I assume those are the guys who are voting for the party opposed to one you're voting for, correct?
> actively stifling progress is not actually funny
Another thing that is less than funny is assuming that there's some universal definiton of "progress" and those who disagree are just doing it out of stupid stubbornness, unwilling to concede the obvious truth.
> It is not possible for me to base my legislative direction on “everyone that is not cis white is bad”.
It's not possible to anybody. Literally nobody does that. It's a crude caricature. By perpetuating this caricature as if it had any bearing to reality, you are a major part of the problem.
Except that it wasn't the same way one or two decades ago. And the republicans have changed a lot more than the democrats on that front.
Only if you're looking at it from the Democratic perspective. From the Republican side they look at Democratic policies from the last decade and see a group that suddenly decided to throw all previous social norms out the window and upend social order. They see themselves as reacting to that change in the Democratic Party.
I think the truth is that both parties simultaneously escalated, but that perspective usually gets shouted down pretty hard by both sides who each really want to perceive themselves as the consistent one.
That's a different front, though.
Even if it's a response to those things, the level of "don't cooperate even on issues where you agree/used to agree" has not been the same between parties.
> when half the populations entire political identity is “whatever we think will make the other side angry”?
The idea here is that Republicans are somehow out to spite the Democrats more than vice versa, and I frankly don't see it. Both sides believe the other to be acting in bad faith, and honestly from my perspective it certainly looks like both sides are acting in bad faith.
We've had more than our fair share of close calls to government shutdowns the past four years, but let's not forget that Congress actually did fail to fund the government twice during Trump's presidency. The current Congress flirts with the line but has always ended up actually finding something that can pass.
> And the republicans have changed a lot more than the democrats on that front.
Of course, your team have always been standing for the common sense but the other team is just crazy now. Long gone are the times of Bush presidency, where the parties lives in almost perfect harmony, and the worst thing the President could be called by the opposing politician is "this esteemed and honorable man is sometimes mistaken". If only would could go back to those golden times.
I don't know why you think this is relevant to what I'm saying.
> Of course, your team have always been standing for the common sense but the other team is just crazy now.
That's not what I said at all. I said both teams used to be more similar in a specific way.
And neither one was very good.
I visit alt-right circles A LOT, and I have literally never once heard “the other side does these things out of spite”. The vast majority of the time, they don’t have anything to say on a topic beyond repeating some stupid meme.
Additionally, I would also like to point out that people on the right actually demonstrably DO have zero conviction for their beliefs. It is a tested fact that on the whole people on the right will absolutely flip flop on a topic the moment they find out that the left supports it (some 90% of right wing voters in tests), however, on the whole, people on the left are *far* less likely to flip flop (only some 10% of left wing voters flip on a topic upon learning the right supports it).
That the right actually votes out of spite is not just something people assert, it’s a tested fact.
Mitch *blocked his own goddamn bill upon finding out that dems supported it*.
They're constantly saying that the other side "hates you and wants to destroy the country", exactly the same thing left-wing circles are constantly saying about them. If they're laughing when they're saying it, it's either because you're failing to read the room and arguing with someone who's just sharing an edgy meme rather than actually talking politics (I see this very often on the fediverse), or they're doing it in a cynical "haha, we're so screwed" manner.
You from earlier:
> It is not possible for me to base my legislative direction on “everyone that is not cis white is bad”.
Both sides are totally guilty of repeating stupid memes instead of engaging in intelligent discourse. You just don't recognize your stupid memes because they seem like factual statements since you've heard them so much from your circles.
You hear someone say something that you disagree with and you immediately interpret it using the memetic pigeon hole that you've adopted for that "kind of person" instead of actually listening to what they have to say. Get out more and actually listen (really listen!) to what conservatives have to say. Why do they repeat the memes that they do? What do those memes say about their inner life?
As a rule, conservatives are no less thoughtful and caring than you are, they just have a very different set of axioms governing their ethics. Until you understand those priors their words will sound as irrational and foolish to you as your words do to them.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17457289.2019.15...
"these results suggest that Trump was able to leverage populist anger for political advantage in ways that other candidates were not and that such anti-elitism played an important and underappreciated role in explaining the outcome of the [2016] presidential election."
*Edit - added year in brackets for clarification.
Do you think "owning the liberals" is a completely made up thing? How do you think it compares to the phrase "owning the conservatives", a phrase nobody uses nor seemingly aspires to?
> Do you think "owning the liberals" is a completely made up thing
No, I don't think it's completely made up. I think it's by far not the main driver, and claiming like everything the right does, or even most significant driver for what the right does is this is nonsense.
> "owning the conservatives", a phrase nobody uses nor seemingly aspires to
A brief search (not using Google since their results are garbage now) provides ample proof otherwise. But my point is that spite in not a primary motivation neither for the right nor for the left. Since the right is by its nature more reactionary (I don't use it here as pejorative but as a description of action caused by another action), their actions can looks spiteful in more cases, but that's not the primary motivation, whatever the forum trolls say. For the trolls, on both sides, yes, this is a primary motivation, sure, and they obviously exist, but they are not the main or the only force by far.