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Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.
It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens. If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption then doing it back would be strange.
Presumably if you hold an idea like "smaller governments are generally better for a country's growth" or "the state taking ownership in companies leads to bad incentives" or "free speech benefits the country's citizens and the country as a whole" then it would make little sense to abandon them once you've taken power if you want the best for the nation.
After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy. If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm. Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy. Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.
This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily. An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial. Suppression and censorship when their side is in power would be traitorous to the good of the country in their mind, even if done out of a desire for revenge. A person like Scott Lincicome of CATO truly believes that government taking equity of private enterprise is bad policy, and thus it's easy for him to critique it.
They aren't "turning the other cheek", they just actually believe in the words they say and the ideas they promote. They want good policy (or at least policy they think is good) for the benefit of the country. Sometimes you can see this in politicians, like how Bernie Sanders supports the plan to take equity in Intel. He believes government ownership of corporations is good for the country so he supports it even when the "enemy" does it. I think he's a stupid socialist but it's consistent with what I expect from a true believer. And you see with libertarian Republicans like Ron Paul, Justin Amash and Thomas Massie criticizing the Intel buy.
Counter to this, the "revenge" narrative comes off like the advocates never believed the words they were saying. It suggests their stated beliefs don't reflect what they think is good for the future of the US, but rather personal feelings and signaling to their in-group community. If they changed their minds it would be understandable, but if that's the case then the revenge narrative is unnecessary to begin with, they can now argue on the merits.
I submit it's because you subscribe to a revenge framing in the first place, as opposed to a relationship framing. So long as you adopt a misleading framing, you will continue to be misled.
For example, when you give this paragraph-
-this leads off with abstractions ('the country', 'the left'), but no acknowledgement of a relationship. Even the traitor allegation is framing it as treat to the abstraction (hate the country). Even that treats the action as an initiation, as opposed to a response, as if treason is a state of being unprompted at odds with a natural/healthy state of behavior.
This is wrong in the same way that 'the organization decided to do something' is wrong. Organizations do not make decisions. People in organizations make decisions. Political parties do not try to appeal to, or deliberately offend, parts of the population. People within political parties try to appeal to, or deliberately offend, other people in the population. The tolerance / encouragement of such behavior is not conducted by The Party, but by the consent / support of other people within the party.
When people make a series of decisions over time in regards to, and affecting, other people, this connection is a relationship. Sometimes the established relationship is amicable, and sometimes the relationship is hostile.
People responding negatively to a hostile relationship are not traitors. Nor does their response to hostile relationship come off as them never believing the words they were saying.
...unless, perhaps, the only paradigm you can conceptualize for responding negatively to a hostile relationship is 'revenge' against abstractions.
And how does this make a meaningful difference? Bad policy as a response to bad policy is just more bad policy. Imagine for instance if the response to leftist rent control was a rent floor rather than not enacting price controls to begin with.
Organizations, in being controlled and owned by people do in fact make decisions. Organizations are just a group. If the group members (or owner of the group if it's legally theirs) makes a decision, then the group itself can be said to have made a decision.
Of course if the people in it change over time, we expect the group itself to change but it's still just that, reflective of the humans within it.
Ok I agree that when leftists implement bad counterproductive and unhealthy policies like high corporate taxes or price controls or whatever other economically/freedom damaging policies, it's understandable to react negatively. But I don't see why that would lead to the response of joining in on the self harm.
If leftists are stabbing the nation, why grab a knife and join in on the murder? Your comment doesn't answer this, it just assumes that saying "bad relationship" explains why I should want to harm our nation and our future.
The meaningful difference is that there is not just a policy conflict. There is also a relationship conflict. The relationship conflict is more important than the policy conflict.
Imagine what the response to leftist rent proposal might be if the standard conduct of of the leftist advocate coalition pushing / advancing / defending the policy in the decade prior did not also make public attacks on the moral and personal character if their opponents, upto and including ruining the career prospects of individuals and defending such action of their coalition peers. Imagine if the leftist coalition did (or did not) have a contemporary (or multi-decade) reputation of lying about policy concessions only to renege on them, and then accusing the opponents of being unwilling to compromise or actively being tyrants for insisting on- or enforcing- the earlier compromise.
It would matter relatively little what the current policy proposal is. Significant skepticism, suspicion, lack of trust, and warning to others would be warranted on the basis of past behavior.
The patters of past behavior are what establish a relationship, not just a policy, dispute.
Congratulations on not recognizing the common attribution error, and the implications that has for recognizing the differences in impersonal and personal relationships with groups of people that shape how people respond to actions by that group.
Your relationship with a [committee] of people you don't know, and with a [committee] of people you do know and have a relationship history with, are fundamentally different.
If we equivocate degrees of change, or great deal of incredibly significant social dynamics such as the nature of a group's selection bias and internal enforcement dynamics. Why you would want to ignore such dynamics which are very relevant to political faction hostility is not something we agree on.
For example, we don't actually expect a group to meaningfully change itself if the group is actively engaging in self-selection and ideological compliance actions for its induction of new members. A hobby group can remain a hobby group by recruiting and retaining members of the hobby. This, however, is a completely different organizational culture- and survivorship bias- than a organization that engages in ideological policing of its members. The more prone a group culture is to self-selection and ideological purity spirals, the stronger the survivorship bias can be expected to be, and the less relevant the changes are to central issues (as opposed to largely irrelevant non-central changes).
A organization which applies and maintains self-selection and internal indoctrination is over time going to be composed of true believes, willing conformists, or cynical grifters. 'The group will change' based on the relative composition, but the change on the willingness to act in line with the true believers does not change until outside pressure creates conditions so that the grifters see a deal elsewhere, and the conformists are willing to conform in a different direction.
That outside pressure, in turn, is [hostility].
Because you avert your eyes and do not acknowledge conflict beyond a policy conflict, and do not listen when people tell you there another sort of conflict taking place, and thus do recognize when different types of responses that are appropriate in different types of conflicts are appropriate because there is a different type of conflict going on.
See no issue, hear no issue, understand no issue that warrants issue-dependent response.
And nor should it, because my comment is that your chosen paradigm, [vengeance/murder], is false and misleading. You do not challenge a false and misleading framing as such on the framing's own grounds, you contest the framing.
In turn, someone's insistence on false and misleading framings can itself be a 'knife' that can be used to 'join in on the murder.' After all, a willful framing that implicitly accuses the dissenters of being equivalent to Bad People- say an immoral murder- is a form of accusation. An accusation can be true or false, but if it is publicly repeated when false, it is not a just a lie, but slander.
I suspect you would concede, if pressed, that dissent to your preferred way of political conflict is not equivalent to murder. I think you would also concede that slandering your countrymen (and women) is an attack on the country that is composed by them. But by making the framing, you are already grabbing a knife and giving another jab yourself.
It makes no such assumption that you should 'want to.' It is expressing that "bad relationship" is the harm.
Your nation is a collection of individuals in multitudes of relationships. Your collective future is in turn entails both the character and the consequence of those relationships. If a community has strong and positive relations, then it can overcome even great disasters. If a community has weak and negative relations, it will fail to unite over even common challenges.
There is no common interest without commonality of the people with interests. Commonality of this sort is not categorical or imposed from the outside (or above), it is cultivated and perceived through the relationship people have with each other. It is what separates a nation from an accident of geographical proximity.
If you break down that sense of commonality through negative relationships- regardless of whether that's actively attacking your opponents, or 'merely' turning a blind eye to the attacks by others because it doesn't interest you- then over time your opponents will learn that their interests are not so common with you, and stop perceiving such a strong relationship of commonality with you in turn. This manifests in things such as declining social trust, lower trust in shared institutions, and so on.
Whether you 'want to' end in a low trust society is irrelevant. It is a product of relationships whether you like it or not. In turn, you can ruin a relationship as much be neglect or dismissal of other party's concerns as anything else. A knife is still a knife.
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