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Comment by thilmo | Hacker News Reader

How about the best way:

7. THINK

Think up better arguments, that might convince people. Examine your own opinions, to see whether they're actually right. Examine your opponents' opinions, to see whether they're right too. Maybe come up with new ways of thinking about the issue which are better than the way anyone's thinking about them at the moment. And then start talking.

People in politics should put less thought into HOW CAN I SPEAK LOUDER and more thought into how they can think of smarter things to say?

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I'd say evaluate the actual target audience for this conversation, and choose to not engage an audience that clearly has no interest in anything other than what amounts to tribal warfare.

And that includes the president smearing every source of criticism as "FAKE NEWS!" He exactly represents those who voted for him: ignorant, fearful, angry, reactionary, conspiracy theorists, suspicious and vindictive. There is no possible way of having rational conversations whether smarter or louder. I don't see any point in examining these opinions, it's a colossal waste of time. I'm not responsible for their opinions, or changing them. I think a very decent chunk will have buyer's (voter's) remorse on their own without me having to say a thing about it, and the rest will just dig their heels in.

Ergo, Trump and Trump voters are a distraction. Focus on the effecting policies: non-violent demonstrations and associations, legal recourse, letting local and state reps know how you feel. There are mayors like Marty Walsh who historically have done more to stand up to overreaching state and federal bureaucracy than any U.S. Senator.

You do realize this sort of behavior doesn't grow in a vacuum right? In a relationship it takes two to tango, unless dealing with someone mentally ill. To claim that say 10 million voters who hold resentment against the left for what they perceive as hostile bias are all mentally ill is grossly unfair.

Conservative resentment against what they perceive as liberal intolerance has been going on since at least the early 2000s. The conservative blogosphere really took off around that time. There they either endured constant ridicule for their views or total ignoring from the established media which mostly runs liberal aside from Fox News. When they broke the story on Dan Rather and the faked National Guard memo on Bush, they were instantly derided for being nothing but people blogging in their pajamas. When they were proven true, the hostile indifference never let up. This has gone on for 15 years or so now. For them, this last election to them was the last straw. The coverage that went on during the 2016 elections was deeply shameful and outright scurrilous in some areas.

Keep in mind that during the 2000s and probably about until 2008 or so, the internet community sites were mostly dominated by liberal views. Reddit for instance looked vastly different compared to now. This allowed the formation of deep and entrenched echo chambers that allowed certain behaviors to foment and become acceptable. When conservatives began to join the internet en masse, they ran up against these entrenched social communities and quickly found that they were getting shut out. Rightly or wrongly, that kind of blanket treatment will cause resentment.

Vast swaths of people on the left have been dismissive of people on the right for ages. This is not a one sided issue, of course conservatives do the same. But that does not matter. We got here because everyone started talking past each other, insulting each other, and not doing the hard work of emphasizing irregardless of our agreement or not. Emotional labor matters and we've all dropped the ball hard. Conservatives are not monolithic and people always appreciate feeling listened to and that their concerns matter. You don't have to agree with someone to do this.

When we want to fix a relationship with our partners we don't concern ourselves with who was right or wrong. We concentrate on the relationship itself.

I agree with the premise that there is an insufficiently mature dialog, and engagement across the political spectrum.

But there's been, provably more dismissiveness and ensuing divisiveness within the conservative movement, which is where "Republicans eat their own" came frome. The explicit targeting by far right conservatives to destroy moderate Republicans in elections is not something that is at all common in the Democratic party. It was refined to great success by the Tea Party movement.

Smug liberalism is not at all the same kind of nefarious strategy the far right has used. Smug liberalism is a naive position that if only conservatives had the facts, they'd become liberals/progressives/Democrats or at the very least revert back to being moderate Republicans. It isn't intended to piss people off, even though that has been the outcome.

The political landscape is sufficiently damaged now that there is likely a significant and intractable minority who believe in a different reality where liberals are out to get them; that corporations and billionaires are out to screw them by hiring "illegals" (except for Trump's hand selected billionaires, they're the good ones); and that import tariffs are paid by foreigners. Damaged by the likes of Newsmax, Infowars, and Breitbart (previously run by now Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the U.S. president) are all far right sites trafficking in varying degrees of mistruth. These are not policy disputes, these are disputes over facts.

I do not think there is any fixable relationship when two sides are disagreeing on world view: how the world works, how it should work. They are mutually incompatible right now, and the thing to be negotiating is the outcome of losing arguments, which hopefully remain non-violent. The language of name calling and violence is destabilizing whether it is a one on one relationship, or directed at countries. The president is openly combative with everyone who disagrees with him. It'll be deeply fascinating to see how things go when those disagreements happen with people he's hand selected - which is why I think it's important senators support pretty much all of his cabinet selections, at least all of them are completely sane.

Actually I missed one: selfish. There are probably quite a fair number of Trump voters who are not any of the other things I listed, but were voting for lower taxes/regulation; and dismissed all of his other policy promises including some kind of Muslim ban.

On the plus side, many ill conceived or implemented policies last week were walked back. So it's not like the administration is completely intractable in the face of outcry.

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