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Yeah, I suspect that which "starting point" people lean to will be a combination of their ideology and their age. I tend to reflexively regard the Bork hearing as the major inflection point in today's political partisanship, but that couldn't have happened without the Warren Court, and that couldn't have happened without... (on ad infinitum) There are not really events, only points along a process continuum. "Nothing ever happens."
But I agree! It didn't used to be like this. One suspicion I have is that our values pluralism has gotten the best of us. "Values pluralism" for most of our country's history has meant "you can live out any flavor of the European Christian good life imaginable!" When most of the nation shares fundamental values--even the people who opt to live differently, in an "I know I'm a bad person but I just can't help myself" sort of a way--then political parties aren't existential threats, they're just competing visions for implementation. Somewhat boring, really--"we're all welfare statists arguing about the optimal balance between taxation and redistribution." The retreat from values-oriented politics to identity-oriented politics did not happen all at once, but I think it has certainly happened, and the rise of the "alt-right" was just the inevitable result of certain "conservatives" finally getting the message that the time for discussion and compromise was over, and that a new age of tribalism was upon us.
I would like to find a way to reverse that trend, but the Motte is one of the few places I can even discuss it without encountering an outright refusal to engage on the merits.
One thing I noticed about politics Now vs 2000 is that basically politics itself has become much more of a lifestyle than it used to be. There are entirely different default activities, and different fashion sense and different music and so on. And now there are political themed shopping — bulletproof coffee and the like. And I think that’s making polarization worse, as it makes almost every decision made at least potentially political. I find it kind of exhausting tbh to have so much be political when it doesn’t matter that much.
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