As someone who took an interest in politics while in elementary school and a first time voter in the 2016 election, I find it very disheartening to have only known extreme partisanship throughout my life (first major event I got into was the 2008 election, was too young to make opinions about the Bush administration while he was in office), and for it to appear that it shows no signs of going away.

I remember in 2008, hearing from someone in my life "Obama's a communist," "our nation is at risk if Obama wins," "McCain will show that we care about the economy," "McCain is the only choice and the only one who loves this country," etc. Obviously this person was/is a hardcore Republican, but it was the first time in my life where I came in contact with a political party "fan" - a type of person that I interact with on basically an every day basis, someone that it seems every single thing (Democrat or Republican) does is right and everything (opposite party of the former) does is wrong.

Flash forward to the beginning of the 2016 election cycle...There were several first time voters my age that were going to blindly vote for whoever the Democrats/Republicans nominated, purely based on their parents' views, but there was also quite a few people that I grew up with that I followed on social media that were openly forming opinions and were not adamantly in favor of either party and seemed to be giving every candidate an equal chance when each party's debates were televised. Welp, just about all of these people sold out to either Clinton or Trump by the time the election came around and were only posting about how amazing one was, and how horrible the other was, and finding a way to defend literally every single policy view of whomever they were supporting. This was especially frustrating as someone who knew they were voting Johnson-Weld, yet openly criticized some of their positions, and still praised some of Clinton and Trump's proposals, though admittedly did criticize a strong majority of each of their positions.

I noticed this while Obama was President, though I was still too young to be apart of the "real world," I have noticed painfully extreme partisanship during Trump's Presidency.

I regularly play live NLHE, and my game is dominated by hardcore Republicans. There always has to be the Fox News Network on, and whenever politics is discussed it's always how amazing Trump is, and don't dare criticize him. These are mainly old white men in a fairly rich area, so obviously they're more prone to be Republican, but I really don't care for their attitudes. I remember one time challenging Trump's tariffs and one of them literally started screaming about how the tariffs are a great move and I better stfu if I'm only going to be spewing Democratic propaganda. Another time I challenged the rising deficits and a different player, though slightly more calm, got very upset and told me that Trump is the president and we must get behind him and that he's an amazing business person and everything he does is for the best interest of me. Blah. I'm friends with one of the older guys that loves Trump (not either of the two that got emotional over challenging him) and although he's a heavy marijuana user, said that abortion shouldn't be illegal, said he genuinely doesn't care at all whether transgender people can serve in the military or not, routinely talks about how Trump is perfect and always finds a way to agree with every single thing he says? I've challenged him several times, but all that happens is he gets mad and starts changing the subject and assigning the label of either socialist or Democrat, even though I am extremely far off from both labels.

This is obviously not a problem unique to Republicans, I just interact with a lot more because of the area I live in. I have a very far left wing friend, one who campaigned for Bernie in 2016, who has the stance that every single thing Trump does is incorrect. I remember having extensive conversations over 2012-2016 on foreign policy, where we both agreed on a very liberal foreign policy, one where we aren't the world's police, where we don't spend as much money on military, end all wars, etc. I remember when it was initially announced that Trump planned to pull out of Syria, and I remember celebrating and telling my friend how amazing it was and all of a sudden his opinion changed and we should be in Syria? How does that even work? I've told him several times that there is simply no way possible that he genuinely disagrees with 100% of the things Trump does and he adamantly argues that Trump is wrong 100% of the time, and honestly this friend is one of the smartest people I've ever formed a close relationship with.

I find this all to be very disturbing. I love sports, so for example, I could be very excited to go watch the Detroit Lions play a football game and cheer for the Lions...I find this same exact mentality with the people I interact with - "I can't wait to watch this debate/speech/hearing/etc so that I can root for (Democrat/Republican)." I don't understand this at all. How can someone be so in love with and so loyal to a political party that they're blinded to the fact that the people representing these parties are in fact not perfect human beings? Is there anything we can do to help this problem, and is do you foresee any changes to the extreme partisanship opinions held by many Americans?

It's a very tough problem. Hard enough to try to keep UK and Europe going down the same dark path. How the USA will pull itself out is unknown - must be possible though

Might help if more people recognised the problem. I'm not sure how convoluted it is but in less polarised countries we seem to more readily recognise what a disaster polarisation is.

Sometimes all we can do is keep on trying.

I doubt the underlying issues causing the divisiveness today are any worse than what was going on in the 1960s. That it seems otherwise is most likely due to the internet, social media and a much more pervasive news media. Took a little time but things sorted themselves out. There’s probably not much if anything we can do to hasten the process, though, because it's a process of change and some want a lot of it and some don't want any.

GGG looking a lot slower tonight. Pretty RIP KO shot though.

Good adjustments to go around the guard.

internet/media just going to increase the problem. Everyone needs to say something that much more outrageous than the last guy so that they can get their 15 minutes of fame and it will just keep pushing people further and further from the middle.

OP...

Study some history.

You'll find that the current political climate is neither unique, nor permanent.

Your smart left wing friend is correct. Its understandable given the catastrophic Iraq war that the US would want to take a "gtfo completely" approach to the middle east, but with Northern Syria (mostly Kurds) you have a group that has helped crush ISIS and established its own democracy but it still being seriously threatened by murderous Russia-backed Assad, and murderous Erdogan. Likely US troops wouldn't even have to fight much and would mostly act as a deterrent, but by pulling out they would practically cause an invasion.

This btw has almost nothing to do with party politics, and Syria might even be the best of example of something doesn't adhere at all to party politics. If anything, the Republicans are way more gung-ho on Syrian involvement with Trump being an exception along with a few Rand Paul types. Trump's position might be due to Russia's role in election interference, or might be due to pure idiocy its hard to tell (if he's actually isolationist why the **** is he hiring Bolton as a foreign policy adviser???). Democrats seem legitimately split. Elizabeth Warren clearly stated she was for total troop withdrawal in a recent town hall. Checking Sanders' sight it looks like he's also for troop withdrawal but is more cautious about it.

I don't know the answers to your questions, and I hesitate to make any grand predictions about the future, but I enjoyed reading your OP.

I was thinking thoughts sort of tangentially related to all of this the last few days, and was pondering starting a thread, but instead of making a new thread I'm just going to post my thoughts here, since I'm curious to hear about your experiences, particularly with regard to social media.

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A couple of years ago I played research assistant for a study that looked at how posters in the Men's Rights subreddit used image memes as vehicles to convey movement frames ("frames" in social movements theory are basically bits of culture -- like protest chants or signs -- that succinctly convey what a social movement is about; what is the protest about, who is responsible, what needs to happen, and so on). So we scraped and analyzed about a year's worth of threads where the OP was an image meme. That collection of images can be viewed here.

The most noteworthy thing about the memes as a collection, to me, is the centrality of outrage as a theme. In our analysis the two most common overall themes were what we called "Men as Victims" (of sexism; of over-zealous feminism, etc.) and "Anti-feminism", and a large majority of images fit within those (non-exclusive) categories (e.g. this meme, or this one). On the other hand, only a small minority were primarily about more traditional social movement activities like organizing protests, petitions, rallies, or about promoting specific "Men's Rights" issues (an example).

Basically the overarching impression was one where participants in the community use memes (among other news articles) mostly as a way to maintain a shared sense of outrage, particularly about certain common topics. In my experience this isn't unique to that subreddit. My wife's facebook feed is a pretty good example of the left-wing version of the outrage maintenance machine. The "Trump's America" thread in the previous incarnation of this forum is similar. There are conservative versions in conservative outlets.

Some of this is promoted or amplified by media companies or specific political groups, but a lot of it (basically all of it for the MRA subreddit) is home-grown. Now, my biases are such that I think the outrages that MRAs are focused on are mostly a waste of time, and at least some of the ones that the #resistance is focused on are not. And it's too simple to just say that we should all stop being outraged so we can have a better politics, because I think the world is really quite outrageous. But I do feel like modern communications technology makes it so easy to be so inundated and overwhelmed by outrage as to lose any sense of perspective. I even see comments from people, from time to time, about how they have to tune out social media because they feel like they can't take it. And I question how much this tendency towards outrage is feeding into polarization, and how one is supposed to manage it without either falling into hardened apathetic cynicism or else being overwhelmed and hyper-partisan.

This is where I'm curious whether your social media experiences fit with the above description?

Not just social media, but media in general honestly. Outrage is excellent at attracting eyeballs, and eyeballs are what advertisers are paying for.

When I say media I mean a sizable % of what gets shown/played on every media type. Think reality TV, scripted TV, especially news, heck even sports commentary.

Oh and social media is of course one giant banquet of outrage. Literally every story in my newsfeed. Even in groups I'm in for work reasons related to trucking are basically a giant screaming match between my role and the opposing role at trucking companies.

When we win. Or when they win. Either way heads gonna roll by the end. Modern American "Conservatism" as practiced is a death cult that wants to take the whole world with it. Tough to compromise in the middle of an existential fight.

I am guessing tom didn't read WN's last post in this thread about the outrage machine or losing perspective. Modern American conservatism works along basically the same social principles that most societies the last 10,000 years or so have worked upon; and a good chunk of the world today still lives by. How is modern American "conservatism" any more of a "death cult" than what is going on in Nigeria, Iran, Russia or China (or pick pretty much any historic society)?

Liberal western democracy is the novel experiment that is still in the probationary phase, that hopefully we can figure out because it seems to have some good things we don't want to lose.

That is not to say less outrageous and more substantial claims about the problems with American conservatism aren't valid. But this thing where we completely lose perspective of reality isn't very useful or productive IMO

There are no winners in this game. The winners are the ones who picked up Bog Snorkelling instead.

This is cool and all but does your Second US Civil War fantasy include the means by which the left will come out ahead in the end?

Extreme partisonship has been going on for over 200 years.

we'll see what happens when the boomers start to die in mass in like a decade. i'm sure there will be something else by then, but that will be an interesting turn.

500 years ago, extreme partisanship

Society has long been polarized, but I think modern social media platforms act as an accelerant. I’m generally libertarian/republican, but I’m perfectly willing to admit that the current administration has made many mistakes. Many of my closest and best friends are on the left and we debate in a friendly and respectful way about political issues; those rarely get hostile and are dosed with a good degree of humor and bonhomie. I don’t pretend that I’m going to change the world, but it seems to me that listening to opponents and understanding that their view is genuine is an important thing to do.

Lapidator:

Worth reading?

I like Dan Jones' stuff. I have not found any outright errors but he certainly tells the story with a certain flair.

"The Plantagenets" should be read first tho.

From a fellow RA (economics), interesting stuff and thank you for sharing.

That's funny you shared this, because the Libertarian Party is very guilty of this. Admittedly while I don't agree with every platform issue, I am a registered Libertarian in Michigan. Anyways, if you look at LP's facebook page it's almost exclusively memes (which I don't care for.) I mean, LP isn't very relevant so I'm not sure how important that is.

But yes, left wing and right wing friends on facebook (my only social media) are constantly posting and sharing political memes. One of the hatdcore Trumpers from the poker room who isn't on social media (probably because he's 70+) is always sending me pro Trump memes.

And yes, my facebook friends are always "outraged." I never thought of the relevance of memes to this issue, glad you chimed in.

How does one resolve a war while the party instigating it denies that they are waging it while they are doing it?

Wookie, the trouble with that post is that it assumes a) your side is right about everything and b) that the other side doesn’t hold their views in good faith.

We have tor recognise it's not a war and the aim isn't to win.

It's politics and the aim is progress.

The problem with your presumption is when someone says they ( or their neighbors) are under attack, you jump to a wild conclusion about them, which is essentially just argumentative denial.

While combat is punishing your enemy into submission and that’s how they use politics, it’s a war.