Also, I believe that we're constantly hearing so many voices trying to convince us one way or another, that our own discussions on those topics end up being attempts to convince others. That would explain "safe spaces" to some degree -- people don't want the pressure of having someone else try to convince them of something they don't agree with.
Some of it just the two-party system. The points don't matter, just which side of the line each person is on. I wonder if more parties would help depolarize the situation. I'm really not sure.
I think what we're seeing is the solidification of identity in such strong and unyielding terms that anything that threatens that identity immediately triggers a basic survival instinct. At that point, rational discourse is not possible.
[1] but then again, we had a mid-nineteenth century religiously-motivated civil war and it only killed a few hundred people. So maybe we support a plurality of parties because we're less polarisable, and not the other way around?
(rather than having a fabric of society, prone to ripping, having a dense irregular felt of society, of tocquevillean overlapping voluntary associations, FTW?)
In my experience, it's more that people don't try to convince. Hell, the people who need safe-spaces, and the people they're trying to be "safe" from, don't even share the underlying epistemic assumptions that would allow them to "convince" each-other of anything less clearly observable than the sky being blue. The latter group, the people who other people need to be "safe" from, usually just scream, berate, harass, and often resort to violence.
(Note that I've avoided identifying "which side" is which. The answer is: it depends which side is dominant in your particular area. Boston and San Francisco and Brooklyn are left-dominant. Middle America is right-dominant.)
That's because it isn't just about ideas, it's about power. Politics and government now are not about coming to consensus solutions that everyone, or at least everyone but a small minority who just wants to game the system, can live with. Politics and government now are about imposing on everyone whichever set of ideas gets a slim 51% majority. That isn't the way it was supposed to work.
I personally would like to see a Constitutional amendment that would require a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress to pass any legislation, and a 3/4 majority required to override a Presidential veto. That would at least require some amount of bipartisan consensus, and therefore some amount of actually somewhat reasonable debate instead of just shouting back and forth, before a public policy was imposed on everyone.
What you would get would be a lot of back-room deals and strange bedfellows. Like now, only more so.
That's not to say that any bill that gets enough bipartisan consensus to pass a 2/3 vote must be good; plenty of bills that have passed in the past with that much consensus have been bad. But I think it might change the dynamics in at least something like the right direction.
It must really baffle you that Chomsky signed this letter.
The problem is, if we're talking in a public forum, anyone can come up (from side X, side Y, or both) and jump in not in good faith. And so I get, as Fellshard said, my hand chewed off, not by the person I was talking to, but by a bunch of drive-by conversation-killers.
Under current conditions, I don't think a real conversation can happen in public (which includes social media).
On social issues, our left is as far left as anywhere else in the developed world.
A centre-right candidate doesn't become "left" just because there's a far-right candidate. Maybe in the US that rhetoric works, but not in the EU.
What poll are you referring to where Macron's far-right opponent received 45%? Le Pen has 26% - less than Macron - from what I can see [0].
He's the more left candidate for purposes of this comparison, which is to compare where the U.S. is relative to France. So if Macron is to the right of Trump on muslim immigrants (and I think it's fair to say he is), and 45% of French support a candidate that is even further right, I think it's fair to say the U.S. is well to the left of France on the issue.
I was citing a head-to-head matchup in the second round: https://www.ft.com/content/6d8b9c7a-412c-11ea-a047-eae9bd51c...
> A recent Ifop opinion poll put Ms Le Pen narrowly ahead of Mr Macron for an assumed first round of the 2022 election, and within a few percentage points of victory in the second round (45 per cent to his 55 per cent)
But even on the actual practical side of those rights, this is not true. Discriminatory policing practices, reparations for slavery, abortion rights for women, and others have very commonly held right-wing positions even among democratic voters and politicians.
And calling Macron left-wing is funny, especially since the election had a very clear divide: Le Pen for the (extreme) right, Macron for the center (even center-right), and Melanchon for the left (he won slightly less votes than Le Pen, while being universally derided and ignored in the press).
Note that I explicitly said that left-wing discourse is missing from the mainstream in the US AND Europe, and in fact this is true for most of the world in general, with only small pockets in South America and east Asia.
And I have seen a lot of people on the left raising this problem and discussing how this will ultimately be used against them when, even when today it is done for mlre left-leaning goals. I think Professor Chomsky is extremely well aware of how easily tools of censorship are wielded against the voices of the minority.
And note that a lot of the grand-standing and calls to boycotts on these issues is coming from liberals, not leftists.
I agree with you in spirit, that we're further left than the American left realizes. But on this particular, I think you're wrong.
B) it doesn’t matter how high the bar is set when one side refuses to do their half of bipartisan responsibility (see impeachment)
When people are strictly divided, the barrier to pass something should be lower so that elections change things again. A government that can’t act might as well not exist. There’s no point in holding elections if legislators never pass any change. The liberal values that make the West free depend on civic engagement.
Biden faces that. He's not a classic leftist, like Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, Gene McCarthy, or Hubert Humphrey, all of whom were presidential candidates. To today's GOP, Eisenhower and Reagan would be considered too far left.
Feel free to read it as “as broad as it is”, different polling from around the same time toward the end of when it was an active issue varied widely (I can find different polls from about the same time putting it at 30% and 11% support), and the exact breath of support isn't really relevant to my point.
Plenty of laws have been passed with that much of a majority.
> When people are strictly divided, the barrier to pass something should be lower so that elections change things again.
No, when people are strictly divided, they should try different things locally instead of having one side's preferred policies simply imposed on the other--much less having things flip again for everyone every time the party in power changes. That means it should be harder to pass Federal legislation that is binding on everyone, not easier. Federal legislation should only be passed if it has broad enough support to make it worth attempting to impose on everyone. Policies that don't have that kind of broad support throughout the country simply should not be enacted at the Federal level. They should be tried out on a smaller scale, in a state or locality where there is broad enough support.
> The liberal values that make the West free depend on civic engagement.
Civic engagement at all levels. Using the Federal government as a bludgeon to impose one side's policies on everyone is not "civic engagement". It's tyranny. Which is exactly what we set up the United States of America to protect against.
People talked about whether the US should enter World War I for years before the German navy targeted US merchant vessels. After the decision to enter, speaking out against the militarization was grounds for arrest. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fiery-socialist-chall...
Make everything 2/3 vote and you increase the need for the dealings that override the current 2/3 vote tools.
IMHO, the Democratic Party to En Marche is a fair comparison, but Our Revolution to En Marche is just silly. At that point, at least compare Our Revolution to the Parti Socialiste (a conventional European social-democratic party) and DSA to La France Insoumise (ie: the democratic socialist party founded by a former leader of the French Communists).
Not to derail, but extending public health care to undocumented immigrants in a pandemic just makes sense. Undocumented doesn't mean vaccinated, so there's a clear public interest in minimizing the absolute number of COVID-19 carriers, no matter their legal status.