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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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It's hard to parse out the causal factors, but one possible effect was that the most extreme factions saw this as an opportunity to push their ideology to the top

Isn't that effectively part of the game-theoretic stability of the two-party system? If you assume voters can be mapped to a normal distribution on a single axis (a poor model, but probably serviceable here) and have democratic selection within the parties, the left half of a left party claiming 60% of the total would get better representation for their views if they shifted the center of "left" towards their side, and dropped to 51% of the total but still winning the overall. The same applies in reverse for the right side.

I think you're right. Back then, I stupidly believed that the left, as the side that represents actually getting things correct rather than getting things according to our preferences, would properly moderate the ideology of the Democratic party, in order to actually get things correct (which necessarily means giving more leeway and charity to one's ideological opponents than to one's allies) and thus keep holding onto power. What I stupidly didn't notice was that the left half of the left half were actually at least as religiously and arbitrary-preference-motivated as the right half of the right half, and they had spent decades from well before my birth laying down the groundwork to manipulate people like me to believing that there was any there there. When you're naive and looking from the top, turtles all the way down can be confused for a really tall tower of turtles.

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