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I honestly don’t think at least at present, that politics is polarized because it’s so important. Political in the past was important because the people who generally discussed them were important people, and thus it mattered to them. In most systems, other than signaling loyalty to the regime, there’s nothing much at stake here. And even if it did, from an evolutionary standpoint, democracy is extremely young— 250 some years since the American and French Revolutions. 250 years from an evolutionary perspective is nothing. Furthermore, even in democratic systems, the average Prole has almost no actual power. The legitimacy of the system requires his consent, but he himself has almost no power over any of the decisions that actually affect his life.
So from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, there’s no reason to care about politics. Even from a practical perspective, there’s no rational reason to care about politics. The opinion of the proles has never mattered on those kinds of politics. And weirdly enough, as you bring up local politics, it’s long been my personal observation that the more power a person has on a political system, the less interested people actually become in learning or talking about it. You can get millions of engagements talking about trans issues that you can’t affect. Nobody but the die hard political junkies know who sits on the school board or the county board or even the state legislature. The people in those seats can still be affected by local citizens. Nobody really cares, and those politics are boring.
In my view, the reason for politics being so divisive is just how little power most people have over the direction of the country. It’s basically a topic that lets you feel powerful, important, and smugly right. At the same time anyone rational knows that if you’re talking about national politics, their opinion doesn’t actually matter. I want to dump the entire science budget into building an albucurre warp drive. It’s not happening because nobody actually cares what I think. The only reason that I matter is that I’m supposed to buy into the idea that because we all voted and that guy won, that “We The People” have spoken and “We” have decided that giving Ukraine the go ahead to fire long range missiles into Russia is a good idea. “We” decided no such thing. Biden did. And this is the way politics works in democratic societies— you must follow the news and vote correctly even though you actually don’t have any power other than giving the system legitimacy. Thus political issues become nothing but identical signaling and pretended power in a place where you don’t have to worry about being right, just making a lot of mouth-noises.
I would honestly contend that you could easily turn down the temperature of politics by giving people actual skin in the game. If voting had consequences beyond the draperies in the Oval Office or which mug you’d see on TV for 4 years, people wouldn’t use it as an identity for social networking purposes. They’d actually care who wins because they want specific things to happen.
I agree with one of your main points--people don't engage in the local politics where they have the most impact--but I disagree that political discussions are powerless. Let's take the trans issues in particular:
In my experience, whenever trans issues come up in person (so not with strangers online), the discussion serves a very important social function: my social circle is coordinating understanding of how to appropriately act/react if someone we know says they're trans. If my social circle cannot come to a single view on the matter, at least we get to identify who feels strongly about the issue and in which direction, and then act accordingly.
And, in my experience, the way such conversation don't start out with "So and so is trans, how should we react?". They start out as "I heard [some news item about a trans-person]...", followed by a qualified personal reaction. Talking about people who we don't know provides an important emotional distance, even if it's a topic someone is passionate about (one way of another), to feel out where other people stand.
Take my Liberal suburbanite friend Judy, who has a twelve-year-old daughter. Judy starts the conversation with "I heard about that High-school teenager in [another state] who assaulted a girl in the girl's bathroom." Then we do a verbal dance around trans rights / sexual assault. Once Judy is satisfied that I know that she's in principle for trans rights, and she heard me make appropriately qualified noises about protecting girls from predators, only then she brings up how there is this trans kid in her daughter's class and her daughter now doesn't go to the bathroom between bells but instead keeps asking for a hall pass during the class after lunch, and the math teacher brought this up and an issue during the parent-teacher conference last Wednesday.
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