* The media wants sensationalism, because sensationalism gets them peoples' attentions and thus money. There is nothing more sensational than riling up and pleading to peoples' emotions.
* The political powers that be want to keep the people divided. A divided people is easier to control and manipulate, whether it's smear campaigns during elections or undermining the safety mechanisms of our governmental institutions or straight up cancel culture.
How do we solve all this? Beats me, I'm in my mid 30s now and already tired of all this bullshit. I'll spend the rest of my days by myself in the countryside just enjoying the simplicities of life while y'all go and club each other silly.
I don't know if it's because of the two-party/first-past-the-post political system, or if that's a consequence as well, but everything about the US just oozes binary thinking (even on the international stage: remember Bush's "if you're not with us, you're against us" war rhetoric).
There's no room for nuance, everything must be black&white. The typical HN visitor should have the mental bandwidth for nuance, but more often than not that same mentality is showing even here.
Ranked voting would solve this issue. I have never read any critique of it that I found convincing. It exists at state and municipal levels. But until the big states switch it won't change the problem. If swing states adopted it, along with proportional allocation of electoral votes (a couple states do this now) it would definitely change strategies for the better.
The effect is that you can't be the most extreme version of your party and ignore moderates in the hope there are more people that hate the other corrupt extremist, because the moderate candidates will get ranked higher than you by both sides of the artificial duopoly.
In that world, the sensational nature of the media works to uncover sneaky extremists so you can rank all the boring candidates higher, or least higher than the extremist you don't secretly agree with. Either way the boring candidates win.
Someone once wrote that the best kings produce the fewest pages in history books.
"My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory...
If you're trying to push as many people as possible to a "survive" mentality, I assume a divided and polarised community helps. Others are coming for your stuff! For your jobs, for your neighbourhood, for your status quo, etc. Make out that your opposition is some ultimate evil.
A more diverse political field and different voting system would likely help. Might stop single issues dominating the playing field? Bring back some nuance.
I think it's too simple to say "the media wants sensationalism" because we all collectively favour sensational content. It suits for-profit publishers, it suits politically active people, etc. But we're making it work for them. We can pretend we're above it, but if @dang let through all the Musk threads on HN, many here would turn full-time arguing in them.
Edit: there will be a fortune ready for the person that has a generative model in hand to let candidates change their name to something minimally scary.
The American people have always been divided. Until semi-recently (~1960s) the political parties didn't sort themselves neatly on these divisions but over the last 30-40 years they have.
To be tribal/clannish/insider-outsider also seems to be an innate human trait.
Ezra Klein wrote a good book on both the (US) political history and various psychology studies on it:
I don't think that's necessarily inherent to right-wing-ism. Left wing politics has also had similar problems, and still does (say, organic food, or the way vaccine denial used to be a left-wing position), but it doesn't seem to dominate the position. Its bugaboos are "merely wrong"; they don't elevate to a movement-wide denial of well-understood sciences or a TV news network devoted solely to falsehoods about their opponents.
Perhaps that's just a way of redefining the terms of discussion: America's issue right now isn't really about right-versus-left at all, but about something else that happens to organize loosely along those lines. Perhaps rightism lends itself better to that, but I'd say that's inconclusive. Certainly left-wing-style thinking was the cause of a great amount of authoritarian violence in 20th century "socialist" countries. And we're left to argue whether that really is left-wing, or whether it's all just no-true-Scotsman.
You're assuming that they believe in the same sets of "real" and "fake" threats, or at least prioritise them similarly.