DrZoidberg
Contributor
in the US, politics is not about a question with two sides having different ideas about how to solve it.
"hm, health care is a problem in that millions of people can't afford it and are getting sick and having their lives ruined by it. what should we do to fix this?"
Democrats: well we could think about expanding medicare, or introduce a public option, or reform to the medical industry... ooo or, we could give the insurance industry one of the biggest corporate hand jobs in the history of the human race and sell it to the public as making it so *everyone* has health insurance! bingo"
Republicans: LYNCH ALL THE NIGGERS
explain to me how you have a reasoned debate on a topic when those are your two options.
I think the problem is much deeper than that. The problem is that conservative quality media is dead. It went Fox news 100% in the 90'ies. In the good ol' days of the golden age of news we have both liberal and conservative quality and tabloid journalism. For whatever reason the conservatives weren't willing to pay to read quality news. So it died. While at the same time, quality news shifted generally towards the left. It's easy to see which news sources are which. Liberal media is full of bleeding heart liberal stories of how unfair life has treated some minority person, and articles of how some poor person "of colour" have managed to do something against the odds. Conservative papers focus on the stuff we're supposed to be afraid of. We are always under siege by some existential threat or another. That and to use a media bias political spectrum service.
Because the media landscape has shifted like this it defines are debates. There doesn't really exist a tool within society where which conservatives can sharpen their arguments or have their beliefs tested in a safe environment. Conservatives aren't going to read liberal media. So what are the stuck with? Facebook and tabloids. That's what informs them and why they behave so stupidly. And which explains the kind of dialogue you wrote.
I don't think conservatives are any dumber than liberals, on average. But we are social beings and if everybody around us say dumb shit, we are going to do dumb shit, most likely
BTW, I'm using the American terminology. In Europe our left are called socialists. In USA they are called liberals. The European socialists and the American liberals are the same kind of people.