There are two comments here on the Motte that have, for the past month or so, been sitting amidst the 71 tabs I've got opened in my browser.
The two comments are fairly different;
The first is a more personal meditation on the human desire to 'be a good person', and how that may or may not align with the equally-human desires to 'fit in', and 'pursue Truth'.
The second is a political argument over whether Democrats/progressives/libs are the real hypocrites, and whether or not they were the ones to 'defect first' in the game of American partisan politics; pretty standard stuff around here, really.
The thing they have in common is that I've been intending to respond to them.
And yet, I haven't.
Part of this is due to a dynamic that ought to be familiar to anyone with a maladaptive relationship with deadlines- if you're late turning something in, the longer you wait afterwards to get around to it, the harder it becomes to ever actually do it; it's easy to put it off for a day or two or three, and before you know it, a week's gone by, and length of the delay in your response might raise some eyebrows when you eventually do respond. Repeat this cycle a few times, and eventually a month or two has passed you by- at which point, you might as well just not bother to respond at all- assuming you're even still in the same headspace necessary to give a coherent response, and that events in the meantime haven't made your response irrelevant, the other person's really going to wondering about your penchant for necro-ing old threads.
A larger part, however, comes down to a much simpler -and much less easily overcome- barrier:
Why bother?
In my very first comment on this site, I noted that the 'two screens' effect is very real, and that the picture that the screen the self-identified 'Red Tribers' on this site are watching is showing a very different picture than the one the few self-identified 'Blue Tribers' still active on this site are watching.
This isn't particularly surprising. For decades, Americans have been slowly but steadily self-segregating along 'tribal' lines; fewer and fewer of us spend much time interacting with other Americans radically different from ourselves. We might live in the same neighborhoods, frequent the same shops and restaurants, and be theoretically 'close' to each other (or not; the same self-segregating dynamic increasingly applies to physical locations as well), but it's increasingly rare for us to ever actually interact with our Others to any real extent.
Combined with the general shifts in how people interact with and perceive what are 'their' communities (triply so in the online age!), the balkanization of 'common' hobbies & interests, the fracturing of the media landscape, and the overall decline in common cultural touchstones and trusted authorities, the end is result is that nowadays its easier than ever for all of us to live in our own Bespoke Realities™. It isn't just that political polarization & disagreements are tenser & higher-profile then they've been in decades (though they are!); now, we no longer even need to have similar conceptions of what it is we're even arguing over in the first place!
I can rage over how Republicans are trying to destroy the government and intentionally harm millions of the worst-off Americans with their new tariff, tax, & budget idiocies- and you can scoff and dispute my entire framing, say how I'm being absurdly hyperbolic and hysterical.
You can denounce the large-scale concerted push by progressives to trans the nations youth; to turn them into Marxist-indoctrinated eunuchs conscripted as soldiers in the frontlines of the culture wars. I can roll my eyes and say there is no such phenomenon, and it's all a conservative bogeyman.
Etc, etc.
So in light of this situation, where we not only argue endlessly about the most basic facts of any given political disagreement, without either side ever having to concede to either the opposition's arguments, or even their basic worldview and underlying framing of the situation...
Why bother?
Why bother continuing to argue (and especially why bother continuing to argue online- an exercise in futility if I ever heard one!) when doing so is unlikely to change the other person's mind?
Why bother continuing to argue when the people I'm disagreeing with seem to have beliefs & experiences so wildly opposite of my own that I have to wonder if we're even living in the same country?
Why bother continuing to argue when people I disagree with just seem like they fundamentally can't be reasoned with at all?
And especially why bother continuing to argue when doing so is only likely to be """rewarded""" with mass-downvotes and distributed dogpiles by commentators on a forum you don't even really like, and only stick around on out of some sort of... IDK, perverse masochism, I guess?
Seems kinda pointless to me, tbh.
Despite my faint hopes, the dysfunction in this country appears to be acclerating.
We seem to be waiting on the precipice, holding our breath to see if the next few days heralds the opening salvos of the beginning of true, active civil conflict.
So I ask again- why bother? Is the time for talking over?
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Notes -
Back in 2010 and 2011 and 2012, all of the liberal news opinion sources that I had read when I was an I AM VERY SMART New Atheist suddenly shifted on a dime, and they started repeating an intersectional line of politics that none of them had evinced back when all of us were extremely mad about Bush. It was the early rumblings of the politics of wokeness, essentially. And for several years, I found my blood pressure going up more and more every time I would read these formerly sympathetic sources. I found them painting with broader and broader brushes, and casting more and more groups that I still identified with in a worse light, and I kept wrestling with the "why bother" question... until a point finally came, in 2014, where a discontinuous break happened. And all of those voices suddenly went from being an "us" to a "them", and I was no longer a sympathetic reader of those voices.
But what I want to say is... that process of me reading, and getting more frustrated, was an essential part of the process of me shifting my perspective, and realizing a whole lot of things about politics and ideology that I had been totally in the dark about. That was, for a time, an actual answer to "why bother". It led me to a lot of much smarter, sharper reading (mostly in the form of actual, rigorous books) than I had done when I was coasting on anti-Bush vibes and Obama charisma. In retrospect, I would say, interacting with those conversations was really important, because it was interacting with it that led to the point where I could be confident that that conversation was entirely over. You could say that's sad, I guess, but I think it's just pragmatic, and possibly healthy, too. If you're blithely in a Schmidt-ian relationship with powerful forces, much better to remove the scales from your eyes, accept reality, and move on (possibly reconfiguring your life so your surface area is minimized as much as possible) than to be a gas lit cuckold, if I can haul out a fraught term.
So there's that. And unfortunately, this cycle feeds on itself - at this point, I simply can't and won't give progressives much of hearing unless they really bend over backwards to repudiate most of the last 15 years of politics and culture. And that's extremely unlikely, so I'm not particularly reachable. And that's too bad, I guess - but I already went on this rodeo before, back when I was being activisted out of my home conservative culture between 1996 and 2008. Fool me once, shame on me...
And of course, and I'm far from alone in this, I'm socially still surrounded by highly presumptuous, true-believing progressives for professional and class reasons, so at least in my case (and I think I'm far from alone in this), it's not like I no idea what evolving progressive thought looks like these days.
I believe, and I think this was once a much more common American belief, that there are much, much, much worse things in the world than different groups with different world views and different values giving each other some generous space. If we are lucky, maybe America will return to that form of organization. But it's going to be very difficult in the interim, because we have all sorts of institutions in place (the New Deal state, universities, Hollywood, multinational corporations) that assume a degree of integration that is possibly no longer supportable given how America is drifting. Or maybe other blacks swan events will conspire that restore a sense of unity - but if so, they'll almost certainly have to involve a massive amount of suffering and death, just like the Great Depression and World War 2 did.
So, to return to your original question, why bother? Well, pragmatically, it's likely that Trump and the new version of the right will overplay their hand in certain key ways. And as they do, there will likely be people who are receptive to new arguments again. You can only make those arguments if you're mixing it up in mixed communities and have gotten good at doing so rhetorically. And the old wisdom I've always seen is, far more people read than write, so if you make good arguments on a forum, even if you're downvoted, you might be reaching an audience that's invisible - that's a thankless road to hoe in the short-term, but if you time it right, and you're fortunate in picking where you participate, you could well reach people that way. I mean, even for me, there is no possible future where I'm reachable by American progressives in a positive sense... but I could be persuaded that whatever gets called the right is more or less supportable, depending on what's going on. But this is all about "what's politically effective", not "what's a fun way to spend my evenings".
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