[filoleg]

From my observations (total anecdata, I am aware), those pro-specific-party people also usually don't tend to participate in politics on more local levels at all (county, state, etc.), despite the fact that those are imo way more impactful and can lead to changes "trickling up" all the way to the national level. Most of the people I personally know who vote in county/state elections can be best described as independents.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

I think part of the issue is that politics appears to have become something akin to a national sport, where we elect to support team A or team B. Because it is similar to a sport, our hopes and dreams, our entire being is drawn into this particular identity. That is why if team A supports position C ( that happened to be supported by team B previously ) it becomes a valid position. I do not know how to make people dislike sports.

I absolutely agree about the importance politics at local level. In fact, this is likely where regular citizens have biggest chance to actually influence an outcome.

[jshevek]

Sports and politics can both give people an easy feeling of belonging to something greater than themselves. Both can give you addictive neur-ochemical rushes while interweaving the experience of victory and defeat with tribal identification and othering.

I used to have a condescending attitude towards people who took sports 'way too seriously', but now I wonder if it is a net gain for society to give people a comparatively harmless outlet for these tendencies. Real harm is done when our policy discussions are dominated by the kind of tribalism, ideological intolerance, and rush-seeking engagement that seems to happen when people bring these tendencies to politics.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

I mean, in lots of Europe, football matches are one of the only places where flag-waving nationalism isn't a social faux pas. It's obviously a harmless outlet for human tribalistic tendencies and thirst for battle. But Europe has gotten ravaged in living history - you can talk to plenty of Brits today who will tell you stories about taking shelter in the subways while the Nazis bombed London. Americans don't really have a living memory of going to war with our neighbors and having our homeland pummeled - wars are a thing waged in faraway lands with people from strange and different cultures, so nationalism is allowed to flourish without any acknowledgement of its toxicity to humanity as a whole.

Tribalism in America goes deep, and you're right: rooting for a sports team is fairly harmless, and rooting for a political party is probably harmful, but I'd argue it's not nearly as harmful as as rooting blindly for an ideology. If you want your party to succeed, you should be engaged in your local politics, talk to people from the other side, listen honestly to their concerns, be willing to change your own opinion on specific policies, and push for those sensible policy changes to be adopted as part of your local party's platform. That's how you win people over, that's how you win elections, and how you enact real change that affects people's lives. Anything else is just yelling into your echo chamber, or getting into bar fights with the guys wearing the "wrong" jerseys.

Ideologies form the axes of socioeconomic space, they're not an ideal point, and the push toward an "us versus them" mentality in politics is embarrassing. It's a quirk that's arisen out of new media, an easily exploitable bug, and the sooner people see through the bullshit and we outgrow this, the better.