
A new study shows Americans have little understanding of political adversaries - 11thEarlOfMar
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republicans-and-democrats-dont-understand-each-other/592324/
======
mindslight
... driven by a news media and political arena that channels bikeshed outrage
onto the other team, shielding the government to continue working against the
interests of the People.

The way I see it, Left/Right are fundamentally just two different modes of
thinking - inductive vs deductive, open world versus closed world assumption,
etc. Each has its own merit, and is worth sympathizing with the arguments even
if you don't agree.

Adding to this, each team ends up organizing around different topics of
concern, which are then casually brushed aside in the rhetoric of the other
team.

The only guarantee is that behind every issue that manages to get political
momentum, some entrenched interest has figured out how to make money off of
it.

------
dragonsky67
...Americans who rarely or never follow the news are surprisingly good at
estimating the views of people with whom they disagree

This is the scary bit of the article. If actually being more engaged with news
gathering (in the traditional sense) means you actually have more inaccurate
information then I think it clearly shows our "news" sources are broken.

I don't know that this would be any surprise to most people, but it seems that
the "news" industry is not about the transmission of facts, but that of a
covert (and no so covert) psyop influence operation.

------
solidsnack9000
_...the best educated and most politically interested Americans are more
likely to vilify their political adversaries than their less educated, less
tuned-in peers._

 _[...]_

 _Perhaps because institutions of higher learning tend to be dominated by
liberals, Republicans who have gone to college are not more likely to
caricature their ideological adversaries than those who dropped out of high
school. But among Democrats, education seems to make the problem much worse._

