the Clinton impeachment, which included wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Fox News's rise to prominence, the Drudge Report setting the 24/7 alarmist tone that still domiantes online political content, McConnell growing into his now trademark do-nothing leadership, Ann Coulter moving from print to TV and showing everyone else that going weirder and crueler wins now. Hell, Orrin Hatch was literally censured _by Senate Republicans_ in the 2000s for how quickly he dropped his frenemy decorum with Democrats, especially Ted Kennedy.

The 2000s were absolutely not a decade of decorum, for conservatives or anyone in politics. The 2004 election was a massive turning point toward where we are today, and the 2008 election meltdown culminated the Republican party turning itself inside out in ways Gingrich really did directly catalyze a decade and a half prior.

We wound up with the Tea Party at the end of the 2000s and American political discourse went from an already slippery slope to a freefall.

As a New England liberal going back generations, for me it was very clear: conservatives were not simply wrong, but bafflingly, astoundingly, inconceivably wrong. The only logical explanation was that as individuals they were misguided: either evil, or dumb, or maybe just crazy.

I didn't understand this at the time, but everything I saw or read supported this worldview. Newspapers, magazines, schools, academics. Since I was left of them generally, I thought the world was too conservative. When conservatives complained about the mainstream media, it was always in context of mainstream journalists mocking them. For me, I saw it as conservatives mocking their extremists.

Fast forward to today, and I cannot imagine how frustrating it must have been to be a conservative then. That idea, that conservatives are bad, evil or crazy, was pervasive and all encompassing and smug.

Nowadays, for me, it's not about agreeing, but about listening. Hearing what people actually say rather than what a journalist says they say is quite enlightening.

“ Fast forward to today, and I cannot imagine how frustrating it must have been to be a conservative then. That idea, that conservatives are bad, evil or crazy, was pervasive and all encompassing and smug.”

I think this explains a big chunk of the Trump vote. Many voters saw in him someone who would not take the smug mockery without a fight.

This.

It's also why there is such a disconnect with respect to the Russian collusion allegations. To those inclined to trust the mainstream media, it is a settled question: of course Trump colluded, and anyone who can't see that is crazy, evil or dumb.

Those who feel misrepresented by the mainstream media, don't see how that allegation isn't just more of the same egregious lying they have experienced first-hand for decades

It is such a wide gap in outlook

Yes, the Russia collusion thing was particularly egregious. It turns out that it wasn’t just the media, but also trusted Federal bureaucrats who were willing to abuse their office for political gain. The media completely discredited themselves by supporting a largely false narrative, and yet they never really came clean about it, and many who furthered that narrative are still working in the media.

I hope that one day the US can come to agree on the facts. But many situations seem to be like Scott Adams says: two people watch the same movie and see two different narratives.

I mean... weren't they?

Look at where it's got them - conspiracy theories about pedophile pizza parlours. I'm struggling to frame the events of the last two decades as "the story of how we realized that conservatives were reasonable people after all".

We tend to be biased towards those we identify with and against those we disagree with, and this will color how we receive and interpret facts themselves, nevermimd simple opinion

Ongoimg anti-racist riots for example: are they a long overdue correction to a deeply flawed and misguided nation that oppresses a large fraction of its own citizens? Or are they a symptom of post-modernist moral relativism run amok, whereby political leaders have abandoned their responsibility to maintain public safety and order? Or perhaps they are a minor local dust up, blown out of proportion by a greedy, cynical media? Perhaps some combination of those?

If one skews left, one will be inclined to dismiss the concerns of the right as unreasonable, perhaps even hypocritical. Do that habitually enough, and conservatives will come off as entirely out of touch; and so will you, to them.

I recommend really striving to understand the point of view of your political opponents, not by reading leftist think-pieces about what the right thinks for example, but reading reasonable presentations of conservative arguments. So, more National Review and less Breitbart, for example. Less focus on "qanon pedo-pizza" who are the black block anarchists of the right, and more on people who makes sense even if you ultimately disagree.

As a lefty, I feel those of us breaking for the Green Party are treated the exact same way. In a way our ideas aren't validated even in the party we called home, so we're leaving for greener pastures.

Great point upvoted for balance. Remember those Dubya cartoons, even before he became a war criminal.

Your thesis is that conservatives "lost their cool" and elected someone clearly unfit for office in 2016 because... George W Bush got made fun of a lot until 2008?

I'm sorry, but I just don't think this is a helpful or accurate framework. Liberals spent 8 years snarking about conservatives because Bush was president, doing all his Bushy things. What about the following 8 years, when Obama was president? Can you specify at what point exactly you think conservatives lost their sense of decorum?

It started with Goldwater, with Nixon and then Gingrich being two major milestones as it developed.

Specifically Newt around Vince Foster's death. You can trace the roots of a lot, a _lot_, of today's utter partisan obstructionism and foolishness — mainstreaming fringe conspiracy theories with the explicit and openly espoused purpose of wedging the other party regardless of its goals — to Gingrich making Vince Foster's death an unending headline news story.

I mean christ, Trump _still_ brings up Vince Foster.