Evillore brings up a pretty solid point about "tribalism". "Political tribalism" was actually the word of the year for Geoff Nunberg of NPR. The word itself, as he admitted
here, has those undertones that create discomfort. We're very unwilling to see things through another perspective, and we're very much inclined to just get information through headline scanning today, or, what seems to be a conservative favorite, memes from social feeds [that generally aren't even close to true].
To pretend that there won't be a demand to erase everything President Trump has done in 2020 would be foolish. We've literally classified each other as evil, tribal, or without sense, and we show little to no respect for the other side.
I'm extrapolating this to the larger picture, rather than staying within the boundaries of whatever discussions on trans/third gender/similar discussions were reliant on, because that surely wasn't the only militant topic; but one of the big discussions was that Trump voters were racist, and frankly, it gained enough traction through the media even through today.
I made an argument for a "New New Deal" on many fronts to support both rural communities and urban communities. The "forgotten people" phrase is probably true. I argued for this significantly. I argued that the economic anxiety, which others, including data analysis authors, simply wrote off at racism, was real. Early today a CNN article showed the distribution of the economic gains in the stock market rally; with a very handy chart located
here.
When you look at that chart, it's pretty hard to imagine how economic anxiety doesn't exist in the areas that voted for Trump. I'm not going to dig deeper than that, because this is focused on tribalism. When I would propose "NND" investments, people would say the rural communities should die off, that miners should loser their heathcare coverage because they voted against Clinton, that I was a racist for suggesting that economic anxiety exists. It's this weird all-or-die mentality that exists on both sides right now in the US. Some of my friends in real life even questioned if I was actually a liberal based on my devil's advocate discussions on Trump voters.
We decide where we want to live based on the politics of the area. People don't want to marry someone of the opposite political spectrum. There was information suggesting Thanksgiving gatherings were shorter due to political divides within the family.
The bonds of political tribes are stronger than country, countrymen, and seemingly family, and that bodes ill for the U.S. That's what Neogaf channeled to an extreme degree. Break that cycle.