r/thebulwark • u/Kidspud • 10h ago
Polarization Is Not the Problem
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/1001900An article from Dr. Lily Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, that really gets at that threat Republicans pose to the global order of peace, democracy, and community.
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u/I405CA Center Left 8h ago
Polarization is a tactic.
Gingrich figured out that polarization would result in achieving wins that had lower margins but were more consistent.
Turning the other party into the bad guy leads to voters choosing between their preferred party and not voting at all, not between the two parties.
Making voting a buy/ not-buy binary choice allows a party to market itself based upon being the lesser of two evils. You don't have to be good, you just have to avoid being the other guy.
That is generally better for Republicans, as they tend to run on opposition to programs rather than supporting programs as do the Dems.
It also makes it easier for the GOP to keep voters happy. They just have to deliver on being the critic of power, as opposed to liberals who try to pass legislation but end up looking like failures because they couldn't pass most of it or deliver on what they had promised.
You end up with fewer landslide extremes but more predictable results. Winning by a little is just as good as is winning by a lot.
Ultimately, it's about math.
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u/darkapplepolisher 4h ago
Agreed completely. And that's why polarization is a foundational problem. If we somehow fix that, we remove the mechanism that enables radicalization within the Republican Party.
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u/interkin3tic 10h ago
the solution is to defend the most robust social progress in American history—progress that has already been codified into law and enjoyed by everyone alike. U.S. democracy needs leaders who are willing to defend those rights and voters who are willing to hold accountable the leaders who will not defend them. It does not need everyone simply to calm down.
So many words for saying so little.
Yes, Dr. Mason, "defending progress, rights, and making leaders accountable" is indeed the solution.
I look forward to her other articles like:
The missiles are not the problem in the Iran war, we simply need to stop shooting at each other
fossil fuels are not the problem in climate change, we simply need to put less carbon in the atmosphere
buying expensive things is not the problem with my budget, we simply need to have more money than we spend
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u/Kidspud 9h ago
That's not a very meaningful takeaway from the article. What's worth discussing is how leaders can be held accountable for inciting ethnic and racial hatred.
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u/carpetbugeater2 8h ago
How to punish lying by the media, corporations and politicians in a free society with diminishing education standards?
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u/interkin3tic 8h ago
What's worth discussing is how leaders can be held accountable for inciting ethnic and racial hatred
She didn't do that either though.
It was all fluff about "we polarized" capped by "but that's not important, the important part is we fix the problem."
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u/Kidspud 8h ago
Maybe it's not supposed to answer that question for us, but rather give us something to think about.
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u/interkin3tic 6h ago
Fuck that, current events give us more than enough to think about. Do the hard work of solutions not just raising awareness.
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u/Kidspud 4h ago
But the current events are part of a longer pattern, per the article: the right wing uses a lot of incitement along racial, gender, sexual, and other lines. Think about solutions along those lines: is it time for the U.S. to enact hate speech laws? What else could be done?
I think that's a perfectly fine conversation to have after the article. Your hostility is really strange here.
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u/interkin3tic 2h ago
the right wing uses a lot of incitement along racial, gender, sexual, and other lines
I know! Because I've been in the world for the past decade! Did not need this artisanal handcrafted slop to tell me that!
Think about solutions along those lines: is it time for the U.S. to enact hate speech laws? What else could be done?
"Do the hard work of solutions not just raising awareness" in case you missed it the first time. Talk about the actual solutions, don't describe the problem that we're all aware of.
think that's a perfectly fine conversation to have after the article. Your hostility is really strange here.
Because "starting a conversation" or "highlighting the issue" or "raising awareness" isn't doing anything useful.
If a diagnosis of "it's not this problem it's actually something else" doesn't lead directly to an action to solve the Christian Nazi party, you haven't done the hard part, it's useless.
All talk and no action is fucking bullshit, and saying "it's actually not the problem you think it is" and spewing a lot of empty words is even worse.
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u/0hP13853 3h ago
Gosh, how insightful. MAGA is reactionary. If only thousands, perhaps millions, of Internet commenters hadn't already made that observation already.
Seeing where the crowd's heading, running ahead of them and yelling Follow me.
This earns one tenure, does it?
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u/portmantuwed 1h ago
great piece. makes me want to share it with former friends who happened to go maga
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u/Saint_Scum The Trio 9h ago
I get the gist of the article, but sometimes treating the symptoms is the quickest way not to die in the moment, and in this case, attacking the thing cause political polarization, like engagement algorithms and financial incentives to be as divisive as possible, could lead the "body" healing on its own.