Reid, I've watched your video and my main response is basically that the problem with this is that we're not dealing with a transhistorical crisis or an "eternal problem"--some kind of cyclical lapse into incivility that can be righted if we just have the right first principles of discourse. Believing that would mean believing that people just *decided* to get more uncivil one day--it doesn't make any sense. Rathe, the increased polarization you're seeing is a symptom of a system of governance in crisis because it is unable to manage the contradictions engendered by late capitalism: people are turning away from civil discourse because civil discourse hasn't done shit for them, certainly not since 2008 and I would wager for certain groups it's been a lot longer than that. That's it. And the insufficiency of insisting on a different kind of discourse rather than a shift in material conditions is revealed when you try to turn to a group of essentially pre or proto-capitalists (depending on where you index slaveowning) and their renowned civility. But of course they believed in dialogue, because none of the questions they were discussing directly imperiled their capacity for self-reproduction. That kind of detached and abstract consideration isn't really a plausible solution for folks facing racialized police violence or who are rationing their insulin because their healthcare won't cover it or who are late on rent because there's no COVID stimulus or who are small business owners who have been tasked with providing unaffordable healthcare for their employees because the state refused to do so.

And so again you (Reid) are in this situation where you're simultaneously saying that you're more focused on your immediate material conditions, but you expect other people to be concerned about civility and the state of discourse which comes at the expense of demanding the security of their immediate material conditions. If you were just talking about MSNBC, fine, yes, absolutely, but as I said earlier, you pinned this on "the left" and that's walking you into all sorts of contradictions you should be smart enough to avoid.

Tell the wife that I had a wonderful time at your dinner party, asher.

I thought it was your wife who hosted it.

Who even knows anymore

Can you imagine how embarrassing it must be to walk around being Mickey all the time? Like every day you have to be Mickey. All day. No breaks. I find it difficult enough to be me, I can't even imagine how rough it must be to be Mickey. God, what a nightmare

It would help to have a clear sense of what you mean here--these are all pretty abstract qualities. But what I would say is that at least two of the three things you listed--increased tribalism and identity politics--are linked to a crisis in governance, or operate as one of the crisis's expressions. Identity politics, for example, is a capacious category and it includes a lot of both radical and quotidian things, but when the Democrats roll out "identity politics" in the form of "it's her turn" (or the negative form of tsk-tsk-ing about the number of women in Trump's cabinet or what-the-fuck-ever), it works as ideological compensation--a way of saying, no, sorry, we're not going to redistribute historic wealth accumulated through an unjust system, we're not going to punish the bankers who caused 2008 and made you lose your home, but we are going to give little girls someone to look up to. And in doing so, they make a moral claim on you as a voting block to support the party despite offering you nothing in terms of material benefits--which is to say it expresses an inability or unwillingness to actually manage the fractures and inequality that structure daily existence and give rise to demands for a better world. And because it's an ideological claim rather than a material one, it has to be accepted full-stop--you can't *kind of* promote diversity or debate the finer points of it if representative diversity is supposed to paper over all the real inequality in the country. So yes, you're right that "identity politics" in this form are turning people away from civility, but only insofar as the turn away from civility is a managed effect of the need to bind voters to a party without doing anything to affect material property relations. Again, ideas don't come from the clouds, and people do not just decide to get uncivil--they become uncivil in response to increased precarity and increased insufficiency of ruling doctrine. They're not being given any other option. What is there to feel satisfied, detached, or contemplative about? And so you can't simply will these conditions to change.

But more broadly, the founding fathers did not have "the same basic debates" because only certain types of people were having those debates, and this is a really key point and why it's so easy to dismiss the hagiographic vision of Ellis. If your case study is Adams and Jefferson, then it might look a lot like civil discourse is the answer. But Nat Turner and John Brown weren't having civil discourse about "racial bullshit," and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there's a really fucking good reason for that.

Sorry about your brain but I'm different.

This part has also been sticking in my craw a bit.

Maybe it's important to define who exactly I'm targeting here when I talk about the hysteria of "the left." MSNBC, Election Twitter, your fellow Harvard lads, RM's patented McPism, Kathy Griffin, Evergreen College, The Daily with Michael Barbaro, Paul Krugman, SNL, and more. Who I am definitely not referring to are the marginalized, the abused, the needy, or the dead. It's important to note that these sets of people I am not referring to are victims of an intricate system of failures that exist independent of a puppet like Trump and 100% are not helped by the types of people that I am referring to.

In my OP I only stated that I now bring my household concerns to my thoughts on Trump/politics as a way of contrasting what I brought to election night 2016 (left leaning idealist/borderline SJW.) I don't even bring that to up in a local sense, but as an overall acceptance that I care about big picture business/career/capitalism more than I ever in a million years thought I would. It was a way of saying that I have a whole new set of ideas and values and it is implied that I expect other people to also have their own unique values they've picked up as they live their lives and that in a healthy democracy we could all listen to each other talk about them.

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you’re a living breathing country song, hank

My last post was pretty shitty and made out of anger and I'll admit that. I thought the one before it was good though.

The pandemic is interesting because because it's the one thing Trump can't lie his way out of, and neither can the people that believe him about it.

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I did enjoy the mickey/argo avatar subplot happening over the last two pages on desktop mode.

The trump phenomena has made me more afraid to be myself than ever because I find the president so very very funny, but everyone else finds him very very mean and they become very upset when you say anything nice about him so its just not worth the trouble.

im always making a duck face now quite frankly

I got a deserved board warning for making personal attacks

the left has ruined masochism and self flagellation!

these things aren't mutually exclusive so it doesn't help to ask!

amen

Maybe you shouldn't make so many personal attacks. Have you tried being a sweet boy with a friendly disposition?