Reply #9: LOL. Had me worried until I read the body :) [View All]

[RZM]

Thanks. A couple more points I forgot too.

One unfortunate thing about 'othering' is that it conflates people and views that shouldn't necessarily be conflated. That's especially bothersome when we're talking about our two party system, where people of very divergent views are lumped together in just two parties. Other people have probably thought about this more than I have, but if we shifted to a multiparty system and the Republican coalition broke up, it would be divided into quite a few parties that would be very different from one another. There would be a Ron Paul libertarian party, a COC/Big money party, a Tea Party (actually the Tea Party itself would probably be sub-divided), an evangelical party, a 'paleocon' party, a Bill Kristollish neocon party, an anti-immigrant party, and so an and so forth. Same thing with the Democratic party too, as we've seen with the testy relationship many people here have with the current administration. Some elements of the Republican coalition are far closer to the left on certain issues than many Democrats are. I pointed out on another post last night that Pat Buchanan's columns on our foreign wars could easily make it to the greatest page if you took his name off of them. Ron Paul wants to legalize weed, which isn't very close to how Obama and Holder approach the issue.

'Big Tent' may be a discarded buzzword, but I actually think it still applies to a certain degree. That's just the kind of thing I think you and I are talking about here. Really understanding the opposition means also understanding its naunces and complexity. It's not that hard to see these kinds of things, but the first step is acknowledging that the opposition is not a monolithic ideological bloc and is instead made up of regular people with regular differences. Elements on the left and right may not have a whole lot in common ideologically, but we have a hell of a lot in common when it comes to internal dynamics within our own sides of the spectrum.

And you're right about political exhaustion as well. If you spend hours reading about politics day in and day out, you eventually reach a point where you stop giving a fuck about splitting hairs and go on autopilot. There are also problems that are unique DU and other elements of the blogosphere, which is very much an 'echo chamber.' Not hearing voices from the other side articulating what they are all about on their own terms makes it that much more difficult to understand what they are all about. Plenty of DUers venture into RW territory to get the views of the other side, but I get the impression that more than a few almost never do so.

Thanks for your OP. I think these types of things need to be said and I'm glad you did so. Free Republic could use just this kind of post on their own side as well, because they have the same types of problems.