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> I don't think the policy positions even matter that much.

The tribalism at this point is insane, it’s basically organized religion. You choose your tribe and get assigned a (terrible) religious leader and a list of dogmas you have to subscribe to without getting ostracized. Why should my view on trade be linked to regulations be linked to climate be linked to drugs be linked to criminal justice be linked to refugees be linked to Israel be linked to identity politics be linked to abortion be linked to guns? No idea, but take it or leave it. And the choices of religious leaders? Between someone who lies as readily and confidently as he drinks water and someone who’s a boring ladder climber and <omitted because this is an overwhelmingly one-tribe site>. No thank you.

Tribalism is human nature, as social success - a key survival criteria - requires alignment.

The reason it becomes a problem is that there the only options for each "tribe" is one of two extremes, and that these are perceived so fundamentally different it is hard for people to find common grounds. When you have many more parties, you have a wider spectrum where you can have partial agreement and disagreement with much softer borders between political strongholds, and tribes can incrementally move within the spectrum without having to switch all their beliefs and ideologies from one day to the next.

Being more understanding of tribes with other ideas rather than making them villains would also help both sides in communication and political mobility.

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In group power dynamics. Once a person identifies with a group, and makes the beliefs of that group part of their identity, then they will fight any threat to it. Since there are just two parties you are forced to choose one or the other.

The single greatest thing the American people can do from this moment on is to stop hating each other for political beliefs, put that aside, and just talk without expectation or trying to convince someone. Just talk. America has let political identity supersede all else.

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I've been trying to argue for some time that with two parties, even accounting for their primaries, the bandwidth of our representation is much too low to communicate a spectrum of political ideas. I forget the exact numbers I calculated, but from memory, current American democratic bandwidth at the national level is something in the neighborhood of 5 bits per year. This can't allow for any kinds of subtle distinctions between philosophy. We're stuck with big ugly buckets of loosely-related (at best) issues because we can't democratically communicate any more specifically.
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Considering how quickly the Democrats ousted Biden when his mental fitness to lead was in doubt, I don't think it's fair to describe progressives as having a "religious leader".
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<omitted because this is an overwhelmingly one-tribe site>

A woman? Lots worse than "liar" could be said about one of them, I'm curious what makes you think both candidates are equally bad but don't dare say it.

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I don’t think it’s as tribal as you think. At the margins yes, there are wing nuts both ways. But Trump got a lot of votes he didn’t get before and Kamala got fewer than Biden.

Inflation has been a shocker. The border being flooded is terrifying. The economy is and has been struggling in many peoples lives. And the democrats want to still focus on identity politics.

I think they can easily win in 4 years but they need to change their ways. They need to abandon the poisoned ideology that Obama inspired.

But… all of those were addressed by the Dems? Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists.

The people who bring the issues back to identity politics are not dems.

Unless… perhaps the solutions didn’t matter, and the polls themselves were much stronger than the results.

Economists are tea leaf readers. For any given economic plan you have economists giving their endorsement. “Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists” is a non-statement and you can replace “Kamala” with any presidential candidate in the last 50 years and it will remain true. I think the President gets too much credit for both good and bad economic situations, but the fact of the matter is that the average American feels the economy is terrible after 4 years of Biden policies and that is going to look larger than promises of future policies.

On the issue of identity politics, Democrats have been all in for nearly a decade, and only in the last year or so, when it has become apparent they are out of step with the majority of Americans, have they begun to back off. It’s not unexpected for the Republicans to now be the ones bringing up identity politics given how closely the Democrats have aligned themselves to it for so long, and the current backlash towards it. The damage is done and it will take many years of priority shifting for Democrats to get over it.

The preceding comments were about tribalism, and I was showing that policy had nothing to do with anything. That the dems talked about policy but it still be perceived that they didn’t.

> identity politics

This has squarely been a republican plank to rile and invigorate their base, regularly creating issues where none existed to get their team up to vote,

The fact that this can be blamed on the dems is always strange. I mean, the whole point of Fox was to create a counter narrative to address the march of “liberal science”. The goal was entirely to handle science and research, and present ways to combat this with feelings. Again - my favorite example is creationism.

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