[xg15]

I don't think it's a good article, honestly. It falls into the same trap that, I believe, Democrats have fallen before - which is to assume that their strategy is perfectly rational and aligns with objective truth, while everyone who disagrees must necessarily suffer some cognitive failure.

Therefore it's enough to analyze the disagreement from a psychological or emotional level and the solution is to simply frame the existing agenda in some way that it is more psychologically palatable for the target demographic.

This misses that there may be a lot of completely rational, fact-based reasons to reject incumbent policy: If your statistics tell you that the economy is fine, but a significant part of the population doesn't know how to pay the bills, then this isn't some psychological error of that population group, it means your statistics suck.

From the perspective of one of the affected, the statement "the economy is fine" will also be understood quite differently: It means that whoever said it obviously doesn't include you in their definition of "the economy" and so is unlikely to alleviate your situation. Of course you then won't vote for them.

As a leftist, I also find the "diversity vs sameness" divide quite superficial. A lot of progressives and left-wing types are promoting cultural diversity while demanding strong economic regulations, while conservatives advocate deregulation and laissez-fair economics but have no problem directly interfering with people's private lives. The ultra-libertarians and ancaps who are so in love with freedom that they would like to abolish the state completely nevertheless have no problem with all-encompassing dystopian megacorps, as long as those megacorps are private enterprises.

Who exactly is the authoritarian and who is the libertarian here?