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> All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.

I see your point — I think more than a couple Twilight Zone episodes that Serling penned explored the "monsters" that are within us.

But I disagree. Because I think when you are face-to-face you're more likely to see nuance in your option and others. "I hate gays!" you say. But then you find yourself chatting with your neighbor and his husband and have been thankful for them, on several occasions, for helping you get your car started in the winter, or whatever.

"Black people scare me!" But then you have to admit that the two black families that go to your church are not threatening at all....

> Black people scare me!" But then you have to admit that the two black families that go to your church are not threatening at all....

They are still racist pricks. The ones at church are just the “good ones” who do a good enough job of code switching - ie so the racists say “you’re not like most Black people”.

(yes I’m Black).

You don't win people over by singling them out.

You'll have to tell me then (I'm white) are the "nuanced racists" worse? Or are they on a learning curve?

I don't think they're on a learning curve. I think they're in a worldview bubble they cannot see out of. When something different enters the bubble, it's an anomaly (one of the good ones). It's like doublethink. It can't be a learning curve, because it's completely stationary. They've been in that spot most of, if not all of, their life.

At least that's how I see the "nuanced racists" in my life (I'm white, fwiw, so it's not the other side view you were probably looking for).

I would say that observing them at an instant in time can't actually tell you which category they fall into. You can only tell if you are able to observe them over a longer period and see if they change further.

I say this specifically because the one truly effective intervention we know of that can destroy bigotry is getting to know someone of the group they are bigoted against. My layman's guess as to what makes the difference between someone who just labels the black/queer/etc person they know as "one of the good ones" and someone who actually starts to change is whether a) the former are personal friends with the latter, and b) the latter is willing & able to speak up and say "just making an exception for me is kinda shitty, other people like me aren't bad either, and if you keep talking about them like that I won't be able to stay your friend".

Its not an instant in time. Its decades of the same reactions to the same circumstances.

They don't change, because their circumstances don't change. I don't doubt that there would be some change if they got really, actually close to someone they are normally bigoted against. I'm just saying it doesnt happen, and thats why they don't change.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...

This guy is famous for converting kkk members by just showing them that they can be friends with a black guy. They didn't just write him off as 'one of the good ones', it undermined their fundamental racist beliefs.

Prior to ubiquitous mobile Internet and social media, we had geographic boundaries around communities. Now those lines are being rapidly blurred, and there's bleedover in regional thought into some semblance of broader online community.

But the point is that the observation that the world seems nuts and a liberal city in the West feels cosmopolitan isn't necessarily wrong - the liberal West is a global minority. Illiberal views are the global majority. What did we expect when we started merging thought globally? And most of the world isn't even 'online' yet in sense they've joined these spaces, they're marginally connected based on how you measure it, or in their own regional spaces.

Or, online discourse has polarised opinion through The Algorithm promoting inflammatory, divisive content. In real life, when people talk, they see the other person as a human with more understandable motivations, and tend to find a lot more common ground.

So perhaps instead of "in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness"; "in real life, divisions turn out to be largely illusory (or more moderate; or more understandable) once you get to know someone".

Most people in real life only have deep conversations with like minded people. In the polite company you just don’t talk about politics, religion or other divisive topics.

There is no illusion about how most rural Christian Americans think about gay people, minorities, liberal west coast elites, Muslims, etc.

No illusion about how many of those people think about Christians too.

I'm in the second most liberal county in the Northeast US and I'd say on a frigid cold night and they called a Code Blue people who go to church are manning the homeless shelter while LGBT...IQA+#@?^! people are tweeting about how Sarah McBride is a sell-out. Then again, the people I know who go to to church are the people who've been to federal prison because they stormed the gates protesting a nuclear weapons faclity.

And how many of those people voted for politicians that are systematically harming non straight people, demonizing immigrants, have no concern about inequalities in the justice system, etc?

I know a few socially liberal devout Christians. I know many others that on the individual level would try their best to make anyone of any religion, sexuality, etc comfortable. But still vote for politicians that campaign on policies that hurt the group.

Some of the Trumpiest voters are "evangelicals who don't go Church". On the other hand there is the strange case of the Mormons who have made Utah one of the reddest states in the nation although it has low levels of dark personality, inequality and corruption whereas my state of New York is the opposite. (Louisiana in the other hand is red and dark and Vermont blue and light)

I have a lot of respect for the values of many Mormons such as Steven Covey but boy does it drive me crazy that they pulled out of supporting the Scouts when the Scouts opened up to gays.

People have numerous reasons for voting the way they do, I know from conversations that there were people who weren't thinking from a "always blue" or "always red" frame but saw the last election as a comparison. They saw Trump and Harris as bad alternatives and picked the one they thought was least bad. Overall the college-educated voted for Harris and others voted for Trump. The argument that "Trump is bad for democracy" wasn't as salient for people as "Harris is ineffective".

I consider myself liberal but not leftist. I can see why so much of the country was turned off by Democrats during the last election. You had more center left and center right candidates before 2016.

The modern MAGAs would have called Reagan a “RINO”.

Back in the 1990s we complained that we couldn't get anything done because of "Blue Dog Democrats" [1], now we can't get anything done because there are only 10 of them.

For that matter, I moved to New York in 1990s when we had a Republican Senator Al D'Amato, a Republican Governor George Pataki, and Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani to be replaced by Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Personally I think one party rule is a bad thing because it makes it hard for us to vote out corrupt politicians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition

I kinda blame the fact that, after zooming out to national or party level,

   Anyone who speaks favorably about marginalized groups is dropped into the "anti-institution" box

(Otoh this is mitigated by my observation that, e.g., liberal christians are recognized by the influential on the right to be prosocial-- and by themselves to be basically pro-institution.)

This is why you need a Mamdani to convince the center-left that it's not divisive to do so (& it's great that he's prioritizing the economic marginalization angle)

With Harris there is another mixed signal independent of her stage skills: swingvoters cannot decide if she is pro-or anti-institution (support from people like Powell-Jobs is counter-productive)

(Aside: let me know if that was confused)

As mentioned by Ezra Klein, Trump is a moderate-- my additional take is that he is intentionally so. Due to dark traits he knows to kayfabe extremism-- this provokes the divisive elements on the voting left, but the politically influential on the right do not see this as anti-institution

Trump is no moderate. He’s been a racist since the 80s when he advocated 5 black and Latino guys get Capital punishment for a crime they were later found not to have committed.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/central-park...

He started the dog whistle campaign of Obama not being an American way before he thought about running for President.

He’s been pro tariff since the 90s also.

During his first run and his first time in office, the institutionalist wing of the Republican Party fought him tooth and nail.

Sorry! That was careless phrasing. Thank you for fuzzing the careless thinking behind it. It should have been

   "Trump is now seen (and wants to be seen) by the right+(white) center left as moderate"

Is that more reasonable?

Imho Ezra Klein explains it better here https://youtu.be/Sx0J7dIlL7c?t=53m6s

(Is he going for "Leto I Atreides"?)

> On the other hand there is the strange case of the Mormons who have made Utah one of the reddest states in the nation although it has low levels of dark personality

LDS forbade Black people from participating in the ordinances of its temples until 1978.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormonism

True. But a lot of institutions in America had anti-black policies that they've changed.

Mormons have a reputation of being sexist, there is evidence for that, Salt Lake City has the highest rate of cosmetics consumption in the US. However...

I used to give blood and to make it more interesting I toured all the places where the Red Cross set up centers, and one place was the Mormon Temple. Usually you don't see a lot of women giving blood, not least because they don't make as many red blood cells as men. I saw at least as many women giving blood as men there and, I don't know anything about them, but they were not having the kind of "tradwife" conversations that "hippie mamas" have in Ithaca, but were talking about international travel, business, volunteering and all sorts of adventures. They may well have been tradwives but they were certainly not just tradwives.

How does the alternate theory work ? The evidence here suggests that instigation on social media is usually targeted and limited to a handful of accounts. If it were indeed the case that people are more real online and more towards the right politically, then we shouldn't observe this concentration. It would be more diffused.

> The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.

It's an interesting theory, and I almost want to agree, but I can assure you that the same approximate percentage of extremist idiots exist in real-world NYC as online. If you doubt me, go to the fountain in Washington Square Park pretty much whenever, and you will meet them.

Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.

Polling can’t even accurately figure out if people are going to vote R or D two weeks from the poll. Color me skeptical that public opinion polling in anything more complex is more accurate and not simply used to itself shape public perception and opinion.

Even polling “experts” like Silver regularly make huge misses on binary questions (his Florida bet) let alone stuff like the Selzer poll. It’s really hard to take any complex issue polling seriously. It’s a tough sell to convince me that sure, these binary choice election polls with a verifiable result (the election) are wrong, but totally unverifiable public opinion polling with possibly framed questions represent reality.

That's actually an indication that what I'm saying is true. Polls aren't sensitive to pick up the subtle differences that divide the two-party system in the USA.

For all that the people in the tails of the distributions want to believe otherwise, the difference between "red state" and "blue state" is a few percentage points, nationwide.

These polls are just asking “who are you going to vote for”, there’s no subtlety to them - and the Selzer poll was still off by 16 points. Nate Silver after all his polling meta analysis bet 100k that Trump would win Florida narrowly at best. He won it by 15 points.

They aren’t deducing voting behavior from your positions. They are just asking you who you were going to vote for and they can’t get it right.

Given those facts, I can’t see any reason to believe even the results of a fraught question like “do you consider yourself a moderate?”

>Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.

When you zoom in on a small area, sure. But globally? Pick a card and you'd have to squint to say most people are moderate on most issues.

Examples:

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2015/11/18/global-support...

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...

OK, the first link was about free speech, and the third was about "support for authoritarianism". Of all the issues you could possibly cherry-pick, those are amongst the ones where I'd expect the most extreme polarization (Survey people if they like ice cream and puppies, and hate murder, while you're at it.)

As for the second one (about homosexuality), the article tells a fairly nuanced story about polarization across countries, with rising overall support, and a lot of countries...in the middle. That bar chart mid-way down the article looks exactly like what I'd expect.

> When you zoom in on a small area, sure. But globally?

Yes. The bigger the population, the more I expect to see a bell curve. Central limit theorem.

> Most people are moderate on most issues. That's just statistics...and it's actually backed up by all sorts of polling.

Moderate-ness is, more or less, a fallacy. People believe that since we have A and B that the correct answer must be somewhere in the middle - intuitively, you would think, somewhere really in the middle. Like if I want fried chicken, but my friend wants to eat-in to get something healthy, then the right answer is getting something out to eat that's somewhat healthy.

So, people who are unaware on issues are "naturally" moderate, because intuitively it seems to make a lot of sense.

But, not actually. If we just look at history, choose virtually any point, when are the moderates right? Almost never. The 3/5ths compromise was shit, for instance. Civil Unions? Remember those? Yeah, that was stupid and we should've just given homosexuals marriage. I mean, what were moderates saying during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s? I'll give you a hint... it was not good. Yeah, that aged like milk too.

You would think, given the history of failure that is moderate policy, people might be a tad hesitant to be moderate on an issue. You would think, they might dig deeper.

But no. We all have this idea that this point in time, and in this particular place, is unique. Our politics, now, are much different. No no, you see, it's not the same. This time we are right.

Of course, this is slightly better than social conservatism, which has a track record of always being bad. Forever. In every culture. Across the entire globe. But no guys, this time it's right! Never mind Confucianism or whatever, this is different!

Most people are fine, even online. As the article says, it's really just a small group that's completely out of control. Maybe people are a bit more direct and blunt over text, but that's a different thing than what the article is about.

We've all had that mad idiot ranting at the pub. You smile and nod and move somewhere else. What's his potential audience? Not so much. That same person is now Tweeting >500 times a day, replying to all sorts of posts with misinformation and (typically) vitriol and insults. All of these people are quite unpleasant in real life too (well, until they get Buzz Aldrin'd anyway).

> All of these people are quite unpleasant in real life too (well, until they get Buzz Aldrin'd anyway).

We just need to send them to the moon to improve a bit.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

Online discourse is a shard of a shattered mirror.