(August 3, 2017 at 4:35 pm)Gearbreak Wrote: Or you know we're mostly normal everyday Americans who differ on policy. I never like to fall into the trap of thinking my political opposites are crazy or stupid. I just think they're wrong.
As a rule, I agree: it's usually not useful to think of one's opponents in those terms, if only for pragmatic tactical reasons. But I'm not quite willing to extend the laurel wreath of "reason" to either my opponents or my allies. Or me, for that matter. The older I get, the more distrustful I become regarding claims of reason -- especially when emotions like fear, resentment, greed, and tribal identity are so often obviously at the bottom of many disputes.
If the differences are really about policy and means-and-ends, then they fall within the realm of the rational and political (in an Aristotelian sense). But it's my experience that in many, many cases it's not really about differences of policy so much as it is about different sorts of non-rational inclinations that, taken as a whole, amount to antithetical worldviews. In reality, "differences on policy" is usually just post-hoc, rationalized window dressing for these inclinations. I doubt many people ever argued themselves into being conservative, liberal, or otherwise. To the extent that people switch political teams, it's usually only after they've somehow squared their emerging political identity with "the way things are" -- i.e, the way they feel them to be.
Case in point: think of that generation of American and other Western intellectuals who were staunch Communists and even Stalinists during the '30s and '40s before the weight of Soviet crimes became too much for many of them to ignore or explain away. Several of that group went on to become outright reactionaries while others (Irving Kristol comes to mind) became the vanguard of the neo-conservative movement -- all without settling along the way on anything resembling a moderate position. They simply swapped extreme ideologies because -- I suspect -- there is something in the way they viewed the world that predisposed them to the sorts of sweeping explanations of human affairs that leftist and rightwing political stances satisfy on a purely emotional level.
