https://scholars-stage.org/the-world-that-twitter-never-made/ Skip to content The Scholar's Stage The Scholar's Stage * About + About the Author + About This Site * Podcast + Podcast Episodes + Podcast Transcripts * Writing + Recent Posts + Greatest Hits + Outside Writing + Full Index * Community + Members Area Forum + Become a Member * Consulting & Teaching + Consulting + Teaching Search for: [ ] [Search] Menu Menu Toggle * About + About the Author + About This Site * Podcast + Podcast Episodes + Podcast Transcripts * Writing + Recent Posts + Greatest Hits + Outside Writing + Full Index * Community + Members Area Forum + Become a Member * Consulting & Teaching + Consulting + Teaching The World That Twitter Never Made 15 July, 2022Tags:By The People, Community, Culture, Domestic Politics [114-1140198_twitter-bird-dead-png-transparent-png] A few months ago Jonathan Haidt made waves with a big think-piece in the Atlantic arguing that most of the ills of the 2010s can be traced back to the invention of the retweet button.1 I read the essay and disagreed with it vociferously. Today City Journal published my critique.2 You can read my counter essay here. Below I would like to add some additional thoughts on social media and American politics that could not fit into that piece. 1 Jonathan Haidt, "Why the Last Ten Years Have Been Uniquely Stupid," The Atlantic (11 April 2022). 2 Tanner Greer, "Our Problems are Not Procedural," City Journal (15 July 2022). I offered three main lines of critique: first, social media (and Twitter in particular) cannot account for a societal wide decline in trust or a societal wide rise in radicalism and partisanship. The number of active twitter users is just too small. As Saturday Night Live understands, when Americans tells pollsters they are afraid to state their beliefs, it is in workplaces and over the dinner tables that these fears matter most, not on social media. Second: the better explanation for declining institutional trust is declining institutional performance. Of course millennials and zoomers are radicalized; the formative political events of their youth were a string of national disasters. These disasters were presided over by the very forces of centrism that Haidt would like to protect. As something of a center-righter myself I applaud his stand against the crazies, but I am frustrated by the manner in which he chooses to make it. By focusing his ire on social media, Haidt elevates the procedural over the substantive. There is little evidence that changing procedural form this or procedural form that will make any difference on the long term. At best it will allow the centrist boomers to hold onto power a few years longer. But if the radicals cannot be openly confronted on the basis of their ideas, and if centrists cannot develop an emotional appeal and political vision as powerful as their opponents, then the center will not hold. Third, what we call "cancel culture" is not a new feature of American life. It has always been with us. If current times feel especially fraught and censorious, it is not because Americans have suddenly become less tolerant of speech generally, but because there has been a titanic and sudden change in what lies outside the bounds of tolerance. This change is disorienting and frightening, but similar instances of active thought policing can be found across our history, including our very recent past (Dixie Chicks, exit stage left). This another example of emphasizing procedure over substance. Cancellation and self-censorship have always been with us. Trying to outroot it is impossible. The real issue is the range of things one can be cancelled for. But instead of arguing, straightforwardly, that issue x or issue y should not be on the list of things cancel-worthy, we tilt at windmills, trying to throw out the notion of acceptable opinion altogether. A better response to radicalism is needed. All of these ideas are laid out with more depth in the main essay. But I want to raise two points that did not fit naturally in that essay here. First, some readers might be surprised to see me write against a Twitter driven account of national affairs. After all, was not I the guy who wrote "The World Twitter Made?" Guilty as charged. I do think Twitter has had a baleful influence on public debate, but not quite the one that Haidt sees. Haidt's narrative of Twitter politics reads much like Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public: once upon a time we had responsible centrists keeping the gates. Twitter and Facebook have destroyed the gates and their keepers. Anarchy empowers the nasty and the radical, who hitherto had no meaningful political voice. They use their megaphone to bludgeon the responsible and respectable into silence. Consequently, radical ideologies rule the roost. There is some truth to this, but among other things, it underestimates just how mainstream radical ideology is among America's younger professionals. It wasn't Twitter anons that drove the Times to Wokeness, but the Times' own employees. The radicals were raised inside the gates. The role Twitter played in the radicalization of the Very Online is subtler than Haidt's model allows. I recall a thoughtful essay by Justin Smith on the futility of debate in the world of Twitter. Writes he: Is there any way to intervene usefully or meaningfully in public debate, in what the extremely online Twitter users are with gleeful irony calling the "discourse" of the present moment? It has come to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles. A writer who works on the old system of production can spend days crafting a sentence, putting what feels like a worthy idea into language, only to find, once finished, that the internet has already produced countless sentences that are more or less just like it, even if these lack the same artisanal origin story that we imagine gives writing its soul. There is, it seems to me, no more place for writers and thinkers in our future than, since the nineteenth century, there has been for weavers. This predicament is not confined to politics, and in fact engulfs all domains of human social existence. But it perhaps crystallizes most refractively in the case of politics, so we may as well start there. There are memes circulating that are known as "bingo cards," in which each square is filled with a typical statement or trait of a person who belongs to a given constituency, a mouth-breathing mom's-basement-dwelling Reddit-using Men's Rights Activist, for example, or, say, an unctuous white male ally of POC feminism. The idea is that within this grid there is an exhaustive and as it were a priori tabulation, deduced like Kant's categories of the understanding, of all the possible moves a member of one of these groups might make, and whenever the poor sap tries to state his considered view, his opponent need only pull out the table and point to the corresponding box, thus revealing to him that it is not actually a considered view at all, but only an algorithmically predictable bit of output from the particular program he is running. The sap is sapped of his subjectivity, of his belief that he, properly speaking, has views at all... Who has not found themselves thrust into the uncomfortable position just described, of being told that what we thought were our considered beliefs are in fact something else entirely? I know I have been on many occasions: to be honest, this happens more or less every time I open my newsfeed and look at what my peers are discoursing about. For example, I admire Adolph Reed, Jr., a great deal; I believe he is largely correct about the political and economic function of "diversity" as an institutional desideratum in American society in recent decades; and I believe, or used to believe, that I had come to view Reed's work in this way as a result of having read it and reflected on it, and of having found it good and sound. But then, not so long ago, I happened to come across this from an American academic I know through social media: "For a certain kind of white male leftist," my acquaintance wrote, "Reed makes a very convenient ally." What would be a fitting response to such exposure as this? Should I stop agreeing with Reed? Easier said than done. It is never easy to change one's beliefs by an exercise of will alone. But it would be will alone, and not intellect, that would do the work of belief change in this case: the will, namely, to trade in the algorithm that I'm running for one that, I've recently learned when checking in on the discourse, is preferred among my peers.... Someone who thinks about their place in the world in terms of the structural violence inflicted on them as they move through it is thinking of themselves, among other things, in structural terms, which is to say, again among other things, not as subjects. This gutting of our human subjecthood is currently being stoked and exacerbated, and integrated into a causal loop with, the financial incentives of the tech companies. People are now speaking in a way that results directly from the recent moneyballing of all of human existence.3 3 Justin Smith, "It's All Over," The Point Magazine (3 January 2019). Smith proposes that modern technology has stripped us of "subjecthood." What Smith calls "subjecthood" I normally call agency. We want to feel like we are in charge of our own lives. We want to feel like our political opinions and prognoses were the product of careful thought and reflection. Our thought and reflection. Liberalism, pluralism, and norms of civil debate are built on the assumption that people are rational, thinking individuals that can be convinced by argument. The dueling essays and op-eds of yesteryear, with individual names attached to each lengthy, carefully edited piece, reinforced those assumptions. Twitter tears these assumptions to shreds. To log onto Twitter is to be exposed to a sea of a million voices. It is to observe political debates in such numbers that one can soon predict every rhetorical move every participant will make well before they make them. It is to have your likes, dislikes, opinions, and passions decided by algorithm. It means watching people climb in clout by manipulating said algorithms for personal gain. The politico immersed in this ocean of content no longer feels like an individual with control over her beliefs. Her intellectual development is no longer her story. Nor is anyone else's story truly their story. We are all the playthings of algorithms, hosts for a "Discourse" that seems to live outside of those discoursing. Nothing in Twitter's endless streams suggests that human beings are amenable to reason or persuasion. Tweets are not written to persuade, after all, but to game. And when the discourse is a game to win, lose, or manipulate, there is little reason to care much for free speech. Lili Loofbourow described her turn against "free speech" in exactly these terms in a viral twitter thread penned a few years ago: Online pundits should know (and factor in) that social media as a "public square" where "good faith debate" happens is a thing of the past. Disagreement here happens through trolling, sea-lioning, ratios, dunks... Most arguments worth having have been had and witnessed 1000x already on these platforms, in several permutations. We know their tired choreographies, the moves and countermoves. At this point we mostly enjoy the style of whichever dunk we happen to agree with. Does that lead to paranoid readings and meta-debates that seem totally batshit to onlookers who aren't internet-poisoned? Yup! "All Lives Matter" sounds perfectly reasonable-as a text-unless you know the history of that discourse. (And you'll sound pretty weird explaining it.) "Why would you refuse to debate someone who's simply saying that All Lives Matter?" is the kind of question an Enlightenment subject longing for a robust exchange of ideas might ask. Well, the reason is that most of us know, through bitter experience, that it's a waste of time. It wouldn't be a true exchange. We know by now what "All Lives Matter" signals and that what it signals is orthogonal to what it says. Your fluency in this garbage means you take shortcuts: you don't have to refute the text to leap to the subtext, which is the real issue.... Sure, good-faith debate would be nice. Instead, the internet pressure-cooked rhetoric. Again: people can watch the same argument be conducted a million times in slightly different ways, and that's interesting, and a blessing, and a curse. It produced a kind of argumentative hyperliteracy. If you can predict every step of a controversy (including the backlash), it makes perfect sense to meta-argue instead-over what X *really* means, or implies, or what, down a road we know well, it confirms.4 4 Lili Loofburrow, twitter thread, 9 July 2020. Twitter presents the problem of over exposure. Debates on the blogosphere, or in the op-ed sections, were argued within a defined limit. Your opponent was a person you could identify, even if that identity was pseudonymous. The onslaught of voices in your mentions strips away the individuality of debate. You are not battling people, but a force of nature. You are repeatedly exposed to non-entities of the other side--or, barring that, to the stupidest and cringiest entities of the other side. Your interlocutors are incentivized not to tailor their argument to you or those like you, but rather to their fans and boosters. It is a poisonous environment for good faith engagement. Spending too much time there risks losing faith in good faith altogether. The retweet button facilitates all of these problems. But it is only one piece of the puzzle. Just as important is the scope of the Twitterverse, which lacks boundaries, borders, or moderators that made the blogosphere and forums of old feel and operate like communities. But Twitter can only poison so far. Twitter is experienced as a war against some natural force only by politicos with high follower counts. That group includes Haidt, Loofburrow, and myself, but not most Twitter users--much less most Americans. In order to trace "Why the last ten years have been uniquely stupid" Haidt must expand his vision past social media. Why aren't the centrists winning out there? There is something eerie when the centrist liberals of our day are set next to the older generations in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons or Dostoevsky's The Demons. The old liberals in those novels read both comic and tragic, absorbed by the rebellions of their youth despite having long passed middle age, horrified by the revolutionary notions of their children yet paralyzed by indecision whenever directly confronted with them, so committed to idealized notions of progress and dissent that they lack the language, much less the courage, to critique their children. So it is today. The boomer centrists do not know how to respond to accusations of racism or sexism without sounding like the echo of their own parents. So they don't respond to these accusations. Instead they grasp for theories that allow escape from the actual issues at play. That is, they flock to theories of procedure, not substance. Haidt's theory of the retweet button fits that bill; so do many others, such as Yuval Levin's writing on institutions. Both are correct within limits: yes, Twitter is bad for the discourse. Yes, we need more institution building. But these theories are popular with centrists and non-politicos less for their explanatory power than for the ideological dodge they allow centrists to make. Share this: * Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) * Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) * Post navigation Previous Post Previous post: The Fall of History as a Major-and as a Part of the Humanities Leave a Comment Cancel reply [ ] [ ] Comment [ ] Name * [ ] Email * [ ] [ ] Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment. [ ] Notify me of follow-up comments by email. [ ] Notify me of new posts by email. [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] 20 Comments [b2d]Patrick C 15 July, 2022 at 9:08 pm As usual I find your arguments incisive. I don't think proceduralism is much else besides a life preserver for people adrift in a situation they cannot hope to succeed in because the rules are not legible or fair. I know as a somewhat young conservative, you've probably seen some variation of this in the late 2010s Free Speech on Campus stuff. Most of that was less an earnest belief in the marketplace of ideas and more of a plea for dissent from woke orthodoxy to not be met with administrative sanction, paramilitary violence, or some combination of the two. If the situation was less overt than that l, I would imagine appeals to natural law or just the strength of the ideas themselves would be more common. While I think trying to make equivocations between (literally 1) band losing airtime in 2003 and 1 football player not being resigned to a contract in 2016 vs the massive forces of administrative, bureaucratic, reputational and informational power being deployed in the opposite direction (and maybe I misread you on that), it's definitely an observable trend that procedural explanations for this issue fall flat across tribes in the US. If I could offer a critique of the general trend I see in these pieces, it would be that I don't think your generational argument works for explaining the Trump phenomenon as well as it does for the NYTimes newsroom dynamics. In my view, it demonstrates the opposite - that boomer power can not only survive but double down. The 2016 GOP primary was a failed attempt at generational replacement. The Gen X campaigns of Cruz and Rubio and the Gen X staffed campaign of Jeb was supposed to usher in an era of Gen X Movement Conservative control of the American Right which would sideline the politics of Bill O'Reilly. Trump's boomer id politics of restrictionism, fiscal expansion, nationalism, and overall (and I say this positively) Ugly Americanism won out over this vision. Generational replacement was forestalled, and the power centers in today's Republican Party remain who can drive small dollar donations from these specific appeals. The most striking fact of this is how the Republican Party has become the party of people outside of the professional class, regardless of income level, and that is because the norms of that class run counter to it. Generational turnover on the American Right is something I don't think will happen in the same way it did on the left. But I don't know how that will pan out, but I'm sure you have some interesting thoughts on this. The one thing I think we will agree on is that Catholic Integralism will not play a part. Reply [61e]H. M. Brough 16 July, 2022 at 12:49 am Good essay Tanner. -- "If current times feel especially fraught and censorious, it is...because there has been a titanic and sudden change in what lies outside the bounds of tolerance." The issue at hand education polarization. There's really not a space for educated, heterodox people anymore. It seems like the prior tolerance for heterodox speech in educated circles was predicated on there being a rough parity of views. Once that parity started vanishing, then the cancellations began. These cancellations converted or cowed a certain portion of the remainder, which facilitated more cancellations, and so on. Indeed, most of the people who take issue with cancellations are urban, educated, and Blue Tribe to their cores. They are mainly concerned with the issue as it pertains to their educated circles. I remember watching Haidt's old talks long before the culture wars got into full swing. He identified very much as a moderate Democrat, and on occasion he would overtly trash the Republican Party. Many of Haidt's "IDW" compatriots understandably bristle at their new position on the Right. They are in the same position as the old neocons, who themselves were comprised of disillusioned leftists and socialists! My advice to them (us) is the same as the advice given by the neocon Midge Decter: there comes a time to join the side you're on. -- The Right is now in the political-cultural wilderness and will be for some time. The sooner educated Righties acclimatize themselves to that new reality rather than fighting for a place in institutions that manifestly don't want them, the better off we will be. Reply [473]Eugine Niet 16 July, 2022 at 2:56 am "people can watch the same argument be conducted a million times in slightly different ways" I would argue that this is a good thing for the rationality of public discourse. It ensures that in the long run, the argument that wins is not determined by accidents like the rhetorical skill of one or another debater, but by the nature of the arguments themselves. Reply [786]jixiang 16 July, 2022 at 12:00 pm An interesting point is that the left-wing identity politics that has taken the English-speaking world by storm is far weaker in most of Europe. In Italy the discourse on racism and sexism has not shifted that much over the past 10-15 years. Social media has still poisoned the debate however, and extremism and conspiracy theories are still rife. But it's Facebook, not Twitter, that really affects the average person. Twitter is probably the wrong place to look. Reply [386]Nicholas Weininger 16 July, 2022 at 2:48 pm It's true that social enforcement of orthodoxy is not new, but nonetheless the extent of it varies over time, and it's reasonable to think that times with less of it are all else equal better than times with more of it. For many of us who came of age in the 1990s, we experienced that time as one with a much larger range of non-punishable opinion than before or since. There is little if anything you "can say" now that you "couldn't say" then, and a large and growing amount in the converse category. If that's true, it's worth understanding why it was true and what we might do to bring it back. You can tell a story where the economic prosperity and geopolitical absence of threat in the 1990s powered the relatively freewheeling atmosphere, with reference to the "survive vs thrive" dichotomy and Friedman's _The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth_. Or maybe the balance of generations was unusually tilted in favor or social tolerance. Or... something else? I honestly don't know, but because social tolerance is so important to truth seeking and genuine diversity, it seems important to investigate. Reply [9b4]Jessica Doyle 17 July, 2022 at 4:35 pm I went back and reread that Smith essay (generally I find Smith irritating, though I can't justify the reaction at all, it's probably more me than him) and found at the end: "But it is hard not to see this sort of endeavor as only the more twee end of the normie's prideful declaration that he still has a paper subscription to the Times." Which feels like contemptuous shorthand-if you like fountain pens, you'll love self-indulgent stands against technology!-in other words, Smith's deployment of a personal algorithm. (Note: I love fountain pens.) Thinking, also, of how my kids (neither of whom are in high school yet) had me playing the musical "Heathers" in the car yesterday, and the first song is all about the characters shouting insults at each other and also despairing that they can't break out of their assigned roles of jock or loser or what have you. (And changing someone's mind about your assigned place in the social hierarchies of high school was hard enough that it spawned an entire genre of popular entertainment between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s.) Admittedly it's been a while since I reread Jocks and Burnouts, but it seems to me that Twitter doesn't introduce algorithms; it simply scales them. We've been running algorithms on each other for a long time-which goes back to your observation that self-censorship and cancellation are nothing new. (Yes, I know "Twitter is like high school" is not a new argument.) With regards specifically to Haidt: having just read (skimmed, to be honest) the AC10 review of The Righteous Mind, I wonder if he's not making the "Twitter ruins things" argument specifically because he came up with a predictive algorithm (Values X, Y, Z -> socially conservative; Values A, B, C -> socially liberal) and then that didn't hold up over time, so he's looking for an explanation why his algorithms, which were at least based on recognizable human feelings, seemingly got superseded by different, stupider algorithms. (If you haven't read the review yet, the reviewer hypothesizes that tribal identification leads to values, rather than values slotting a person into a political tribe.) But I'm doing this crudely, having not read Haidt myself. Reply [416]T. Greer 17 July, 2022 at 4:38 pm "o he's looking for an explanation why his algorithms, which were at least based on recognizable human feelings, seemingly got superseded by different, stupider algorithms." This is actually a very interesting take, not one I had considered myself. Good thought. Reply [fc5]Anon 17 July, 2022 at 7:04 pm The under 30, extremely online, right wing political Twitter users weren't radicalized by the internet. You are correct that it was our experience in life that radicalized us. Everything we were taught about how life worked "in the real world" was the furthest thing from the truth. We watched the society our parents and grandparents had transform into something fundamentally unlike what is once was, and it was nothing we ever wanted or were prepared for. Our leaders represent the entire world except us, and criminalize our every political action and belief. Don't get me started on how every institution demands you hate yourself and your history because you are white. You know, like the kids who ran into machine gun fire to preserve this country that has turned it's back on them and watches their slow decline and suffering. All the internet ever did was remind us we weren't alone in this feeling. The internet didn't cultivate it. It was already there in its entirety. Representative government is a joke. The people who try to "understand" us never will, and they only wish to do so for the purpose of marginalizing us even further. There is no universe where anyone in any position of authority or influence does anything for us without fundamental changes in personnel and governing philosophy. Reply [473]Eugine Nier 19 July, 2022 at 12:17 am > The under 30, extremely online, right wing political Twitter users weren't radicalized by the internet. True, but it helped you realize you were not crazy for noticing these things. Reply [416]T. Greer 19 July, 2022 at 1:43 am Bitterness clouds vision and frustrates action. No institution I am a part of demands I hate myself; I do not need such institutions to survive, and most of you don't either. We are not special snowflakes. The truth is that the challenges you face today are minuscule when placed to those faced by your ancestors. They are even more minuscule when placed next to cultural minorities in many parts of the world, and in many times in American history. Cultural minorities face a choice: they can blame the system, sink their own souls into stagnation and despair, and gain nothing from this life and prepare nothing for the generations of the future. Or they can view their status as a blessing, as a refiner's fire capable of forging both community and character. We can devote ourselves to virtue, excellence, strength, generosity, and all the other manly virtues.... or we can choose to whimper and shift blame. That is my plea: do not choose the bitter path. Reply [0bd]iffen 19 July, 2022 at 12:04 am I'm waiting for someone in a higher paygrade to explain why political polarization is a bad thing. I think it is a good thing, but all the best and brightest lament it daily. Reply [416]T. Greer 19 July, 2022 at 1:23 am Martin Van Buren, the man who did more than anything to codify the end of the Era of Good Feelings into a bitterly partisan system, argued in Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States that polaraization was an excellent condition. Better to have the parties defending specific and distinct political philosophies, argued he, than merely having politics be a battle of patronage networks behind the scene. A hidden motive was Van Buren's belief that partisanship on the basis of party was healthier than partisanship on the basis of region, a partisanship that might wreck the union. The problem with the van Buren view is seen easily over the last few decades, when the Congress and the Presidency are divided, and gridlock between two parties so polarized as to forclude practical cooperation leads to paralysis and shutdowns. I still don't think the USN has recovered from the sequester years. And then there is the problem of polarization escalating into violence, or constitutional crisis. Indeed, it already has escalated to such-that is what Jan 6th was. Constitutional crisis where the Joint Chiefs took things in their own hands, without authorization, to solve. A less partisan populace might not let things get so far. The final problem with polarization is more prosaic. I wrote about it here: https://scholars-stage.org/ signal-like-its-1711-james-addison-on-partisan-signaling-18th-century-style / Regular life is usually insulated from political conflict. It is a blessing to live in an era when the personal is not political. The more polarized society becomes, the larger the scope of things in life that take on political valence. Reply [0bd]iffen 19 July, 2022 at 11:01 am Thanks, there is merit in some of your arguments. I take issue with some, especially the characterization of January 6 as some sort of major crisis. Also, I know for a fact that many people think that gridlock and a divided government are what we need. Loss of confidence didn't just happen last year. I don't know the %, it's small, but for many years there have been voters who always vote for the Presidential party and vote the other party for Congressional candidates. My thinking is that we are, and have been, going to Hell in a handbasket and "non-partisanship" was there to guide us down the primrose path. If, and it's a big if, necessary changes can be made, it likely won't be accomplished through non-partisanship. Whenever I see laments about polarization, which is daily, usually several times, (it's edging out "climate change" for 1st place on the "you need to fear this list") I feel hopeful. It makes me think that at least there is a small chance for a better future. Reply [416]T. Greer 19 July, 2022 at 2:12 pm But it was a constitutional crisis. Understand what actually happened: the JCS, without constitutional authority to do so, intervened in American politics to end a disturbance and decide a constitutional question of rulership. I think they acted rightly -- but that does not make their actions any less extraordinary. Reply [0bd]iffen 19 July, 2022 at 2:31 pm "the JCS, without constitutional authority to do so, intervened in American politics to end a disturbance and decide a constitutional question of rulership. I think they acted rightly -- but that does not make their actions any less extraordinary." Have you written about this and I somehow missed it? [0bd]iffen 19 July, 2022 at 11:35 am One important point that I failed make. This insight from your post on the New Right, "This is an unstable foundation for a post-liberal body politic if there ever was one." explains my pessimism that we can find a path forward. Reply [473]Eugine Nier 23 July, 2022 at 1:27 am > gridlock between two parties so polarized as to forclude practical cooperation leads to paralysis and shutdowns. And that's a problem because. > I still don't think the USN has recovered from the sequester years. How long do you think it will take the USArmy, not to mention the US economy, to recover from the actions the Biden administration took without effective Republic opposition? > And then there is the problem of polarization escalating into violence, or constitutional crisis. Unfortunately, the crisis was polarizing enough with the result that blatant, in your face, election fraud was allowed to stand. > The more polarized society becomes, the larger the scope of things in life that take on political valence. I think you have cause and effect reversed here. The reason everything has become so political is because one faction has been able to push its agenda way past the point of all reason (drag queen story time anyone?) without any effective opposition. Reply [0bd]iffen 23 July, 2022 at 9:39 am At the end of the day, calls for less political opposition and polarization are calls for continuing the status quo. And continuing on the path to perdition is not good. Reply [f2c]Macgregor 19 July, 2022 at 6:08 am The gap that became a chasm between Twitter, where Ukrainian triumphalism and dismissal of the Russians as comically inept prevailed, and Telegram -- where pro-Russian channels showed massive Ukrainian casualties and UAF units bitterly complaining about being essentially left to die in artillery fire savaged trenches by their commanders...is also instructive. I won't Ukraine-jack this thread except to say the danger of polarization is such that facing the defeat of essentially the third largest (de facto if not de jure) NATO member military; one that from February 24 has been US/UK-led, Pentagon directed and increasingly NATO equipped army ever assembled...we could see dolstosslegende narratives emerge. That Trump MAGAcons and the 'alt right' are 'working for Putin' hurting .mil recruitment by maligning the modern military as woke and stabbing the progressive West in the back because they're upset about trans soldiers and the like. A very dangerous time ahead for America, particularly if Trump is indeed hellbent on running again. Reply [0bd]iffen 23 July, 2022 at 9:39 am At the end of the day, calls for less political opposition and polarization are calls for continuing the status quo. And continuing on the path to perdition is not good. 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