Our assumption that everyone is, at heart, a rational actor is as dangerous for our country...
as the "division" and "incivility" ships are.
Perhaps even more dangerous.
The idea that we can simply debate or discuss away racism, sexism, classism, the hypocrisy and double standards surrounding Trump and right wing evangelicals and coming from them on a daily basis, white nationalism and white nationalist terrorism, etc. is naive at best, lazy in the middle, and outright running away from the issue at worst.
Idealism is a nice thing to have, don't get me wrong, but warm fuzzy feelings and nothing but are going to get us the same thing that 65 million votes got us in 2016.
You can point out the fact that middle America or the "real American" is losing his job because a rich white man is closing down the factory and that it is a rich white Republican cutting his safety net all day every day, but you know what? He's still going to blame immigrants for taking his job and minorities for leaving him in the lurch. Happens every time.
This didn't happen overnight, the same forces that turned just the word "liberal" into a pejorative have been cornering the market on using cognitive distortions (Like black and white thinking such as something they don't like being "socialism" ), logical fallacies, ignoring cost-benefit, not caring about the long term consequences of one's actions, and more in our political landscape and using them as rhetorical tools.
And we shouldn't be a party to this, by letting them get away with the lack of rationality, we are contributing to this. It's time to say no more; from debates on forums to discussions at family dinner tables all the way to what we see in DC and as we go into the 2020 election, if people can't discuss things as rational actors, then there's no point in having a discussion and we need to call that out.
And as for platforms that traffic in these things... sites like Infowars, groups like the Alt-Right, and QAnon; looking at you fools... shut them down.
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