'Mental rigidity' at root of intense political partisanship

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https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases ... 082819.php

Somehow I'm not surprised at all.

That makes sense.

This is one of those areas where I think we make a lot of mistakes in seeking out what we consider disorders without posing the other side - ie. quite often they're adaptive advantages in a malignant sense.

For quite a while I didn't get why things like hypocrisy, doubling down, or demanding problems all have a single cause - being so obviously wrong - were not just popular but contageous. It seems like the situation is worse than these just being popular blunders, non-negotiable unreason is a sort of intellectual terrorism that holds civility hostage and thus silences anyone who feels like they have anything to lose by either putting themselves in harm's way to confront these things or even going fisticuffs if such is necessary.

It demonstrates that - this trajectory continued - liberal democracy is most likely going to be overrun by internal barbarism as the 'anything that works goes' that is Darwinian evolution's one tool keeps breaking every vulnerable link in the operation. If this keeps going the way it does we're pretty much set to have one of two or three different types of tyranny to chose from - not because any of them are pleasant outcomes but because that's just how badly wedged in a corner we're likely to be if we have no tools to deal with this sort of problem or unite cooler heads.

The challenge is the emotionality of it – that is very tough nut to crack. In todays omnipresent political discourse, one that is dominated by ratings and one-liners and less by solutions. It's given a platform to the divisive while making the rest of us apathetic to and frustrated with the media and political system.

Eric Weinstein's The Portal #4 had him interviewing Prof Timur Kuran, they spent a good amount of the 2 1/2 hour in that interview going over the steepening A-frame roof problem that seemed to be driving out the middle. One of the things that makes all of this really explosive is the preference falsification by people who have any nuanced views anywhere to the right of hard left or to the left of hard right, they were likening this somewhat (coercion being less sourced through military or police state enforced version than emergence through social media) to the final break of the Soviet Union or the repression of religion in Turkey which hid religious conservatives rather than eliminating them.

I can see the parallel. They're not shy about eating their own. If you don't think exactly like us then you don't get the opportunity to speak. This is how totalitarian gov't's deal with opposition.

The inability to listen to another person's viewpoint due to being a member/voter of another political party.

We have many of them in Scotland.

I find it laughable that Eric Weinstein tries to position himself as a centrist, but Timur Kuran does make a good analysis here and I am definitely interested in Kuran's work.

The sad thing is that it often doesn't seem to revolve around actual firm principles. Rather, it's more about personal animosity and point-scoring. I would also stress that partisanship and ideologicalism shouldn't be used interchangeably. One can be ultra-partisan while not being particularly ideological, and vice-versa. Many of the U.S. Founding Fathers held firm principles, even ideologies, while also being quite skeptical of the concept of political parties.