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Joseph Addington's avatar

What truly matters politically and socially is not public opinion broadly but institutional capture. While Democrats as a whole are much less extreme than the progressive line in most things, progressive control the vast majority of important social institutions and therefore their line drives the culture and political priorities. Conservatives, on the other hand, really only control the Republican Party itself and churches. This disparity is what colors the whole culture-war debate.

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Peter Partee's avatar

Reminds of a Kantian a priori proposition: true, but uninformative. It is well recognized that a vast swath of America occupies and has always occupied the political middleground and avoids extremes. The quandry is how to induce our polarized political parties to acknowledge and represent that middle. One might argue that the endeavor is inherently doomed because parties are infinitely more concerned with retaining and consolidating power than doing the public good. With that as their guiding criterion, the have no incentive but to polarize and extract PAC money from special interests. The days of politicians signing up for their jobs out of a sense of public duty and then working hard to discharge that duty are gone and replaced with hyperbolic vitriol that poisons us all.

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