[softwaredoug]

Here's what politics was like ~30 years ago (in the US): your representative was rewarded primarily on the basis of local issues and economics. For us it was 'can they keep the local Navy base open' which provided most jobs. You can see the remnants of this pork-barrel politics in the Obamacare deal, with various deals to bring over a few senators.

The US had tons of diversity. But it got expression in local culture, and you didn't think as deeply about your identity at a national level. The national stuff felt more distant. It was exceedingly rare families to travel outside one or two state radius.

NOW, perhaps due to the Internet, maybe other factors, everything far away feels 'closer'. It's like we're suddenly crammed together at the same party, sharing more space with people that we would have culturally been more distant from in the past, creating tons of issues. Most issues have become nationalized. The lack of local media compared to social media, the lack of attachment to a community (people move more), and other factors probably are at play here.

So everyone projects values in the past they would have put into local communities onto the shared, national space. Of course if I project my educated, metropolitan PoV and you project your rural working class PoV, things will clash and we will have fundamental disagreements about everything, including facts and core values.

[mattm]

This is a good This American Life podcast about that issue:

> Two towns where people got really upset about undocumented immigrants, even though in both places, that did not seem to be the most important thing happening at all. One of the towns, a small town in Alaska, has no undocumented immigrants at all, but the possibility of them arriving put the whole town at each other’s throats.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/621/fear-and-loathing-in-ho...

[BitwiseFool]

Something about this seems dismissive. I definitely get the sense of "Why are you worrying about this? You shouldn't be worried because it won't affect you. Just let us do this because you shouldn't be worried about it."

[mattm]

Wouldn't that be the advice you would give a friend if they were fretting about something that had a very low likelihood of happening? Would you be happy with them spending energy on something that has no impact on their life?

[softwaredoug]

Just to add: 30 years ago there was nearly as much hand-wringing about pork-barrel politics as there is today about our insane partisanship. It led to its fair share of sub optimal decisions...

[potta_coffee]

We used to be worried about the national debt. Now it feels like a given that it's all funny money.

[nostrademons]

That's because we passed the "We have to pay this off" point, passed the "Our children have to pay this off" point, passed the "It's okay if we never pay off the national debt as long as our GDP grows faster than it", and are now at "Now is not the time to worry about the debt, people are revolting on the streets!"

We know how this rodeo ends, but nobody wants to think about bad things.

[mattmanser]

You've still got less debt vs gdp right now than you had at the end of WW2, so this is definitely not the real/actual reason.

Looking at the UK's debt over 3 centuries, we've often gone way above 200% debt, and you're only at like 120% at the moment, so it's not even a lot, historically speaking.

[tanseydavid]

"Not funny ha-ha, but funny 'BANKRUPT'"

[runsWphotons]

So we have gone from the Congress people bringing pork to bringing exciting live streams. This feels like a challenge to the idea expressed elsewhere that this stems from material lack.