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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1941 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024

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What is the point of politics if it no longer tracks with civility?

I've touched on this before, but it makes no logical sense for people to accept uncivil words and behavior from politicians when we expect civil words and behavior in most other areas of society. And why should anyone participate in politics unless and until we establish a baseline?

And why should anyone participate in politics unless and until we establish a baseline?

You may be not interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. If you ignore the politicians completely, you still will very much have to deal with consequences of their actions, and these consequences, with our currently insanely regulated and government-infested world, would still define huge part of your life. If you don't participate at all, they'd just be freer to do whatever they want, without even the microscopic hypocritical lip service to your interests they have to pay now.

I think a lot about this and to me a huge, unspoken aspect of the vitriol is how much of daily life is now political. It’s a power game, and increasingly it’s a power game that has no outside. The church I attend is political, the car I drive, my sports teams, my beer, the stores I shop at and the brands I buy. Further, politics is invading issues that used to be private business or family matters, or simply left too personal choice. And because politics is so total, it has a lot of power. And with so much power, getting a seat at the table is worth alienating other people. It’s worth walking out on thanksgiving dinner over politics if it means that someone watching might agree. It’s worth the inconvenience of having to check the boycotts to make sure you don’t accidentally fund someone who believes wrong-think.

If government either weren’t so powerful of didn’t require us to vote I think we’d have a lot less vitriol. A government too weak to do anything isn’t a prize to capture and loot. And as far as not having elections, if we weren’t required to give our legitimacy to the things our government wants to do to us, they’d have no reason to manufacture consent.

People have rightfully lost the trust in the polite insiders, so they turn to the impolite outsiders. It's that simple, and I can't blame them.

On a related note, the left has been weaponizing civility to effectively disallow even basic disagreements, which is why being deliberately uncivil is an important precommitment signal in the current environment.

Note that this weaponization works only in one direction. The oppressed masses get a complete pass to be violent (up to and including mass murder) and it's of for the left to be completely uncivil towards the deplorables. But if you dare to disagree with somebody who is higher than you on the oppression ladder, you are the worst criminal possible. It has nothing to do with civility, it's enforced power structure where the left usurps the right to designate who is going to be in power, and who is allowed to discuss questions of power. They just use the pretense of civility in an attempt to hide this blatant power grab.

I mean to be fair, this is how respectability has always worked. The point of having “polite” discourse” is that it entrenches the people with power. When it was the Catholic Church with all the power, “civility” meant that you didn’t publicly say anything against that version of Christianity. When it was King George III, being anti-Crown was uncivil.

It's more civil than war.

I'm serious, that's the baseline. That's the floor to which things can fall. The default method of conflict resolution is where team A and team B kill each other until one of them wins and then that side imposes its will and/or enslaves and/or genocides the other. Politics allows us to decide who gets their way without doing that. Modern politics is nowhere near as civil as it ought to be, and contains a lot more violence and death than it ought to, but it's not literally war. We're heading in that direction, but very slowly, and we're far enough away that there is time to course correct before we get there. Hopefully.

The takeaway from History so many people fail to learn is that things could be so much worse, and how easy it is to get there. We should participate in politics to avoid getting there any faster than we have to.

American politics is still more civil than a lot of places. There are plenty of countries that aren’t currently at civil war where it’s still commonplace for all major parties to have officially organized armed wings.

There's a lot of ground to cover between being unwilling to put up with incivility and being willing to resort to force of arms to secede, a fact which is exploited in modern politics; if I can get the other side to leave in anger or disgust, but not angry enough to come back with guns, then they're pretty much just ceding the ground to me.

If politics feel horrible and fill me with dread, it's not an accident, it's what my political opponents deliberately wish me to feel so that I have to disengage from it to protect my mental health, that makes me less likely to vote, less likely to be informed past the headlines, etc...

Of course, there's great peril in this strategy in that all sides ratcheting this up doesn't really push further away the point at which people resort to violence; maybe slightly at best as it changes the perception of a normal baseline, but not as much as it reduces the gap between participation in politics and violence.

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