That said, the no-compromise issues really do have the effect of shoving all the important stuff into the background...
In fact, there are numerous pro-life groups who directly benefit from moving the ball around but never actually winning the game.
The same is true of race relations organizations, animal cruelty activists, the NRA, etc. With all of these, the spoken platform may or may not be a good thing, but the largest stakeholders would lose tremendous money and influence if they ever actually won.
This is exactly how you win elections. If you gain enough single-issue voters you never need to debate the complex issues that might split your base.
It's important to portray the situation as if they are losing. Pro-Choice is a great example. Abortion-right are frequently portrayed as "under attack and imminently about to be destroyed" despite almost every SCOTUS judge publicly saying it's "settled law".
It is a political form of George Orwell's endless war, and the ultimate distraction.
Corporations don't need to fund them directly as politicians are happy to play this game so that corporations can fund THEM directly since the political attention is placed elsewhere.
I read some “gun people” discussing this. An argument was that they were not single issue voters, but rather they were a foundational issue voters.
That all rights (to him/them) are supported by the idea the public is a counter force to the government. Fundamental before all other issues because is the prevention of the gov backtracking or infringing on anything “down stream”. So...
That if a politician supported the disarming of civilians that was indeed a full stop to other thoughts on abortion or the foreign trade or etc.
It was a good read really, because calling them a single issue voter may give the wrong impression, which is good for no one coming to the table on other issues.
I’m pretty sure you dismissing the conversation I reported as “identity politics” is exactly what the argument was warning against; people misreading opponents of gun control as some surface level thing that can be hand waved away.
Also, “identity politics” isn’t right. No one is born a gun owner, nor can you identify one in a line up or nod to one walking down the street unless they want you to know they are “one of us”. Nor does owning a gun preclude you from another group like being white or black might, although there is a long running AK vs AR debate, but I think that’s pretty much been settled!
But I agree there is a foundational element to the 2nd amendment (which is why they passed it 2nd), and it is not (only) identity politics.
Black's Law Dictionary defines the word arms as "anything that a man wears for his defense, or takes in his hands as a weapon."
The word "arms" in the right to keep and bear arms explicitly meant weapons that could be carried by a single infantryman. It was never about (and still isn't about) tanks, or cannon, or warships, or nukes. So no, you don't have to be committed to allowing tanks to be fully keen on the right to keep and bear arms.
(if you still doubt this, focus on the word "bear". You can't "bear" a tank, if anything a tank bears you.)
( https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/iii-what-arms-meant-circa-17... )
That said, it actually happens to be totally legal for private citizens to own a tank in most countries, including the US. They're expensive, get terrible gas mileage, probably not street-legal to drive on the freeway, unlikely to fit in your garage and the neighbors are bound to complain if you fire the main gun...but you totally could own one (and drive it around your own private property) if so inclined.
I'm also curious about the constitutional ramifications of the ban on civilian ownership of machine guns manufactured after 1986. Could any class of small arms be gradually banned by specifying a date of manufacture cutoff for legality in a similar way? Seems contrary to a plain reading of the 2a to phase out weapons this way but I know that my layman's plain reading is worth very little here.
Case in point: A few years ago I had a company outing to go play tank paintball. This was in the UK.
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/operational-tank-for-sale-a...
(Making, say, a 50 caliber gun legal under the NFA is indeed somewhat more onerous than owning a shotgun. And a gun rights advocate certainly could care about trying to make it less so but they're not required to care about it because - as I said above - a tank doesn't count as "arms".)
If you expand the definition of “tanks” to the commonly used one of “armored vehicles”... then there are a lot more than you’d likely expect.
The photos/videos of people milling about after members and staffers narrowly escaped those in the crowd clearly intending violence combined with a rather intense propaganda effort aimed at minimizing the autocoup attempt have effectively spread a false narrative of the attack, though.
For the cynics and BLM activists and more, this is seen as obvious (no rubber bullets, no real resistance). The police forces will tear gas (illegal in warfare), rubber bullet, etc. black lives matter protestors, but won't dare go against white protestors / insurrectionists. We still have a 'uge race issue here. We just cover it up with policies. In reality (aka both insurrection and protests) we clearly see the two groups treated completely different.
(they weren't yokels, they weren't particularly armed, they were aligned with officials, etc.)
Is it? When I debate some partisans, I can't find bedrock logic under their opinions. It's like the opinions are pointers to beliefs they receive from an authority figure.
They are unconvinceable--because the decision maker isn't in the room.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)
Probably also worth nothing that our political view point(s) may, to a certain extent, be biologically determined:
> Studies have found that subjects with conservative political views have larger amygdalae and are more prone to feeling disgust. Liberals have larger volume of grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex and are better at detecting errors in recurring patterns. Conservatives have a stronger sympathetic nervous system response to threatening images and are more likely to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as threatening. In general, conservatives are more likely to report larger social networks, more happiness and better self-esteem than liberals. Liberals are more likely to report greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction and experiential hardship and are more open to experience and tolerate uncertainty and disorder better.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat...
Also, there is a page in there where Haidt hypothesized that the low agreeableness/asperger personality people actually do better in the startup world precisely because they don't fear being ostracized and thus don't engage in the groupthink showcased in the article. Peter Thiel type people. Of course that's hard to really test one way or another, but the narrative fits...
I and friends have for a few years discussed the idea of freezing all gun and abortion laws in place for 20 years as a means to declawing the US parties' stranglehold on dialogue.
Sans wedge issues, there is a solid American consensus out there and it trends populist, and does so for simple economic reasons.
Entirely entirely unrealistic and would go nowhere. Both sides love their wedges. They campaign on they both saber rattle with, they make their careers on them. When they have a chance to make movement, they usually don’t, if they fixed the issue it wouldn’t raise money anymore.
Look how many people already say there is a UniParty when looking at pretty shitty things like both sides voting for Iraq war, Patriot Act, meager amounts of citizen Covid relief compared to corporate interests... so take away the wedge issues and the two parties may look far more similar.
I’d like to see viable third and fourth party options. No decent person can be entirely red or blue.
I have quit responding to labels directly and nearly always move to clarity first and foremost.
Uniparty?
Usually this is met with either righteous indignation, or a hard pass, or agreement of some kind.
When I ask, "how so?", I tend to understand the other person better and have an opportunity to have a respectable, sometimes productive dialog.
Re: more parties
I agree with you. Sadly, I do not believe those party options make much sense in our current system.
And it is the system, meaning changing it will require similar effort as it does to get anything else done, so...
I feel factions, blocs, caucuses can serve a similar role. On the right, the Tea Party was quite effective. Not endorsement, just noting dynamics that apply here.
The economic left is contemplating similar ways and means.
The other tool we do have is collective action. Class type moves that can deliver very significant incentive to change.
That center is always moving: over the last 30 years, the economic center has moved rightward (see Bill Clinton and the "Third Way", or the tax rate of the top bracket), while the social center has moved leftwards (see public opinion of interracial marriages and LGBTQ unions). On both axes, the US center is right of center, compared to the rest of the world.
Ie: Let's make sure everyone sees the doctor without going bankrupt or being denied for lack of money
, or
relitigate the SCOTUS decision gun ownership being an individual right, and like all rights, is not absolute, subject to reasonable regulation.
Pick one.
And one is all we get due to how politics currently works in our US system. As for changing it? Same priority discussion.
Without our people being able to express consensus in a potent way, we basically ignore them right now. No judgement there, just hard reality.
How do we want to play it then?
So far, these kinds of conversations have been super interesting! They often go pretty well. The core idea is being for something we have majority consensus on rather than burn time on things we don't.
Expressing all this stuff in terms of priorities could be a way to get past how toxic it all is.
What I will say is quid pro, pro. Get health care sorted and we all can have a much lower cost, lower risk conversation about guns...
I still love the idea a little bit, federal abortion and gun laws have moved only incrementally in the last 20 years and yet they've prevented coalitions surrounding so many other pressing issues from forming.
In ancient Athens they used to try to make laws like that. They would create a penalty for bringing up certain ideas like melting down golden statues in their temples for money or proposing ideas that disasterously failed in the past. These laws had a tendency to be broken though.
Bear in mind, many people's politics and values have become very aligned: If you don't support someone's views on identity issues, for instance, they may not feel they can be friends with you anymore. If you consider abortion to be literal murder, the color it places on someone who supports or has had an abortion, may make friendship similarly challenging.
But your main point is right, that things like memes often serve to push people away if you’re not already in the in-group.
Edited to add a space
That's actually kind of the point of this article, as I read it: political opinions are very malleable. Tribal identification is one mechanism by which they can be changed. If the tribe decides we're cutting taxes, we change our opinion to favor cutting taxes. If the tribe decides that trans identity is extremely important, we do too. Not because of any overt pressure but simply because of natural herd and instincts.
But self-interest is an even stronger hammer with which to shape political opinions. If it is strongly in my economic best interest to get an abortion, there's a pretty decent chance I'm gonna finagle my way to believing it's OK -- at least for me -- even if I "thought it was literal murder" before. It's easy enough to do because abortion has none of the physical hallmarks of literal murder (you know, struggling, screaming victims, blood everywhere, etc.) and society clearly treats it as a different thing, no matter where in the U.S. you live. I have noticed a similar pattern whereby rich liberal friends are slightly less in favor of eating the rich than poor liberal friends, even though the Twitter crowd has pretty much decided where they stand on this issue. Self-interest is a powerful motivator! Us rich folks like to talk about all the entitlements we support but we get a little less comfortable when it comes time to talk about who pays for them.
This is just a general rule, it doesn't apply universally by any means. Even this article suggested that there's just a 15% shift in personal opinion directly after a tribe opinion change. But I guess the change grows over time too. I hadn't heard a damn thing about illegal immigrants from my conservative father until about 2016. Now sometimes it seems like every third article he sends me is on that subject.
Hey, you know another interesting thing about this: everyone hates literal murder, but somehow murderers families often -- not always, but often -- come around to forgiving them. Sometimes they forgive the murderer so hard that they come to court to support them before they're even convicted, pay for lawyers, etc. You'd almost never do that for someone who wasn't family. Self-interest, family, and tribe are extremely powerful mutators of political and even moral opinion!
The number of clinic bombings and assassinations of abortion providers in the US particularly given how few there are in slem areas demonstrates that enough people believe it to feel compelled to act.
Sure people do. There are plenty of us. Even those of us who are atheist and/or pro-LGBT. It doesn’t strictly align with parties; for instance my own views are rather liberal except for this particular issue.
> Folks would lynch abortion providers -- not one or two, but en masse
This did not happen for a lot of other viewpoints throughout history that we now consider illegal and unthinkable. Those of us who are anti-abortion consider abortion to be much the same—it will take a long time to change society’s opinion but violence is not the answer to solving the problem.
What if it's state sanctioned? Where were all the people destroying nazi concentration camps?
I would also just note that there are policies that have been clearly demonstrated to reduce the number of abortions, but they require a small amount of spending. I struggle to believe that someone who believes abortion is literal murder would shrink from providing e.g. free contraceptives, given the alternative. Yet Republicans tend to be opposed to these things, certainly at the legislative level. The behavior and voting patterns just don't support the claim, IMO.
(This did happen with the Republicans in 2016
Republicans controlled Congress and held the Presidency for various times from 2001-2006.
Would that explain why Catholics, who, ah, generally don't support abortion, are split ~50/50 between blue and red? [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_politics_i...
This begs the question - why do people pick and choose their religious dogma, but not their political dogma?
I feel that the answer to this question is 'The world is a little bit more complicated than the parent poster claims.' These claims have little predictive, or explanatory power, given this rather prominent counter-example.
Well, in a multiparty democracy (which was where the study happened; if you didn't know that going in to the article, the reference to multiple center-right parties should be a pretty big giveaway) if you dissent from a party on an issue of any salience, there's a pretty good chance there is another party available that is just like that one, except for it's view on the issue you dissent on. So, if the party fails to convince you when it changes, you stop being a party member rather than become a dissenter on the one issue.
That's less true for religions (especially religions with certain features: you aren't going to find a Church like the Roman Catholic Church including it's view of the papacy and it's historical descent, but differing on the moral parameters of abortion.)
It's also less true of parties in a system which isn't a robust multiparty democracy, which is why both major parties in the US system are big tent parties with stark internal divisions that sometimes try to paper over them to present a united front.
Interesting possibility: Religion is a protected class, politics isn't. So people fear viewpoint discrimination (i.e. getting canceled) for diverging from the dominant political party, because that isn't protected, but not for diverging from any given religious doctrine, because that is protected.
Maybe we just need to declare the political parties to be religions. In a way they are. And it's in the same way that caused religions to be protected to begin with, isn't it?
It feels risky to me. Coupled to the protection of freedom of religion in the US is both the interpretation of the First Amendment and the political custom that there be a "high wall" between religion and politics. In practice, this isn't always true, but the principle serves as a counterweight to people's faith not being formally, structurally questionable.
For obvious reasons, no such high wall can exist between people's politics and politics, so making political affiliation a protected class risks giving protection of the law to things that society will greatly suffer under if they are protected (imagine if he SPLC couldn't fire a staffer who's an active Klansman).
I don't know if I buy it, because the purpose of the wall is to constrain people from being punished for their beliefs, which you could do just as well with politics. That isn't the same as having their beliefs questioned in a public debate -- which we already do with religion. Questioning isn't punishment. Getting fired is punishment.
> imagine if he SPLC couldn't fire a staffer who's an active Klansman
The strongest objection to a Klansman is that they commit acts of violence. But violence isn't protected speech. If they're committing acts of violence, fire them.
Whereas if your only objection is that they go home and give sermons against interracial marriage while wearing a stupid hat, isn't that kind of the point?
How is it any different than Planned Parenthood can't fire a Catholic for opposing abortion outside of work?
Companies ought to have the right to fire people acting counter to their goals.
American Catholics support legal abortion at pretty similar rates to the general population. [0] The Church heirarchy may not, but that’s not the population of interest.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/20/8-key-findi...
You can be religiously Catholic and support legal abortion, and do so without dissenting on any essential doctrine (though you’d be in tension with how the heirarchy tends to apply certain important doctrines.)
If you morally support abortion, you'd be in dissent, but doctrinal dissent isn't really unheard of among Catholics (even within the heirarchy.)
No actually, you can't. You can fit the broader definition of Christian but if you hold these views and profess to be a Catholic, you are in fact a heretic and can be excommunicated[1]. I see this fiction posted again and again on HN, and while it's not my intention to support or oppose the Church's viewpoint on this people should be educated and aware that they can't claim to be certain things if they aren't them.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/docume...
In practice, there's a wide gulf between what the Church formally establishes as dogma and the adherence of individual Catholics. It's generally resolved as the Church holding the door open for forgiveness through a person's entire life, as long as penitence is a possibility. It's rare for the Church to excommunicate an individual Catholic (or even deprive them of communion) even for very public statements regarding their support of abortion.
Sometimes, the door is held open so long the Church's view on the topic changes and forgiveness is no longer needed to align the practitioner with the Church's stance.
No, you can't, and nothing at your link supports your claim. Support for legal abortion (or the non-criminalization of anything; criminalization is not symmetric and there are cases where this wouldn't be the case for supporting criminalization of an act) is, where not obligatory, inherently a prudential judgement as criminalization always inflicts harm intentionally.
Moral support for abortion would be dissent from authoritative teaching, which is of a more serious (both doctrinally and in canon law) character, but that's an intensely different thing.
[1] https://www.consciencelaws.org/religion/religion002.aspx
[2] In this context, by scandal Catholics mean action that invites others to sin.
Have you not seen the current Pope? Far more injecting in politics than the previous. Obvious in a historical perspective, this is still very hands off for the church.
The European Catholics (Primarily Irish, Italian, German ancestry) are often more liberal, perhaps because historically they've lived in the urban North East.
People flip flop on policies because they are part of social groups, not coherent ideologies. They don't perceive themselves as flip flopping, because of course they have not changed groups.
If a 'strong' leader of a group such as the President, characterizes something as positive, followers will buy it.
Especially when there is a political divide, people tend to be 'against' ideas as well, much more so if 'the other side' approves or proposes them.
If you gave any number of policy recommendations to a random group, and indicated at random they were proposed by either Republicans or Democrats, I suggest you'd get responses more consistent with group alignment than ideological alignment.
I've lived long enough to see the terms "liberal" and "conservative" morph multiple times. (You will too eventually, just watch carefully.) They've long since lost any connection to their origin in classical European political philosophy and have now become merely placeholders to give the pretense that the two major US political parties have some kind of consistent ideological (as opposed to financial) backing, which they don't.
There's a certain irony in Barry Goldwater being credited with launching the modern "conservative" movement in the US when Goldwater himself could be considered much more "libertarian" and was opposed to the policies and increasing influence of "conservative Christians" such as Pat Robertson.
Scratch either of the two parties and underneath you'll see a very loose coalition of differing, sometimes opposing interests, not a clear set of consistent, unwavering beliefs. It's an ongoing power struggle, and the political labels just reflect the currently dominant group in the power struggle.
Ok it’s not that easy.
It is, but it's not just them. Mainstream Democrats are more center than the Party. "Defund the Police" did not play well with many centrist Dems.
Your friends will argue with you, you'll be surrounded by memes making fun of people who believe what you do. There's incredible social forces to conform to the exact set of beliefs espoused by political parties, which are mostly set by corporate interests.
It's a huge part of what the Republican party has struggled with: There's both the clear vision of conservative values and ideals... and Donald Trump. You can practically see on people's faces trying to reconcile their beliefs with party platform. And there's a massive amount of pressure to stay in line with everyone else.