Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The US electoral system pushes politicians to the left and right due to primaries, where politicians need to win over a small number of more polarized voters. We can change this system into non-partisan ranked choice elections so that politicians don’t need to bend over for the extremes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ws3w_ZOmhI
The guy who killed Kirk was less a hardened leftist and more a young guy with psychological problems who was radicalized by memes wafting in his direction. The guys who tried to kill Trump were nutcases. People with psychological problems are motivated by stupid shit to do something crazy. Toning down the rhetoric may help, but that’s hard when the president is abusing his power and breaking the Constitution left and right. Accurately describing what the president is doing sounds like heated rhetoric when it is not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOv2EqojRkw
They’re Using Charlie Kirk’s Death To Make Things Worse…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coojCF9KiWo
“Republican Sen. Thom Tillis’ shocking retirement announcement Sunday reflects the real state of our politics, an example of how even the most competitive and best known swing states — places like North Carolina, that determine the presidency every four years — are infected by the same contagion as the most hardened one-party states. Amid our hyper-nationalized, hyper-polarized politics, any lawmaker seen as a moderate won’t last long, no matter what state they hail from.”
Tillis did not blindly support Trump; Trumped publicly attacked him and said he was looking for someone to replace Tillis; Tillis announced his retirement.
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“Purple state status doesn’t mean that the citizens are, by and large, more moderate than they are in other states, but rather than on average they resemble something approaching moderation. The truth is that purple states have very few purple voters; they simply have blue and red voters in roughly equal numbers.
In today’s nationalized political environment, those red and blue voters in purple states respond in the same uncompromising way to modern politics as they do in states dominated by the Democratic or Republican parties.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/01/thom-tillis-north-carolina-retirement-swing-state-00436038
“A study published in February in Political Psychology reported that “political identity outweighs all other social identities in informing citizens’ attitudes and projected behaviors towards others.” The results echoed those from similar research from Stanford University in 2017 which found that “the strongest attachment…is Americans’ connection to their political party. And the strength of that partisan bond – stronger than race, religion or ethnicity – has amplified the level of political polarization in the U.S.””
https://reason.com/2025/06/23/political-violence-surges-because-politics-matters-too-much/
“Political polarization shapes how people interpret risk and who they trust and listen to, which shapes what health services they access and what behaviors they partake in or don’t. This dynamic was a big reason Covid death rates so dramatically diverged between Republicans and Democrats: Party affiliation determined people’s willingness to get vaccinated, wear masks, social distance, and take other preventive measures, says Oberlander. Republicans were less likely to take these measures, and more likely to die of Covid as a consequence.”
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“Although left-wing Americans were more likely to take Covid’s risks seriously, Van Bavel notes Republicans outpaced Democrats on Ebola fears throughout the 2014 outbreak, during Barack Obama’s presidency. “It’s not that Democrats in America have a unique capacity to be attuned to the science and the risks of epidemics and pandemics,” he says; it’s that polarized people on the left and the right distrust the other party’s ability to handle any health threat.
Polarization is also creeping into our relationships with health care providers. A recent survey by communications firm Edelman found people feared the politicization of medical science as much as they feared the cost of medical care; 41 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they wouldn’t trust medical advice from a provider who had a different political persuasion than they did, or would stop seeing them entirely.”
https://www.vox.com/even-better/388130/polarization-political-partisan-health-rfk-jr
“Two new political science studies investigate how all of this time spent on social media affects our politics. The first asks what, if anything, digital denizens learn about politics, while the second develops a model to explain how social media interactions spark culture wars by sorting people into antagonistic political tribes.
Published in the Journal of Communication, the first study finds that whatever else millions of social media devotees learn from their online activity—catching up with friends and finding new ones, checking out product reviews, and watching cat videos—one thing they do not do is learn about is politics.
There are “no observable political knowledge gains from using Facebook, Twitter,
or SNS [social network sites] in general; when measuring policy-specific, campaign-related, or general political knowledge; in election and routine periods; and when individuals use social media specifically for news or for more general purposes,” find Israeli communications researchers Eran Amsalem and Alon Zoizner. They reached this conclusion after parsing data involving more than 440,000 subjects in a pre-registered meta-analysis of 76 different studies on the effect of social media on political knowledge.
One minor exception to this sweeping conclusion is that research using experimental setups finds small but statistically significant knowledge gains from using social media. However, in such experiments, Amsalem and Zoizner note that subjects are given no choice over what political information they see, so they may be artificially induced to pay greater attention to it than they ordinarily would scrolling out in the wild. The experiments also fail to account for information decay, since they test their subjects’ political knowledge gains immediately after exposure to it. “Considering these caveats, our conclusion remains that social media contribute little, if at all, to political knowledge,” write the authors.”
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“Törnberg observes that accumulating data indicate that political polarization in the U.S. and other countries is not growing because people are increasingly isolating themselves with like-minded folks in social media echo chambers that confirm the righteousness of their views. Instead, Törnberg notes that the “empirical literature suggests that digitalization does not appear to lead to a reduction of interaction across political divide, but quite the opposite: it confronts us with diverse individuals, perspectives, and viewpoints, often in contentious ways.” So how might social media contribute to the apparent increase in partisan rancor? Törnberg develops a model showing how political disputes, controversies, and debates on nonlocal social media can drive people to adopt increasingly extreme positions.
Back in the good old days, political and other differences of opinion were largely local and neighbors had many cross-cutting issues and commonalities that moderated their views of those who disagreed with them. “Social conflict is sustainable as long as there are multiple and non-overlapping lines of disagreement: we may differ on our views on one issue but agree on another; we may vote differently, but if we support the same football team or go to the same church, there remains space for interpersonal respect,” writes Törnberg. “The recent rise in polarization is thus expressive of a gradual breakdown of this cohesive glue, driven by a gradual alignment of social, economic, geographic, and ideological differences and conflicts.””
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“Based on the results of his model, Törnberg argues that we need to rethink “digital media as not merely arenas for rational deliberation and political debate but as spaces for social identity formation and for symbolic displays of solidarity with allies and difference from outgroups. Digital media do not isolate us from opposing ideas; au contraire, they throw us into a national political war, in which we are forced to take sides.””
“partisan animosity suits the authoritarian elements on the left and right just fine. Their goal is power, and they have little patience for procedural niceties that interfere with its exercise. As history teaches, a base whipped up into fear and fury is ready to accept almost anything to ensure its own survival. Perhaps even the destruction of the institutions and ideals that make America distinctively itself.”
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“At a time of polarization, you might expect the right to react by doubling down on support for free markets and private property. Instead, concurrent with democratic socialism’s ascendance, many prominent conservatives have taken a leftward turn of their own.
In June 2019, Tucker Carlson spent five full minutes during his prime-time Fox News show praising a plan from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) to promote “economic patriotism.” The proposal, which called for “aggressive” government action to bolster domestic manufacturing and keep American companies from creating jobs abroad, “sounds like Donald Trump at his best,” Carlson enthused.
President Donald Trump exhibited a high degree of comfort wielding state power for mercantilist ends, from his imposition of tariffs to his use of subsidies and bailouts to support American companies facing competition. Now a rising cadre of nationalist conservatives (a.k.a. “natcons”) are happy to provide the intellectual ammunition for this America First agenda.
In 2019, Republican policy wonk Oren Cass appeared at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference to argue for industrial policy—a robust program of federal interventions meant to resuscitate American manufacturing. He went on to found a think tank, American Compass, that promotes such familiar policies as making corporations give board seats to labor representatives.”
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“Economics is the arena in which the left-right convergence is most obviously apparent. But there are other places in which the two movements, though superficially worlds apart, are tracking in the same disturbing direction at a deeper level.”
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“This is what feels most broken in our politics. It’s not the ways left and right are further apart than ever; it’s the ways they’re closer together, with powerful elements on each side having jettisoned the longstanding liberal ideal of respecting the rights of even those with whom you strongly disagree.
The two camps, of course, have different substantive moral visions for the society they wish to construct. But each views a broad conception of individual liberty as a barrier to achieving that vision.
Economic liberty, including international trade and private property rights, stands in the way of progressives’ desire for an egalitarian and democratic order in which no one is ever again expected to work for someone else—and in the way of natcons’ desire for a revivified American manufacturing sector in which male breadwinners can support a large family on a single income. Speech protections prevent both sides from controlling the conversation as they wish. Religious freedom is seen as either a cover for rank bigotry or a rationalization for excluding God from the public square. And liberal toleration, with its norms of fair play and civility, is at odds with the reigning conception of politics as total war.”
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“Individual liberty, equality under the law, protections against the arbitrary exercise of governmental power—these are unmistakably American values. While influential elements on both the left and the right have turned against them in recent years, most Americans are not on board with total-war politics.
Much has been made of rising affective polarization, and there is some evidence to support the concern. People have become more likely over time to say they would be displeased if they had a son or daughter who married someone from the opposite political party, for example. Yet Americans from both parties are still significantly more likely to say they would not be bothered at all. In fact, a 2020 survey commissioned by The Economist found just 16 percent of Democrats and just 13 percent of Republicans saying they would be “very upset” in that situation. Severe affective polarization remains mostly an elite phenomenon.
In a poll commissioned last year by the group More in Common, three in four respondents agreed that “the differences between Americans are not so big that we cannot come together.” Demonization of the other is a powerful political weapon, and those inclined toward authoritarianism are particularly comfortable using it. But what is sometimes called the “grand liberal bargain”—a social truce in which each side broadly agrees to respect the other’s freedom, even if it doesn’t like what the other side will do with it—is a powerful defense, and one in keeping with the natural ethos of America. It’s not too late to choose it.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/1/26/22899208/american-elections-leaders-depolarize-politics
“That polarization has now opened political rifts in vaccination rates, with people’s decision to get a shot or not today a better predictor of states’ electoral outcomes than their votes in prior elections. It’s led the US’s vaccination campaign to hit a wall, missing President Joe Biden’s July 4 goal. Meanwhile, the more infectious delta variant is spreading, raising the risk of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in unvaccinated — and often heavily Republican — areas.
To put it bluntly: Polarization is killing people.”