[hannofcart]

I think the article implicitly assumes an American context. Political arguments in other countries are not as contentious.

American politics, as seen by someone who's never visited America but is hooked to the spectacle is fundamentally a difference in opinion about the reality we inhabit.

In other countries, political arguments are not as contentious because we can broadly agree on the state of reality. I might think my local MP is corrupt and is better replaced by another while my uncle who lives nearby might think he might be a bit corrupt but more "effective" at "getting things done" than the other guy. Therefore, political arguments of this sort might render the dinner table conversation lively but never descend into acrimony.

It's an entirely different thing if the starting point is that one of us thinks that the party the other one supports is filled with satanic vampires that murder children and drink their blood.

To an outsider American politics is like a slow moving train wreck. It's horrifying but you just can't look away.

[082349872349872]

Every year some old colleagues and I have an informal competition to see which one of us can be last to inadvertently learn who won the Super Bowl. For a few years, just after I emigrated to europe, I had an unfair advantage, but no longer, because of pervasive internet.

Trying to look away from American politics suffers a similar problem.

(I once asked a farmer in a remote mountain village what her goats were named; the answer was: Hilary, George, and Barack)

[c22]

Wow, I've lived in the U.S. my entire life and I couldn't tell you who won any superbowl if my life depended on it.

I have seen several of the infamous "superbowl ads" though, those seem truly inescapable.

[rayiner]

Outside fringe elements, Americans don’t disagree about reality so much as they have extreme differences in values that cause them to see facts very differently. Follow Breitbart or Mother Jones for a while. A news report might be about someone released without bail and murdering someone, or someone dying because they couldn’t get insulin medication. Both things actually happened: the article contains a police report, or photos, or whatever. Some people are going to get outraged by one or the other thing, but for the other thing will be like “well let’s put that in context, how often does that happen?”

American style polarization is common in most countries, from Latin America to Asia. As a Bangladeshi, where a country that’s 95% ethnically, linguistically, and religiously homogenous but still manages to have violent disagreements about politics, American polarization seems tame to me by comparison.

[amalcon]

The "members of the other party are literally evil and uniformly commit (non-political) crimes against humanity" thing is somewhat overstated. There are a disturbing number of people who think that, but it's far enough from the norm that it's not hard to find a family gathering with nobody who thinks that.

Not that our politics aren't super weird and unusually contentious. They are, often even relative to the same people twenty years ago. It's just that the particular archetype you're citing here is still pretty unusual in the scheme of things.

[DoctorOW]

Anecdata, everyone I've spoken to who is loyal to The Party, believes at least one mistruth. Ranging anywhere from "the gays are coming for you" to "the Jews control the media" the fact that there are a selection of personal boogeymen instead of a single centralized one is almost irrelevant to the overall point.

[hannofcart]

> Some 23% of Republicans, and 15% of all Americans, say they agree with the baseless QAnon allegation that “the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.”

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/05/27/nearly-30-...

[MarkPNeyer]

Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.

Yeah, maybe the Satan worshipping thing is off the rocker. But a known pedophile ran a pedophole tape party island that lots of wealthy powerful men were at, somehow none of them got charged and the guy died in jail with video cameras blanked out.

Are they really ~crazy~ for thinking that maybe something is up there? Or are they just going overboard when diagnosing a real problem, like the half of democrats who supported COVID internment camps?

Source: https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...

[sanderjd]

This is a very recent phenomenon in the US as well and I'm hopeful the fever is beginning to break.