i’m a huge fan, and i agree with much of the diagnosis in this piece. but the proposed solution strikes me as analogous to just asking people to cut back on personal consumption to solve global warming. 1/
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it won’t work, and blames its victim for the foreseeable failure. systemic problems require political solutions, but in the case a politics different from, and orthogonal to, our dominant red-blue polarization. 2/
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if the people who understand red-blue polarization as the scourge that it is drop away from politics to lead the exemplary lives in the small, a kind of benedict option, who will build that orthogonal politics—reform our electoral system, build institutions that integrate us? 3/
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if we leave politics to those most attached to its vices, we will end up only with a more vicious politics. 4/
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we need an explicit politics of depolarization, of addressing the reasons why we’ve entered a dynamic that is tears us apart while doing nothing to fix the sources of the real and rampant suffering partisans opportunistically recruit to their own ends. 5/
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we need a new politics, one that works assiduously to resist capture by red or blue, that reaches out to adherents of both tribes who understand that this tribalism none of us fully escape may be the death of all of us if we do not find a remedy, urgently. /fin
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I’m working on a voting reform project in Seattle, seattleApproves.org that should help with that.
It brings approval voting to our local elections, which encourages candidates to build big tents and take more popular positions.
It’ll be on the ballot in 2022.