Why Polarization Makes No Sense, And Why It Makes Sense To So Many
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Generating an enemy to direct your hate at is the simplest way to gather people around you to help do your dirty deeds. During World War II the military began by training its recruits to hate the enemy. Maybe somewhat counterintuitively, once those soldiers were in the field, familiarity with their opponents made hating harder versus Americans at home who were more readily encouraged by that hate. Training was then switched to focus on the goal of protecting your buddies, which could be translated as leave no American behind. While there may be a better analogous setting than war, there are many similarities to our current politically polarized environment.
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Familiarity as a hate reducing force, however, it can be subverted in real, or de facto autocratically controlled settings. Various forms of hate may be beneficial when you must protect your actual turf, nation, yourself, family, or home. However, its usage has been greatly extended by other human desires not associated with what is, in very few instances, true and honorable protection. Hitler used enemy-hate for unimaginable yet real horrors.
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They Persisted in a Basket.
While comparing Hitler and the Nazis to anyone, or any situation tends to diminish his and their cruelties, the spectrum does likely start and end with him, and what he spawned. Creating an enemy using hate and fear of the Other, reaches deep into the parts of our psyche that are easily activated and manipulated, especially the more we believe our backs are against the wall. The Republicans and Trump generated heightened polarization, exploiting a segment of the enemy-hate spectrum.
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Additionally, the clannish mode helped to prevent defection. Similar to the leave no soldier behind military directive, a clan mentality solidifies the hate, fear, and enemy structure. The Democrats were able to assume the “Nevertheless she persisted” slight by McConnell; and Republicans assumed the “basket of deplorables” slight by Clinton. Wearing MAGA red hats and other garb encouraged more and more loyalty, which made their media awareness much more likely.
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Rather than using the slight as a pushback in pertinent instances, as Democrats did with she persisted, Republicans inculcated any perceived or actual slight in their direction or, Trump’s, into a persecution complex and justification platform for every belligerent thing they wanted to do, were going to, and ended up doing. They have always sought out, made up, and twisted around all slights, until they were as angry and threatened by the slights as possible. Brewing everything real, and imagined, in a colossal canister of crazy clan kook-ade.
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Every supposed offense was an exaggerated persecution that spread to general Republican voters, who became more intense Trump loyalists. When they perceived so much abuse targeting their clan, mostly due to media repetition of negative Trump news or antics not actual abuse, hardcore loyalists, and those barely attracted to the cult of Trump, were compelled to bunker and hunker down in the ultra-conservative echo chamber. Call it the communal flight and fight response. Such foxhole, close proximity, echo chamber connections prevented real information from getting through to even most tangential Trump followers. Their believing in, or at least repeating of, conspiracies and lies became automatic due to a dearth of fact or truth for them to deploy in response.
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Basic dialogue and serious argument, let alone effective compromise, are non-existent in such an environment. If there is no real contact with the enemy, hate can live, and fester. Like how insidious Nazi propaganda in the late 1930s and early 1940s destroyed community connections between German Jews and other Germans. An Orwellian state can make you believe anything about your neighbor, even other family members.
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A Polarized Paradox.
Polarization is a paradox bound up by false ideologies and logical fallacies, stuffed in a supposed Pandora’s box we are taught to fear because it releases powerful change. To stop all kinds of change, requires an overarching, severe belief system in closed-loop clan environment. Like a convoluted syllogism imbued with fearful, and angry epithets, overgrown with religiosity:
The policies of Democrats are so wrong, they must be the devil.
We cannot work with the devil so Democrats must be the enemy.
The enemy cannot be trusted, or dealt with on an equal footing, which requires us to hate them viscerally, and denounce them before we hear their (superior) arguments.
The devil, the enemy, and the hated, can be lied to, and lies made up about them. We can deal in elaborate, cringe-worthy conspiracies, and extralegally overpower the enemy, even subvert the Constitution, to give us the wins we deserve as the persecuted, righteous clan we are.
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Justifying your enemy is much easier when the groundwork of fear, and loathing has been laid for over two centuries using various guises. A Constitution infected by slavery, states’ rights, and a vindictive, anti-humane, exiled (or separated) from it (and the state) slavery-loving, religious sect. Race riots, KKK involvement, community groups from hell, murder, and lynchings allowed, and often participated in, by the government. Jim Crow and voter suppression. Redlining, school and housing segregation. Making racism and policy synonymous (i.e. welfare, and law and order). Central American immigrants seeking the American dream become bad brown people. And other constant, manipulative political propaganda as well as discriminatory representations in the news and entertainment media. This powerful platform of hate-enemy harms has done its job in profound, and horribly racist ways.
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Can this lemmings’ progeny be talked down from the cliff they are running over, or ledge they are jumping from? Hate raised up to these heights will require a lot of time and effort to calm and come down. The brain investment in its latter half stages gets to the level of narcotic addiction. Once they are falling for, or into, the fascist abyss, the effort to retrieve them is many orders of magnitude harder than the first half stages. Transcending in your faith, whether tangible or spiritual, is a powerful drug that cannot be shaken off quickly. Maintaining the high may always seem preferable.
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The best way to break up a polarized faction is to provide a place to crash for those on the edges, or not too ensconced, where they can be protected from intimidation, or re-coaxing by the deeply addicted, or those who want to exploit the power such a group affiliation offers. The place must include something that is powerful enough to draw them away. If the group is allowed to stay active and sizable, the ability to leave, or even see a reason to leave, will be greatly curtailed. The group’s persecution complex will fester until it has the power desired, or until it is reduced to ashes, or very close.
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Hammer Time Versus Talking Nice Time?
Personally, I struggle deciding whether it is better to aggressively critique their ideas, methods, and leaders, or if talking nice in some fashion is the best way to go. In the end, I must lead with what I do best, which is warning everyone how these kinds of groups metastasize, and the need for building up a wall of the immunized. They have gone over the brink, breeched the castle, and the bringing of good or honorable tidings is very unlikely. For talking nice to achieve anything of long term merit rings hollow, without a viable alternative, something not seen before. A similar hollow result materialized when the British talked nice to Hitler, months before he rapidly overran and seized Poland.
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Chamberlain offered nothing to Hitler that overcame his need to destroy and control. Republicans, especially Trump’s hardest core followers, and the copycats, are seeing nothing but their own dissolution, demotion, and demoralization, if they give-in now. Why give up your position, if giving it up merely puts you on a downward spiral, no longer in control the way you have been for four decades? While they could regain more control than they believe is possible, if they put into practice some reasonable, political strategies, rather than burning every bridge around them, and standing patriotic-proud in their own circular firing squads, they are now stuck in a spiral that has some bizarre, sadist value to them.
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Absorbing their zealous fury, and calming their dystopian fears, must be done, or the likelihood of a fevered, bunker mentality going deeper and spreading wider is considerable. By the next election cycle, it is possible they could find a different, calmer path, and be on it. Unfortunately, this hopeful perspective has been around for a decade, if not longer. More importantly, taking a look at the whole sweep of changes in the Republican Party since 1980, shows many problematic ideological stances and actions will continue to plague our politics.
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Congress is a constant food fight due to the clannish stand of Republicans, its often slim majorities, and every few terms a wave election whiplashing that flips the majority. It is hard to believe that A.C.A., DACA, and CARES type mud-wrestling matches will not continue. Developing good public policy requires regular reality checks, updates, and reforms not a drastic passing or failing grade, causing a flip-flopping of funding, and the trashing other vital policy elements, every term, or so. Finally getting around to pass some very compromised and less than average legislation, then it also being targeted for sabotage right after its implementation, does not a great nation make.
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Continuity in an expanded form would help to avoid the food fight mentality, and the polarizing it engenders. There are various short term fixes like changing senate rules to make it more conducive to voting on legislation, improving elections so Americans can vote in the highest numbers possible, and reducing dark money power in politics. Changes like adding new states, enlarging the Supreme Court or term limiting justices, or ending the Electoral College, are both likely a lot longer term, and have as much opportunity to worsen polarity as does anything else.
Our Parallelistic Escape From Polarization.
Therefore, another parallel strategy should be pursued to move toward greater continuity, and to absorb the current level of polarized flux, and reduce any dangerous buildup not on the radar. The idea is something I have proposed before. It can do things in the short and medium term, with unlimited longer term expansion possibilities. The system has a democratizing structure, with a local to national platform, to improve communities around us, and even improve our worldwide community. It is untethered from the political process, focused on fostering development of current communityprojects, creating new solutions when needed, and implementing them, and is bipartisan, based on an ideals matrix similar to, but more inclusive and flexible than our fairly lethargic Constitution.
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I call it the We The People System. While much of what I explain about the system, below, may be mostly advanced technology oriented (though it is generally off-the-shelf), people will be the reason it is successful. Real people will be hugely responsible for developing the societal movement, and creation of the system structure and capabilities. My goal here is to draw basic outlines, and fill in vital framework details to provide a clearer picture of what it is about, and what it could do if the democratized community decides those ideas will be part of the system.
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If one would add up all the major problems in our communities from potholes to addictions and systemic racism, let alone problems affecting every community in the world in a direct, or indirect way like climate change, the totals are extremely daunting, and overwhelming. Yet it is hard to understand why some problems are still plaguing us. Before COVID there was opioid addiction, and climate change. Addiction is a tough problem, but doing almost nothing never gets very far. The warming of the planet is a slow process in comparison to deaths from opioids and COVID, yet why have we waited decades to react proportionally? And how do we ramp up quickly enough to tackle such problems if we move only in fits and starts, with Trump’s backtracking thrown in?
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We still have educational gaps, and extreme income and wealth inequality. Racial discrimination in hiring, enforcement of law, sentencing, and financial lending has not been honestly, or effectively confronted. Immigration policy has been in limbo, or worse for decades. Plastic bottles, bags, and bits, and other pollutants still have no expiration dates. The health of American healthcare and public health is epitomized by two glaring inconsistencies.
- The United States has the highest healthcare expenditures in the world, at 18% of our GDP, even though not everyone has insurance!
- We have the 2nd worst health outcomes; 35th out of the advanced 36 OECD nations, maybe worse!
At about the same time brain transplants are successfully performed, Americans will still be dying prematurely in greater numbers from conditions we can easily prevent.
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Our unpreparedness is legion. I have consumed at least 3 nonfiction books in the last twelve months that brought up our need to be prepared for a global pandemic. None were specifically about health or healthcare. The most recent publish date of any of those books was months before the first COVID case in the United States. The wealthiest nation in the world should not have its pants down around its ankles in so many instances, lost in a downpour, stumbling through the dark in a plowed field knee deep in mud. I always thought death and destruction had some impact on freedom and liberty. Huh.
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Speaking of Texas. After all the cold, snow, ice, hardship, shivering, and freezing deaths in the Lone Star state, you would think that actual freedom and liberty would be more important than regulations on energy, but if Texan homeowners are gladly accepting ten thousand dollar electricity bills due to a week of energy use, my mind may change. That said, most people would rather have a different level of liberty and freedom. Not to find yourself on a two-sided coin of fucked. Either your life ends because the energy utility failed, and you froze to death. Or your life savings disappears merely for using the same amount of energy one week in some year. Depending on which side of the coin you got in the utility’s pursuit-of-unhappiness flip, you are either destitute fucked, or you are deceased fucked.
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Details of the Polarization Response Unit.
Think about the We The People System as a method to lift every advancement Americans have been fighting for to a much higher, sturdier, and more effective rampart. From this massive and welcoming stage, we can overcome the congestion and confusion now holding us back. Our unbeatable competitors and bully billionaire opponents become our equals and interlocutors. WTP System provides Americans with manifold the power we have today. Together, in this structure, we can transform our communities, our country, the world, and even our politics.
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Consider the system as a major renovation of governing like our Constitution, yet parallel to it. There can be direct and indirect connections made to the current government structure. Of course, since the WTP System is a near pure democracy, those connections would need to be first approved by system participants, then allowed by Congress. It has the autonomy of a third political party, without the politics, and consistent failures. Like political parties, and government agencies, the Constitution has nothing positive or negative to say about them, or this type of system. Being non-profit, non-partisan, and sanctioned as a citizen/worker/public partnership, it is similar to other non-profits, or faith-based, government funded initiatives.
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The WTP System absorbs and derives its power from the 60+% of Americans and workers participating in its services, projects, and management duties. Everyone has a role, large or small, depending on your needs, wishes, skills, and goals.
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Basic We The People System elements include:
- Economic Platform: Guaranteed Jobs, Dominating Economic Database, Small Business Development, and Poverty, Homelessness, and Legitimate Income, Wealth, Health, Education, Justice System, and Overall Inequality Gap Reductions, Where Possible Eradication. >>>>>>> (MMT ends debt, deficit fever.)
- One Door Civic Connection, and Voter Education; Non-Partisan Involvement in Local, State, and Federal Issues via Nationwide Interwoven Connective Threads.
- Comprehensive Private and Government Watchdog Strategies, and Advocacy Support for Non-Profits, New Entities, and Investigative Media.
- Massively Robust Clean Energy Logistics, and Implementation, National Smart Grid Buildout in less than a decade, as well as Ending Pollution, Especially in Underserved Areas.
- Local, State, and Federal Agency Research, Critiques, and Reform Recommendations, Possible Assumption of Management Duties.
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The above items are not merely a wish list. Each one is part of a plan to revamp how we approach unresolved problems, help Americans who face those problems, and improve our future overall. The Constitution should have been a starting point, instead it has been used too often as a regression, or status quo document. While the above system capabilities may have not been possible even twenty years ago, we should have had our 1776 renewal declaration in 2001, and finally gotten to the 1788 renewed path ratification by now. We are wasting time using the same two-party politics’ tools to get better results.
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Whether the climate is in crisis, or not, such advancements are required to move at the speed of change we need. The Constitution did not automatically make the U.S. what we need it to be today. Innovation in government and politics has been required for decades. The economic structure has stagnated at the very least for 50 to 90% of Americans for decades. In addition to income and wealth growth, inequality cannot be ever expanding, and must be reduced. Otherwise, specific societal problems worsen, and in general, politics becomes more one-sided in favor of the very wealthy.
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The WTP System provides the super glue and support non-wealthy Americans require at this point in our history. Polarization can only be leveled off by developing a new path for reconciliation. The old paths will keep leading towards disunion. Building a parallel smart grid of a large nonpartisan, small “d” democratic block of Americans can diffuse the dangerous surges of electricity now being generated by the two-party system. The big business and mega-wealthy require a countervailing force. The two-party system has broken because it allowed money and old, bad economic theory to have the final say. Its obligations to big money and austerity budgeting will be unshackled by the WTP System.
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Conclusion.
Extreme and disruptive polarity will be broken by a combination of elements built into, or inherent in the We The PeopleSystem architecture.
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The first is the numbers element, 60 plus percent workers and citizen participants. The initial 60 percent will have the weight to take many firm and powerful stances, as well as the heft and influence to increase the number above 70 percent. The young want a way out of our stagnant cesspool of bad decisions, and profound problems; this provides more opportunities, and a brighter future than any other idea currently proposed.
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Next we have the main draw, which is the Jobs Development Platform. It is much more than a jobs guarantee program. Illegal and unethical hiring discrimination will be a thing of the past, guaranteed. That includes all who were previously incarcerated. Transitioning from one job to another due to firing, big layoff, etc. is nearly automated, whether it includes training updates, or starting a new business. Relocation, if required or desired, is mapped out within seconds from selecting a new home, to schools and transportation, and of course, a job for the spouse! The citizen and worker combined focus means a better society from the top to the bottom line.
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Third, there is elimination of immigration issues. The reality or concept of undocumented immigrants will be placed in the historical dust bin. No new or undocumented immigrant will ever take the job of an American citizen who has similar skills and desires a job. Additionally, with full employment, new businesses will also require employees. Ending the undocumented dilemma also means no American citizen’s pay can be undercut. Everyone competing by skills alone, with citizens getting first in line. Every immigrant or migrant will have documents, and the language capacity and training each business needs.
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Finally, those who trend conservative, either Never Trumpers, or non-hardcore Trump loyalists, will be able to trim government waste, whatever works within the WTP System ideals matrix. No unneeded or ineffective agencies, parts of agencies, or agency regulations will be tolerated. Old laws, rules, and legislation will be reviewed, and any that are outdated will be recommended for removal or change. This is part of the watchdog element.
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By providing these four benefits, those Americans tending toward the conservative polarity, but not quite in as deep as diehard Trumpers, will help move the dial towards the middle enough to bring about real change. However, any American not in the top 1% would be very welcome to participate in the next big thing since the Constitution was ratified in 1788. Either we pull enough of those in the middle or tending towards Trump or his copycats from the brink, give them a place to crash, rehab their ideals, and rebuild their future. Otherwise, the crashing will come from the broken glass that had protected our Constitution, and our better angel ideals.
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WTP System related essays:
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