This a article cites an N=2 anecdote, conflates a couple of trends at random, then draws a conclusion that we live in an age of moral decay (ie, a perennial no-signal communication favourite).
We should consider the likely alternative - Americans are actually pretty nice to each other, all things considered. It is really quite impressive what American grass roots organisations can do if people let them. Trust in institutions is low because the institutions are being exposed to the harsh light of Very Good Communication and it turns out that bodies that rule by decree are kinda corrupt. That should shock people, but it doesn't represent a radical change in the status quo.
There are serious economic headwinds that someone needs to do something about.
It's an article putting forward an opinion, not a scientific paper. Though they do cite plenty of interesting statistics. I enjoyed reading it and it provides an alternative view to the other hypotheses for the stats, which they list.
I assume you're coming from the direction that economy first fixes the social issues. That's a valid view but I'm not sure it tackles inequality. No point in a bigger economy if only a few at the top benefit.
> That's a valid view but I'm not sure it tackles inequality.
"Tackling inequality" comes from reading too many say-nothing articles by Mr. Brooks and not enough time spent reflecting on what we should be trying to do to get the best result for people.
We should not care how much money a neighbour has. In fact, the more the better. I don't want to have to offer them charity if there is an option for them to stand on their own. They could be billionaires next door for all I care and that doesn't harm me or anyone else in the city.
Inequality is one of a number of fake issues that are major unhelpful distractions. The focus should be on median and low living standards.
> Inequality is one of a number of fake issues that are major unhelpful distractions.
Inequality causes crime in developed nationsp[0]:
> Comparing across industrialised societies, higher inequality—greater dispersion in the distribution of economic resources across individuals—is associated with higher crime and lower social trust. These associations appear empirically robust, and meet epidemiological criteria for being considered causal.
Inequality also has health impacts[1]. "The evidence that large income differences have damaging health and social consequences is strong."
Your 0 link is a computer simulation. It is literally reporting that researchers imagined a world and reported on it. That is an academically worthy thing to do, but not evidence of how reality works.
The second paper is difficult to argue about because I can't read it, but it is difficult to imagine that someone's quality of life could rise but their health worsens. That seems radically unlikely to the point where you need a pretty solid research base before taking the idea seriously. The paper is probably either making a mistake or says something different in the body text to what the title implies because it is likely that income inequality rose and living standards dropped.
It is the living standard that leads to outcomes. The inequality is a red herring. People are so bad at guessing relative income that they can't even detect real inequality. They usually pick up on poverty instead, which is completely different.
I both disagree and agree. We should be able to live happily without trying to keep up with the neighbours or covet their good fortune. But that's a macro level thing. Inequality is a real issue where too much wealth gets funneled to the folks who already have the most wealth and in such a way that it gets worse over time.
What you describe doesn't seem to be at odds with what I think of as the inequality problem - a larger proportion of economic value going to folks doing the work rather than the capital investors. It might not even be that drastic a change for that to have real effects over time, and the rich would still be rich.
> They could be billionaires next door for all I care and that doesn't harm me or anyone else in the city.
Unless, of course, they buy up a bunch of properties, making it unaffordable for the average income folk to own a home on a reasonable timescale.
When is HN going to learn that simplistic views like "rising tide lifts all boats" and "iTs NoT a ZeRO SuM GAme" are not helpful at all and blatantly false in most cases.?
If you can't afford your own home, that is a living standards problem. It can be improved while still having rising inequality. Indeed, the focus on inequality is a distraction from the large number of relatively normal people who own houses and want policies that push the price up.
Which is a problem, but the problem isn't the inequality. The problem is stupid housing policies that overemphasise debt and restrict construction.
> ... "rising tide lifts all boats" and "iTs NoT a ZeRO SuM GAme" ...
Using erratic camel case does not make an argument. It is obviously not a zero sum game or we'd all have Roman Empire era living standards.
I don’t see an answer to the example. How can less restrict construction policy solve the problem that a minority is able to buy all real estates? Unequally is a problem as the word says since power is distributed unequally.
For the same reason that people can afford food even though a minority is able to buy all the food.Just because a minority can buy something doesn't mean they will. If it gets easy enough to build more housing then it won't make sense to buy houses as an investment; the threat of oversupply would be too great.
FWIW, unrelated to this topic, I think we should adopt Georgist tax policies. That has nothing to do with inequality and it would resolve the situation of wealthy people buying property neatly.
Thats a really bad comparison since food is a consumable and most time not a investment since its expires (with exceptions like whisky).
Housing is a good example since our planet has a natural limit which can't be worked around. Otherwise please tell me why Bill Gates owns about 270,000 acres of farmland. There is a famous quote about it. “Buy land—they aren’t making it anymore.”
If you got spare money you are pressured to invest it, since the inflation will reduce the value. But not everyone is able. Thats where your financial gains are coming through you investments. By people who are not able to invest themself and the cake is getting smaller every year.
I see the non-cohesion in shared "things", like the way that people are driving, respecting traffic laws, cleanliness of common spaces, infrastructure.
It seems a lot worse in the disadvantaged socio-economic parts of town. I think there's an attitude everyone having to "fight for mine" and "what has society ever done for me" and in response not caring for it.
I have spent < an year in US (mostly in California) and found the America behaviour to be very polite in speech but indifferent/mean in actions. The passive aggressive behavior seemed quite common.
As an outsider sometimes you are not aware of cultural norms, but I always felt the margin for error for what Americans considered "acceptable" was too narrow. There was no benefit of doubt, and sometimes an explicit dislike for someone who did not immediately fit in.
I'm divided on this. I've found Californians, especially those of the tech type you'd find here in HN, and I've found many to be of exactly that nature. On the other hand, I've been to NY and the Midwest, and they've been extremely polite, in speech and action. It was funny how a policeman in Kenosha is very polite to a non-white me, or how most New Yorkers were extremely helpful, often giving me extras or guiding me throughout the city or what not, in spite of the bad reputations both have seemingly earned online.
The truth is that countries, or even cities, are not monolithic entities. It's entirely possible for each place to have two characters. In the same NYC that was largely kind to me, I was also stalked at by some lowlife with presumably evil intentions.
NYC is not known for polite communication. In fact, they have a reputation for being loud and direct, which often comes across as rude to outsiders. Of course it is not everyone, but it is one of the stereotypes.
I meant that as someone exposed to their bad reputations from what other people say online. I know, should've worded it better. NYC folks are portrayed as loudmouths, arrogant and moneyminded, even on TV. But honestly, one can be that, and yet also polite and kind at other times.
NYC may in fact be polite, from their perspective.
In NYC, there's always too much going on. The critical thing people lack is time. So they interact in ways that don't waste time. That may be being polite... in context.
Yep. If you're a tourist standing, blocking the subway door like an idiot and not paying attention, you can expect a loud "get the FUCK out of the way!" from a New Yorker and probably a shove. It's definitely going to feel shockingly rude, but the reality is that you're preventing a dozen or so people from getting on or off during the limited time the train is stopped, interfering with people who just want to get to work or get home. Ie, you're the one being rude and selfish and the New Yorker is just correcting you as quickly and effectively as they can.
This is something I noticed as well, and in more general terms, the importance put in the States on the appearances. For example, from what I've read here many US Americans are quick to point out that tipping culture is essential for giving you an always smiling waiter, while for me it's more important to know whether behind that smile there's a big "fuck you". I'd rather have an invisible waiter sticking with doing their job of serving people. Not that I don't like smiles, but I appreciate sincerity more.
tipping isn’t important in order to get a smile, it’s important because it’s a critical part of their wage. And yeah, if they do their job decently and you take that away, they’ll be upset (as you would too).
It’s a terrible custom in most ways but I don’t think you got a good explanation.
Their argument was in favor of keeping the tipping culture, as in not paying them the real wage because you'd lOsE ThAt sMiLe (as forced as it might be). Yes, I find this terrible as well.
Yes I know. The thing is that I read somewhere that tips are easier on the taxes so it is not obvious that the staff wants to get rid of them. I may be mistaken,,or have a false memory, though.
This said, it is such a global thing in the US (specifically for waiters) that I do not understand why there isn't more pushback if this is a problem for everyone (except the restaurant owners)
I don't think it directly has to do with taxes as much as take-home pay. Waiters are paid very little (below the minimum wage, which is itself unlivable), so the idea of "get rid of tips" is not usually accompanied by "and triple/quadruple their hourly wage."
FWIW there are more and more restaurants in the US (especially high-end ones) that have gotten rid of tipping but this is a labor-friendly decision made by management and puts the restaurant at a menu-price disadvantage to its competitors.
> Waiters are paid very little (below the minimum wage, which is itself unlivable)
Is there a legal anchor to this? I was under the impression that "minimum wage" is a salary they must be paid or otherwise it is illegal to employ someone (at least this is how the minimum wage works in France)
Basically the hourly wage for tipped workers can be (and almost always is) below the minimum wage but if they don't hit the minimum wage in tips, then the remainder must be paid directly as a wage by the employer.
So if you earn $5/hr and minimum wage is $10/hr, you are guaranteed $10/hr but if you are receiving tips then the remaining $5 comes from your tips. If you do not, the remaining $5 comes from your employer.
However, a lot of tipped workers earn well over the minimum wage when you include tips. So if the proposal is: "let's get rid of tips and then you can get minimum wage," that's obviously not desirable. What would be more palatable is getting rid of tips and raising the minimum wage closer to what they earn with tips, which is really more a problem with the abysmal minimum wage than it is with tipping per se.
Thank you for the explanation. The last solution is indeed the logical one.
We have a minimum wage of 10 USD/hour in France (net, after the zillion of taxes) but the actual minimum is based on a collective bargain that exists in some families of employment (including waiters). The average net salary for a waiter is 1700 USD/month (this includes retirement, social security, unemployment etc.) - not sure how this compares with the US (if there is a way to compare at all, taken how vastly different the systems are)
From the other side, I'm American who spent time in Europe and I felt similar.I don't want to use the term “uptight” but I can't think of a better word.
No, I’m not trying to be disrespectful and I’m doing my best to be respectful. But it was culture shock and I wasn't used to the array of “we don’t do that here” and “you can’t dress like that there” etc. I was kind of on eggshells in many interactions over things that noone would give a second thought to in the US.
(For context, I visited The Netherlands, Belgium, and France)
Could you give examples of what kind of behaviours generated a "we don't do that here" or "you can't dress like that there"? Dutch/Belgian and French culture are quite different, even between Dutch and Belgian there are enough differences to create some friction, and I'm asking for examples because I would never expect a "you can't dress like that there" from Dutch people, for example.
Uptight, surely, there are plenty of pockets of uptight cultures in Europe, even more in their largest cities. I consider Stockholm uptight as fuck but on the other hand I'd say that Malmö is pretty relaxed.
Using Europe as a single, homogeneous thing is the same mistake as calling the USA a homogeneous culture. There are traces of culture in both places that are quite orthogonal across many regions but there's so many regional differences that it becomes irrelevant.
Sounds a bit Doe Normaal. Not the most endearing cultural trait. But then, when we lived in Ireland nobody would _tell_ us that they thought we were freaks for wearing colourful clothes or not caring about church or athletics, they would just insult us behind our backs.
I have to say that this phenomenon seems much more visible and extreme in denser urban areas. I'm an American who has lived in Europe for almost 20 years, and me and my family just completed a 2 week camping trip in rural Colorado and New Mexico and we had a fantastic time. People out in the country and in smaller towns seem to be a lot more friendly and open to getting to know you.
I'm not defending the US as I'm often the first to shit on it culturally, but I would definitely suggest getting out if California tbh.
This is why immigrants jive and fit well with other immigrants.
I am in hell right now..dealing with harassment(in the legal sense of the word)from a CA public agency, no less. Everyday I fantasize about quitting something I love because the psychological impact is too much to bear.
The only thing that keeps me going is that one day I hope karma will kick in…
I have become a lot meaner at heart. I wonder if I will turn into a tyrant if I ever acquire power.
In California, the worst racism I have faced is in Berkeley where they wear their progressiveness on the sleeve.
> I have spent < an year in US (mostly in California) and found the America behaviour to be very polite in speech but indifferent/mean in actions. The passive aggressive behavior seemed quite common
It's worth noting that in the US, that's a stereotype of the west coast and California in particular. The contrast with NYC is particularly frequently cited. New Yorkers have a reputation for being very direct and coming across as rude but will actually be very nice and helpful once you get past that. New Yorkers will call you names that would make a sailor blush, and then immediately rush to help a woman carry her stroller up the subway steps.
I visited the US many times (probably 40+, a week to month long stays) mostly in Chicago and Phoenix.
I always clearly explained that I am a foreigner and do not know how to do this or that and I was given ample information.
The one time it did not work is when I had breakfast in a diner in Arizona and left my table after paying. A lady (also a customer) dropped le and time me how come I can leave without bringing my plate back. I was so surprised that I asked "this is what you do here in restaurants? Cleaning after yourselves?". She got mad and told me how I was misbehaved and everything.
> The passive aggressive behavior seemed quite common.
As someone in their 30's struggling to deal with the passive aggressive, unflinchingly uncaring and overall dismissive behaviors of my city's people, I could definitely see this being a trend in my fellow Americans. All lip service and nothing more.
> Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.
This, this right here - and it's not just the US where this shows up (although it's definitely the most extreme). At the core, I think, it's all about "free speech": when you have a constitutional right to say whatever you want, without any limitations, you will first get a bunch of contrarians yelling all sorts of offensive stuff around "for the lulz"/"because they can", and eventually that sort of stuff gets normalized, and then societal cohesion (especially when the offensive stuff is directed towards minorities) and eventually society itself gets poisoned.
This feels like the right time to remind people of the paradox of tolerance [0]. Here's the summary of the article:
"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance."
If you're going to post that, then let's also remind people that it's only a paradox if you treat tolerance itself as a moral imperative:
"Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats [..] the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms."
People don't want a peace treaty. They want a moral precept, a rule by which they can distinguish good behavior from bad.
At first blush, "tolerance" seems like a decent precept. You don't bug me, I don't bug you. But it takes only a moment's thought to realize that it doesn't work.
And that effectively makes it pointless. The peace treaty is routinely broken, and might as well not exist. The precept works perfectly well for the situations where it's not needed -- most of the time tolerance is also in your own immediate best interests. But as soon as you try to extend it to cover anything else, it fails.
Too bad. Back to the moral drawing board. Meantime, we can describe ourselves as "tolerant", if it makes us happy, and pretend it's the reason we're doing what we do. But it won't help us make any hard choices.
It's become wildly prevalent the past few years in Canada, to the point where co-workers whom I've thought were decent people for the past ~10 years are actually inhuman pieces of shit, they've just never felt 'free' to air their grievances in public. But you don't only see this ignorance in the way people talk, it's extended to everything, from the way they drive, to the way they navigate a store, it's almost like nobody exists in their world except themselves, you're simply an obstacle in their day-to-day,
IME, COVID was a real turning point that pushed a *lot* of people into a more selfish mindset, and the "trucker" convoy/occupation of Ottawa really seemed to shed any remaining social decency that still existed in many of these people. Now that cost of living is spiraling way out of control (housing is a prime example, my $100k income virtually assures I will never be a homeowner), it's really galvanizing that selfishness in many while fosting in many more.
I'm not sure free speech is really causative. It might be a catalyst, but people have to be self absorbed and hold those beliefs before voicing them. They might just feel emboldened to voice them since others are too.
Is it that you can't afford a house anywhere, or that you can't afford one in the area you currently are? If relocating (remote work) is an option, my understanding is there are more affordable areas of Canada that have lower average home prices that someone making $100k could potentially afford one on the cheaper end.
As an atheist, I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of the factors that made me atheist in a way that would've been not just repugnant, but downright unimaginable, to the previous 20+ generations of my family.
I think the individual rational case for abandoning religious institutions is really compelling. Goodness without gods is obviously possible, and villainy with them as well. The religious machine consumes time and resources and the benefits it yields are ill-defined and diluted by its many harms.
However, theology and religion represent the state-of-the-art of a millennia long effort to establish meaning in the human condition.
Today, many academic disciplines look down upon theology when it was, until very recently, the core of what it meant to be a scientist or thinker - especially in Christian/Muslim/Jewish traditions. It's crazy how many in the social sciences, much less the physical sciences, have never engaged with the religious canons that underpin their disciplines. Not so much the bible stories, as the exegesis that gave birth to academia.
Even for the average person, the Church served as inexpensive frontline mental health care (esp. for bereavement, anxiety, and guilt), a social safety net, a source of community, and a source of simple, generally reasonable, heuristics to evaluate daily decisions. These are all things my "enlightened" post-religious life struggles to provide me.
It's totally fine for society to evolve away from religion. I think faith is in inevitable peril as our understanding of the world grows. However, we may be throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater by making the assumption that it is possible to simply skip out on something that sat at the core of most human lives for millennia with no ill effect.
Why have hospital billing departments become more mean?
Why are credit card agencies and collections companies so cruel to the average person?
Why do airlines not give a crap about your well being?
I wonder if the author has it backwards. Americans are being kicked around by their corporations, and now they are being just as big assholes back. I know that I've learned to treat customer service people differently--not impolitely, but I am fine repeating the same request to them over and over again until they give in.
Unfortunately, this treatment bleeds over to people and businesses that don't deserve it. There's nothing wrong with screaming at a medical collections biller to leave you the fuck alone, but if you're doing that in a family-owned restaurant, then you are the asshole.
The only "mean" culture I'm aware of in modern America is the modern corporate culture in California. They're polite, but uninterested in the well-being of others. If you talk to someone while riding public transit in Southern California? "Stop talking to me.", "I have pepper spray."
And in New York? New Yorkers are direct and sometimes rude, but every New Yorker I asked for directions stopped everything they were doing to help me. This is a far cry for behaviour compared to southern California.
The Midwest? Stranger still - there's an enormous emphasis on manners (and they will never let you leave their home hungry), but if you're out of a job? Homeless? Good luck.
This article is riveting. I’d never appreciated that there was such a history of society, in so many ways, teaching and training each other to be members of a society. The article argues that this rapidly fell alert after WW II as people tried to reconcile what happened.
I found myself nodding along to the section on politics - “ If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear.”
And yet the question is never answered “why now?” What has made this point in time so particularly bad? Yes, there were large changes starting in the 1950s to what we read and were taught, but what changed in 2008 (or 2016? See, I can’t even get away from politics to explain the way we treat each other!) that has made things feel so much worse?
"Why now" is the steady increase of news in our lives. The timing tracks perfectly the shift from newspapers to TV to 24 hour news to the Internet. We're now more aware of politics as continuous, rather than as something that happens only during elections, plus brief updates that go one-way from authority figures to us.
It has turned politics from the way we make national decisions into a national game. We treat it with the same seriousness as sports -- which we treat as if we were making each decision ourselves, despite having even less effect on the game than the pompoms. Our opinions on both are loud, under-informed, and irrelevant, but we enjoy having them. Enjoyment has become the primary goal.
> This article is riveting. I’d never appreciated that there was such a history of society, in so many ways, teaching and training each other to be members of a society.
Are you familiar with the expression "It takes a village to raise a child."?
> “why now?” What has made this point in time so particularly bad?
I can’t help but think that the pervasively available, ad-supported* nature of social media, enabled/amplified by smartphones, has had a more massive effect on the changes observed than the almost trivial-by-comparison elections in 2008 or 2016.
There’s a good chance that much of the non-tech content on HN is tapped out on smartphones (including this comment).
* Ad-supported is a higher-order problem. Ads are not inherently a problem, but optimization for ad revenue often leads to optimization for engagement, which drags along time-wasting and optimization for outrage engagement, dunking, like-farming, etc.
As a parent dealing with their midlife crisis and raising two children I can say this concept is high on my mind. What kind of world are they going to inherit when they can’t even run to their neighbors for help when something goes wrong? Who do they turn to when they want to help the community?
Something the article talks about is how morality is engendered not found. That the community teaches morality and that we need this or there are gaps in our humanity. Considering how we treat others is a learned skill it is also a taught and reenforced skill. How do we as a society wish our youths to treat each other? We need our systems to engender that.
> As a parent dealing with their midlife crisis and raising two children...
Geezer reaction: If only this was ~1945 - ~1965 America, I'd say to find a nice little Protestant church* and start attending. An enormous number of such churches were either founded to meet such needs, or grew enormously during the baby boom.
(Not to say that any such churches were perfect. 50% of 'em were below average! But if you lived in a good-sized town, you'd probably have at least a few to chose from.)
*Assumpion - Roman Catholics, Jews, etc. would mentally translate this to "Catholic church", "synagogue", etc.
I can't help but point to the rise of dual-income households as a leading cause of the lack of home communities. Who has the time to build a community when most adults are away for almost the entire day?
Nobody ever put a price tag on the value of a healthy living community, so the market is optimizing against it.
I think a lot of Americans hold a very self righteous indignation viewpoint of the world. Anything that disagrees with them is not just met with simple, mutual disagreement, but self righteous indignation, and a bit of vengeance. Parking spaces, what to teach in the classroom, just sitting on an airplane, it's very much an attitude of "how dare you disagreed with me."
If the author thought americans are awful to one another, he should try one of the many other countries on Earth. Americans are actually pretty nice, polite and helpful in comparison with many of the other places. Compared to many other nations, I believe Americans rarely try to say jump the line, lie to you for tiny advantages, do you harm out sheer spite etc.
> For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it (even while validating that low view of human nature by producing a document rife with racism and sexism).
And there's the problem right there.
The Constitution is a ground breaking document. Just because it did not hit a grand slam home run in terms of fixing all social ills in one fell swoop doesn't mean it's "rife with racism and sexism". It established the fundamental mechanisms that would enable us to progress as a society despite individual shortcomings and faults. And we have - often at great cost.
It is those same fundamental mechanisms (freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, ...) that are under attack by power mad elites. Without these mechanisms in play, of course everything becomes much more contentious.
Completely agree. The way I like to think about it is they designed the document to involve as much grand standing, yelling, horse trading, politicking, conniving, and debate as possible because that is what human beings will do with government. You might as well embrace the fact they do it and give everyone just enough power to make it extremely hard to change.
Go spend time elsewhere in the world. You might find some places where people are nicer here and there, but I'd say the US ranks pretty high overall. Also this is very dependent on the city you live, there are major variations between parts of the US as in any large country.
I don't live in America, but I think this is related to the unprecedented mass communication that has been made possible by the internet, and as cliche as it sounds it truly made borders disappear between different countries, contents and cultures, which is making this generation exposed to things previous generations didn't even think they exist or have people believe in it, the only countries that seem a bit isolated from this are the ones who have their own internet circles because of language or laws.
But I'm a little optimistic that this would eventually pass with time, If we apply `Tuckman's stages of group development` to the whole world and communication between its parts I think we are in storming phase.
If you remove politics from it, Americans are pretty good to each other. Also, if you remove the internet...Americans are pretty good to each other in real life situation. It's as soon as any politics is injected that a divide starts. From people saying the people in Ohio didn't deserve aid because they were a Trump heavy district, to people saying Hawaii never did anything for anyone (aka Republicans), so why care about their wildfire? I've seen that type of thing become increasingly more common. Politics has completely broken people's brains.
I wish people would just turn off the news. They sensationalize everything, from "Red state" poverty to "Blue state" crime. They know it gets clicks, so they play it up. The modern media model is broken and doesn't serve democracy or society. Couple that will grifters online hocking nonsense to rile people up and you end up with a lot of angry people that aren't really even sure what they are angry about.
Wow, you really shouldn't be comparing prior years to 2021 due to the pandemic. No shit the numbers look worse in 2021. Most of the increases they are talking about happened in 20/21, even if a smaller trend was present prior to that.
form the outside looking in... It looks like America treats its people like each and everyone one is a resources to be exploited and consumed.
not just by those that are in power, but by everyone.. its like they are raised to think that its their right to exploit and consume anyone in their path.
Quite frightening on a huge socioeconomic level. It worries me enough that the few times I've left Australia I made sure that any of my stops did not land in America.
> Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.
Americans reaping what they sow. What do you expect? The US is one of the most capitalist societies on earth. American propaganda over more than a century has built a culture which venerates the super wealthy and teaches deep hatred for the poor.
This worked to keep a small but important middle strata of workers in line but access to that class is harder and harder. If the system starts to fail for the majority of people, of course people are going to be angry! And American propaganda prevents little class solidarity or basic awareness of the exploitative system, so Americans channel that anger into hatred for one another.
As far as I'm concerned, America is divided because of two reasons:
* The media wants sensationalism, because sensationalism gets them peoples' attentions and thus money. There is nothing more sensational than riling up and pleading to peoples' emotions.
* The political powers that be want to keep the people divided. A divided people is easier to control and manipulate, whether it's smear campaigns during elections or undermining the safety mechanisms of our governmental institutions or straight up cancel culture.
How do we solve all this? Beats me, I'm in my mid 30s now and already tired of all this bullshit. I'll spend the rest of my days by myself in the countryside just enjoying the simplicities of life while y'all go and club each other silly.
To expand on your second point, if the other side is an unthinkable evil, then the leaders of your side can be as corrupt as they want and betray as many party ideals as they like, because at least they aren't the unthinkable evil. Because in the US you don't get to vote for anyone, you only get to pick who you vote against. Otherwise you are throwing away your vote and letting the unthinkable win. And in the vast majority of voting districts even that doesn't really matter because they aren't swing states.
Ranked voting would solve this issue. I have never read any critique of it that I found convincing. It exists at state and municipal levels. But until the big states switch it won't change the problem. If swing states adopted it, along with proportional allocation of electoral votes (a couple states do this now) it would definitely change strategies for the better.
The effect is that you can't be the most extreme version of your party and ignore moderates in the hope there are more people that hate the other corrupt extremist, because the moderate candidates will get ranked higher than you by both sides of the artificial duopoly.
In that world, the sensational nature of the media works to uncover sneaky extremists so you can rank all the boring candidates higher, or least higher than the extremist you don't secretly agree with. Either way the boring candidates win.
Someone once wrote that the best kings produce the fewest pages in history books.
It is amazing to vote in Ireland where it isn't rare for a candidate that nobody loves but most people can at least somewhat tolerate wins because of 2nd or 3rd preference votes.
Ranked voting will help, but it's a stretch to day it will solve it. There's still the issue of money/publicity and party loyaty/identity. If you don't have the money for the publicity, many people won't even know who you are. You'll still have people who use one of the two main parties as part of their identity and won't entertain the thought of outside candidates. Politics has become a religion to many.
I have family friends and neighbors who subscribe to both of the state religions. None of them ever start their evangelizing by telling me what their party stands for. It is always about what they stand against. I think the religious fervor is primarily a side effect of fear of extremism they don't like, instead of the extremism that doesn't really effect them. If they can rank their cuddly extremist first then the moderates whose name they only vaguely recognize in some random order based on what they think they might have read, or some stereotype based off the name itself, then the unthinkable evil dead last, they will still serve to moderate things, just via the central limit theorem.
Edit: there will be a fortune ready for the person that has a generative model in hand to let candidates change their name to something minimally scary.
The problem with that theory is that parties still hold primaries. Primaries have the most extremist representation since those are the people who are most motivated to vote. This is a problem when voter turnout for primaries is something like 15-20%
If via some magic, the electoral system changed as I described despite those who won in the current system being in power, then the primary candidates would lose against moderate independents hardly anyone knew except for the reasons described. Except that the parties would forsee that and run different candidates using ranked voting in the primaries as well. Again, that is if somehow the changes could ever be made. Where it has happened it has often happened via referendum, and even then, it has been reversed on multiple occasions as well. I think Seattle just selected for local elections? It will be interesting to see how that goes.
I don't know if it's because of the two-party/first-past-the-post political system, or if that's a consequence as well, but everything about the US just oozes binary thinking (even on the international stage: remember Bush's "if you're not with us, you're against us" war rhetoric).
There's no room for nuance, everything must be black&white. The typical HN visitor should have the mental bandwidth for nuance, but more often than not that same mentality is showing even here.
> As far as I'm concerned, America is divided because of two reasons:
The American people have always been divided. Until semi-recently (~1960s) the political parties didn't sort themselves neatly on these divisions but over the last 30-40 years they have.
To be tribal/clannish/insider-outsider also seems to be an innate human trait.
Ezra Klein wrote a good book on both the (US) political history and various psychology studies on it:
I always remember Scott Alexander's piece about left-wing vs right-wing attitudes, and what seems to define the split:
"My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment."
If you're trying to push as many people as possible to a "survive" mentality, I assume a divided and polarised community helps. Others are coming for your stuff! For your jobs, for your neighbourhood, for your status quo, etc. Make out that your opposition is some ultimate evil.
A more diverse political field and different voting system would likely help. Might stop single issues dominating the playing field? Bring back some nuance.
I think it's too simple to say "the media wants sensationalism" because we all collectively favour sensational content. It suits for-profit publishers, it suits politically active people, etc. But we're making it work for them. We can pretend we're above it, but if @dang let through all the Musk threads on HN, many here would turn full-time arguing in them.
The hypothesis has a lot going for it, but I think it's missing a level. I don't think it explains the degree to which right-wing politics has become optimized for ignoring real threats and inventing fake ones.
I don't think that's necessarily inherent to right-wing-ism. Left wing politics has also had similar problems, and still does (say, organic food, or the way vaccine denial used to be a left-wing position), but it doesn't seem to dominate the position. Its bugaboos are "merely wrong"; they don't elevate to a movement-wide denial of well-understood sciences or a TV news network devoted solely to falsehoods about their opponents.
Perhaps that's just a way of redefining the terms of discussion: America's issue right now isn't really about right-versus-left at all, but about something else that happens to organize loosely along those lines. Perhaps rightism lends itself better to that, but I'd say that's inconclusive. Certainly left-wing-style thinking was the cause of a great amount of authoritarian violence in 20th century "socialist" countries. And we're left to argue whether that really is left-wing, or whether it's all just no-true-Scotsman.
In a true capitalist meritocracy, all the "social bonds", "caring", "kindness", "ethics", and other crap is, at best, inefficiency. Often it's a barrier to optimizing your own career. Or worse - an obstacle to maximizing the profits of the 0.0001%.
Why are people online mean to each other? It's because of immoral journalists writing outrage bait and playing with people's emotions...The Atlantic is part of the problem.
Go to the real world, and people are much nicer to each other.
People were mean to each other long before online journalism was a thing. Despite popular belief, not all of society's ills were born from the fiendish machinations of social media and journalists.
And in the real world, people are even meaner, because in the real world, people can get you with more than just words.
We should consider the likely alternative - Americans are actually pretty nice to each other, all things considered. It is really quite impressive what American grass roots organisations can do if people let them. Trust in institutions is low because the institutions are being exposed to the harsh light of Very Good Communication and it turns out that bodies that rule by decree are kinda corrupt. That should shock people, but it doesn't represent a radical change in the status quo.
There are serious economic headwinds that someone needs to do something about.