Why Does the Political Right And Left Feel the Need to Demonize Each Other ?

[The Anti-Targ]

20 hours ago, Shryke said:

Negative campaigning is usually more about getting the other side's voters to stay home then getting your own base excited.

 

It's irrelevant whether the negative campaigning depresses the opponents votes or brings out the base. It's all about the effect on the political discourse and the mindset of the base, whether or not they vote. The bit you are also missing is that negative campaigning probably also convinces the base to rarely or never switch their vote, even for one election. No matter how bad your side is, the other side is always worse, so I won't vote for "my" candidate becsuse they are shit, but I will never vote for the other one.

20 hours ago, Shryke said:

And blaming this shit on Tribalism is just completely bullshit people throw out to make themselves feel better then others and above the fray. When one side is literally endorsing known child molesters I think we can safely say that demonization is legitimate.

What's next, are we gonna both sides people who don't like Hitler?

It's got nothing to do with both sides-ing.

It's the long march of progressively more intense demonizing (which is a classic positive feedback loop that will indefinitely escalate until something actually breaks) of the other that allows the shittiest people to slip in, because again, no matter how bad you are, the other side is worse. The nutcase wing (which is possibly most of them now) believe equally vile shit about all the senior Democrats. Their belief might be irrational, but once that belief is established (because of all the demonizing) then their decision to support an alleged (wriggle room - he's possibly innocent of any crime) child molester is rational because to consider the other is to consider voting for a demon-possessed, Devil worshipper who is in thrall to the lizard people (or is a lizard person), or international Jewry if you are a Nazi. If I believed in demonically possessed, Devil-worshiping lizard people I might consider voting for an alleged child molester myself, if I believed those were my choices.

It still comes back to tribalism, my people are better than your people with or without acknowledged flaws. The fact that one side has mostly factual grounds on which to base their negative views, and the others have much more fantastical ground for their negative views is not really relevant.

But back to the both sides-ing tactic, this also can be taken back to tribalism. As seen in other examples of how tribalism manifests (note I should have added nationalism to the list of tribalistic things). It is a classic ploy to downplay the faults of ones own tribe and magnify the faults of the other tribe, and this inevitably leads to both sides-ing when one side gets so bad there is no defense for their side except to try to say the other side is equally bad.

But if you are going to demonise because of an alleged child molester (as an example), then the other side believes an unconvicted rapist was elected president, twice. Do we really want to be getting into a debate about which sex crime is worse? And before you say there was no rape, the facts are irrelevant. If the other side honestly believes there was rape, then their response (that there is sufficient moral equivalence to cancel these things out) is rational.

I recognise the inherent, insoluble corruption of the system, and that all of the demonising and the floating of the scum to the top is a symptom of that corruption. Nothing changes until the system breaks, per the positive feedback loop I previously mentioned. The election of people like Obama is like that global warming pause the climate change deniers like to point at and say "look, climate change is a myth / hoax / deep state conspiracy". Or like giving someone with cancer or a septic infection a painkiller. Makes them feel better for a while, but the problem is still there and will only get worse.

[Darth Richard II]

So...it's because people are stupid?

[Yukle]

We don't demonise each other! Anyone who tells you differently is a right-wing conservative troll, who is ruining everything as usual.

 

Jokes aside, the biggest sign of political maturity is recognising that people with different views are not part of a conspiracy to secretly ruin the world, or rule the world. They just have an ideal version of the world that's different to yours.

[GAROVORKIN]

6 minutes ago, Yukle said:

We don't demonise each other! Anyone who tells you differently is a right-wing conservative troll, who is ruining everything as usual.

 

Jokes aside, the biggest sign of political maturity is recognising that people with different views are not part of a conspiracy to secretly ruin the world, or rule the world. They just have an ideal version of the world that's different to yours.

 

Well said. 

[GAROVORKIN]

3 hours ago, Kalbear said:

They might exist, but much like fiscally responsible conservatives they appear to be rare, and usually don't practice what they preach. 

I suspect that  they might be a bit more common then you think.  

[Darth Richard II]

3 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

This must be fucking international Poe month online or something.  

 

No, that's November.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

 

Well said. 

Except when the people whose ideal world is removing you, your family, your friends and everyone else slightly like you from that ideal world, and doing it with blood and fire to the greater glory of their ideals. White supremacists have been doing that in this nation since the 17th century.

[DMC]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It's irrelevant whether the negative campaigning depresses the opponents votes or brings out the base. It's all about the effect on the political discourse and the mindset of the base, whether or not they vote. The bit you are also missing is that negative campaigning probably also convinces the base to rarely or never switch their vote, even for one election. No matter how bad your side is, the other side is always worse, so I won't vote for "my" candidate becsuse they are shit, but I will never vote for the other one.

There's been a quarter-century of debate in political behavior on the impact of negative ads.  The demobilization hypothesis initially proved dominant within the field, but was quickly countered by studies finding negative ads had a stimulating effect on turnout.  Overall, meta-analyses have concluded multiple times that research has not demonstrated consistent effects of negative advertising on vote choice nor turnout.  In short, despite the fact campaign operatives have been convinced otherwise for decades now, a review of the literature indicates negative ads don't work.  Consistent effects that have been found, interestingly, include negative advertising leading to increased campaign knowledge; and also negative advertising decreasing political efficacy and trust in government.  So, while the research does support your notion that negative campaigning is detrimental to the political system, it should be noted these effects (and the knowledge effect as well) are generally quite small.

[Darth Richard II]

46 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Except when the people whose ideal world is removing you, your family, your friends and everyone else slightly like you from that ideal world, and doing it with blood and fire to the greater glory of their ideals. White supremacists have been doing that in this nation since the 17th century.

Naw man, like, tribalism! Or something.

[Shryke]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It's irrelevant whether the negative campaigning depresses the opponents votes or brings out the base. It's all about the effect on the political discourse and the mindset of the base, whether or not they vote. The bit you are also missing is that negative campaigning probably also convinces the base to rarely or never switch their vote, even for one election. No matter how bad your side is, the other side is always worse, so I won't vote for "my" candidate becsuse they are shit, but I will never vote for the other one.

It's got nothing to do with both sides-ing.

It's the long march of progressively more intense demonizing (which is a classic positive feedback loop that will indefinitely escalate until something actually breaks) of the other that allows the shittiest people to slip in, because again, no matter how bad you are, the other side is worse. The nutcase wing (which is possibly most of them now) believe equally vile shit about all the senior Democrats. Their belief might be irrational, but once that belief is established (because of all the demonizing) then their decision to support an alleged (wriggle room - he's possibly innocent of any crime) child molester is rational because to consider the other is to consider voting for a demon-possessed, Devil worshipper who is in thrall to the lizard people (or is a lizard person), or international Jewry if you are a Nazi. If I believed in demonically possessed, Devil-worshiping lizard people I might consider voting for an alleged child molester myself, if I believed those were my choices.

It still comes back to tribalism, my people are better than your people with or without acknowledged flaws. The fact that one side has mostly factual grounds on which to base their negative views, and the others have much more fantastical ground for their negative views is not really relevant.

But back to the both sides-ing tactic, this also can be taken back to tribalism. As seen in other examples of how tribalism manifests (note I should have added nationalism to the list of tribalistic things). It is a classic ploy to downplay the faults of ones own tribe and magnify the faults of the other tribe, and this inevitably leads to both sides-ing when one side gets so bad there is no defense for their side except to try to say the other side is equally bad.

But if you are going to demonise because of an alleged child molester (as an example), then the other side believes an unconvicted rapist was elected president, twice. Do we really want to be getting into a debate about which sex crime is worse? And before you say there was no rape, the facts are irrelevant. If the other side honestly believes there was rape, then their response (that there is sufficient moral equivalence to cancel these things out) is rational.

I recognise the inherent, insoluble corruption of the system, and that all of the demonising and the floating of the scum to the top is a symptom of that corruption. Nothing changes until the system breaks, per the positive feedback loop I previously mentioned. The election of people like Obama is like that global warming pause the climate change deniers like to point at and say "look, climate change is a myth / hoax / deep state conspiracy". Or like giving someone with cancer or a septic infection a painkiller. Makes them feel better for a while, but the problem is still there and will only get worse.

This is nice and all but still just bullshit for exactly the reasons I said already.

"Tribalism" is a nice pat way of not having to actually look at what people say or do. We can just dismiss people's strong opinions about other people's horrible actions as people overreacting and continue to pretend like the middle way of not-getting-excited-about-anything is the obvious answer.

 

Literal fucking nazis in the streets getting support from the President but hey, no, it's tribalism.

[Rippounet]

6 hours ago, Yukle said:

Jokes aside, the biggest sign of political maturity is recognising that people with different views are not part of a conspiracy to secretly ruin the world, or rule the world. They just have an ideal version of the world that's different to yours.

The problem is that is this factually not true.

There is a conspiracy. I am referring to the colossal amount of funding that goes into the right, into right-wing think tanks (AEI, Heritage, Hoover, Cato... etc), right-wing politicians and right-wing causes (NRA... ) with the very open purpose of seizing political power.
And yes, one might say there is something similar going on on the left, but there is a huge difference in intent and consequences.

It used to be that this kind of talk could be found in books by intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. But there have been more scholarly works about the influence of right-wing money on politics and economics in the past decade(s). I'm thinking of Nancy Mc Lean, Kim Phillips-Fein, or Steven M. Teles among others who have documented the links between immensely wealthy businessmen and right-wing politicians.
Nor is this exclusive to the United States. A professor from Canada once gave a lecture at my graduate school describing the rise of a transnational movement of "decomplexified right-wing parties" (which basically means: parties praising the rich and defending their interests) throughout the Western world. He linked Reagan and Thatcher to the "modern right" in the US, France, Britain or Canada.
By comparison, although the "left" is relatively well funded in the US (there is abundant litterature on George Soros), the "true left" (as socialism has often been abandoned by so-called "socialist" parties) is generally divided and underfunded in other Western countries.

Then there is the problem of intent. The left is mostly about protecting the weakest members of our societies. The main drive of the left is to provide things like education, healthcare, and welfare to the poor, to protect minorities (ethnic, religious or sexual) and women's rights.
The right's main drive is the destruction of the welfare state and tax cuts for the wealthy.

And the consequences... Well, as a political scientist myself I have studied the right for more than a decade now. I used to think there had to be a way to reconcile the left and the right, a "middle-ground" that everyone could agree on. Instead, my research has led me to believe that the right-wing movement needs to be systematically crushed before it is too late.
I am familiar with most right-wing arguments. In the name of individual liberty, conservatives will at least condone various forms of discrimination. In the name of economic freedom they will support neo-liberal policies that dramatically increase inequalities and destroy our environment. In the name of nationalism, cultural tradition or religious values they will oppose immigration and at least condone xenophobia and sometimes racism (which is why boarders here talk of "nazis").
The consequences of all this is that the right has been aiming at the very fabric of society. Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" quote always comes to my mind when writing about these things. Because that is exactly what the right is about today. The defense of conservative "values" has become a front to create a world in which the wealthy can enjoy their riches without contributing to society and the poor can... well... they can just die.
I used to think that conservatives were only confused and misled. But research has shown that most right-wing politicians and "economists" (most "economists" you see on TV are not actual economists) know what they are doing, that the media has been bought by the same interest groups and is complicit, and that some of these people deliberately hurt other fellow humans to further their own interests.
There are actual demons in this story. To be fair, perhaps once there were some to be found on the left as well. Left-wing values were in fact hijacked by dictators and other power-hungry individuals. But today, it is the right that has become infested with the worst: greed, selfishness, racism and all too often, sheer lack of empathy and stupidity. For better or for worse Trump embodies all these things, but one shouldn't be fooled by appearances, many European politicians are just as bad and way more shrewd.
 

[Bonnot OG]

When the right stops demonizing the marginalized because of their bigotry, then they will stop being criticized by those left of them, which they consider being demonized.

[Darth Richard II]

4 hours ago, Shryke said:

This is nice and all but still just bullshit for exactly the reasons I said already.

"Tribalism" is a nice pat way of not having to actually look at what people say or do. We can just dismiss people's strong opinions about other people's horrible actions as people overreacting and continue to pretend like the middle way of not-getting-excited-about-anything is the obvious answer.

 

Literal fucking nazis in the streets getting support from the President but hey, no, it's tribalism.

Yeah that's what's scary, this shit isn't hyperbole anymore. Actual Nazis and people who support Nazis are in charge.

i was thinking a bit about what kracken said earlier, and forgive me if this makes little sense, I'm jacked up on dew and listening to progressive metal, but as someone who had some BEEY religious family members I know how you feel. The question I'd ask is how much was your mom aware of when she voted and what does she think about all this shit now? A problem that relates to the actual topic is the thevrights "demonization" of the left is effective as fuck on people who tend to only get their news from religious sources. They truly believe we murder babies and sell the parts while having satanic orgies with underage slaves in the basement of a pizza joint.

[Darth Richard II]

Basically while both sides accuse the other of horrible things,lately the right has been actually doing the horrible things.

[GAROVORKIN]

1 hour ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

I have no fucking idea what you're trying to say here.

What I'm suggesting is that conservatives, in America right now, come in three varieties: racist, brainwashed, or delusional. Or, more likely, some combination thereof.

EDIT: Shit, that does kind of describe the Nazis circa 1930s...

The way you pigeonhole and categorize  tells me that you don't really don't understand conservatives or people in general outside of your own preconception of them . You might want broaden your understanding just a bit .

[Seli]

8 hours ago, GAROVORKIN said:

I suspect that  they might be a bit more common then you think.  

Which again leads to the question how fiscally responsible conservatives vote? Because in the US two party system objectively it is the more progressive party that is the most fiscally responsible option.

[Yukle]

1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

The way you pigeonhole and categorize conservatives tells me that  your understanding of people in general is rather one-sided .

A point worth asking: where was the co-ordinated conservative response to this? It's not true that all conservatives are the same... but this was disturbingly accepted by America's right-wing.

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

There is a conspiracy. I am referring to the colossal amount of funding that goes into the right, into right-wing think tanks (AEI, Heritage, Hoover, Cato... etc), right-wing politicians and right-wing causes (NRA... ) with the very open purpose of seizing political power.
And yes, one might say there is something similar going on on the left, but there is a huge difference in intent and consequences.

It used to be that this kind of talk could be found in books by intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. But there have been more scholarly works about the influence of right-wing money on politics and economics in the past decade(s). I'm thinking of Nancy Mc Lean, Kim Phillips-Fein, or Steven M. Teles among others who have documented the links between immensely wealthy businessmen and right-wing politicians...

Then there is the problem of intent. The left is mostly about protecting the weakest members of our societies. The main drive of the left is to provide things like education, healthcare, and welfare to the poor, to protect minorities (ethnic, religious or sexual) and women's rights.

The right's main drive is the destruction of the welfare state and tax cuts for the wealthy.

...
I used to think that conservatives were only confused and misled. But research has shown that most right-wing politicians and "economists" (most "economists" you see on TV are not actual economists) know what they are doing, that the media has been bought by the same interest groups and is complicit, and that some of these people deliberately hurt other fellow humans to further their own interests.

I don't disagree with this, and I suppose that the difference is whether you separate people in positions of power from people in positions of relatively nothing.

So it's not a case to me of the right-wing going crazy so much as it is that whoever is in power can be so easily corrupted.

I'll take an example such as the Catholic Church, which you can fairly call a right-wing organisation in its social views, and a left-wing one in its social justice (notwithstanding matters like abortion, but in fairness - and I don't want to hijack the thread - I completely understand the view of life being sacred and wanting to preserve it at all costs to a religious institution).

Also, this isn't meant to become a discussion about the Church, I'm just using it as a drawn-out example.

The Catholic Church as a whole is extremely dedicated to social justice, and even has a concept of "liberation theology." It's eerily similar to Communism in many ways (although what Marx called Communism, not what Stalin did). It's derived from Jesus' clear teachings on the evils of greed and the absolute imperative that humanity share all it can with the least of its people. This message resonates with Latin Americans, and Sub-Saharan Africans, which is where the majority of Catholics live.

Yet, incredibly, the Catholic Church's hierarchy has more cardinals from Italy alone than it does from all of Latin America or Africa. Despite the fact that widespread poverty is a fact of life in the daily experience of more than half of all Catholics, the church's leaders are focused on almost wholly evil concepts, such as covering up sex-abuse, or wholly irrelevant ones, such as a new English translation of the original Greek and Latin mass.

Now - and I stress this - I'm removing most nuance from this example to illustrate a point, it's just an example that in and of itself isn't meant to encompass the whole view.

However, to me it's the trappings of power that have allowed the leadership to become so indifferent to the needs of its membership. It's not a new concept by any means - and in the case of Jesus, he specifically warned about the corruption of wealth.

While I don't have a good solution, the issue is that the same people tend to be in power over very long periods of time, and become very good at entrenching their power. Being in power, as you correctly imply, is not necessarily the same as holding elected office. If it was that simple, then term limits would've solved much of the world's inequality.

All-in-all, I don't see the average right-wing commoner as the same person as the average right-wing person in power. I think that they're different people, one sort guided by idealistic principles (which I don't have any hesitation in saying I almost entirely disagree with) and one by greed.

Yet I have a sad feeling that in the same position, a typical left-wing person would be corrupted by greed, too. To use Australia as an example, we've had literally one idealistic Prime Minister who was truly guided by principles and openly steamrolled the "partisan hacks" (to use his words) in his party who aimed to use their positions of power to appease their own interests. And not only was Gough Whitlam in office for just two and a half years in a country with three-year election cycles, he was the only one in our history to be dismissed from office by the unelected head of state.

His successor, Malcolm Fraser, stopped at nothing to get into power... and after he lost it, was nearly unrecognisable as the man who undid so much of his predecessor's work, becoming perhaps the last great right-wing Australian to date.

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

The way you pigeonhole and categorize  tells me that you don't really don't understand conservatives or people in general outside of your own preconception of them . You might want broaden your understanding just a bit .

The way you equivocate makes me think you have never actually considered the merits of any political argument and have a compulsion to make false equivalencies because it's just to much work to actually evaluate something critically.  Smiley face.

[GAROVORKIN]

33 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

The way you equivocate makes me think you have never actually considered the merits of any political argument and have a compulsion to make false equivalencies because it's just to much work to actually evaluate something critically.  Smiley face.

Im equivocating? Yeah right .  I know how to analyze and argument and it points pretty quickly draw a conclusion.   Kraken's whole argument against, understanding of and condescending  attitude towards conservatives in general   is stereotypic and inaccurate.  And for the record, I do believe that  there are large segments of the conservative  right that do a similar thing to the left . 

[Larry of the Lawn]

31 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

Im equivocating? Yeah right .  I know how to analyze and argument and it points pretty quickly draw a conclusion.   Kraken's whole argument against, understanding of and condescending  attitude towards conservatives in general   is stereotypic and inaccurate.  And for the record, I do believe that  there are large segments of the conservative  right that do a similar thing to the left . 

Ok, prove him wrong then.  I challenge you to do the following:

The next time you want to post some inane sophomoric observation in the US Politics thread, instead defend a GOP position that's being talked about, and see if you can do so without falling in to one of those pigeonholes.   I bet you can't actually do it.