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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (366883)	3/21/2018 1:26:41 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 541962

"In my view there are two big differences between, say, the 70s and now. The first is that the very low level tribalism " Even into the '80's where O'Neill and Raygun would get drunk and swap Irish jokes, or at least occasionally meet over drinks. REAGAN AND O'NEILL: EACH ONE NEEDS THE OTHER - The New ... nytimes.com Mar 17, 1983 - Bryce N. Harlow, a former Eisenhower aide, recalled, 'Once a month, I used to get Rayburn and Johnson in with the President on the Q.T. for a drink and some political talk. Reagan ought to try that with O'Neill.' The two have met far less frequently, usually in the setting of a White House meeting with the ...

To: JohnM who wrote (366883)	3/21/2018 1:38:59 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541962

<there were several assumptions we shared.> Part of that is the rigidity of age. People who do not remain life-long learners tend to become reactionary when they get older. I share annoyance with some issues and feel people should be accountable for their actions. This fact alone should provide some common ground the central lobe of political bell curves. However, what I've seen is a bunch of people whom I'd have never guessed (when we knew each other in high school) would have espoused and supported the Dumpfster® agenda. Some of those are feeling the "hang over" and have gone "radio-silent" on FB or other platforms, probably out of embarrassment or disgust. The shrill voices of the Faux News agenda are now embedded in the minds of a lot of the 60+ generation. Not everyone drank the Kool-Aid but a lot did. The youth I presume still have some shared beliefs that, in our day, were shared over doobies and classic 60's rock records. Today's' 160 character tweets don't support long rambling exchanges about Truth, Virtue and Fairness. Not sure where such a forum exists anymore, if it does at all.

To: JohnM who wrote (366883)	3/21/2018 2:13:50 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541962

I have had a theory for awhile as to why we are more tribal now and it will never change. Just as the invention of written language completely changed human society by enabling information to be passed on from one generation to the next exactly, which caused a huge decrease in myths and huge increase in logic and facts, according to Ornstein and Burke, so the internet changed how we "KNOW "each other. Because we can know each other exactly. When people just talk to each other they can't get a good feel for what a person really believes, what one's philosophy is, but when it is written down, day after day, it can be scrutinized, exactly. When I started on SI almost 20 years ago everyone posted on the same threads, but as we got to know each others thinking we started separating ourselves. Now liberals and conservatives post on their own threads. And the threads are much different. If you visit a conservative thread you will notice the post are usually simple phrases, very few complex posts that are logical, and there is very little accurate information, but if you go to a liberal thread like this one, people post in paragraphs with an introduction, body and conclusion and the information is almost always accurate. And so liberals are banned from conservative threads as they cannot defend their ideology and are intimidated, and conservatives are often banned from the few liberal threads because they are so disruptive. Never the twain shall meet, IMO. And so our present body politic. << In my view there are two big differences between, say, the 70s and now. The first is that the very low level tribalism that was around then has hardened. My own, idiosyncratic, evidence is dealing with my high school classmates. We could talk politics then with the feeling there were several assumptions we shared. Very hard to do now. The second is that we have a president who governs as a tribalist. Makes it much, much worse.