Comment by rebeccaskinner

I consider this type of thinking to be a form of tribalism because you're essentially saying there are two tribes. Each tribe has specific values.

A person's values are not a dichotomy (i.e. republican or democrat). You simply cannot put people into two buckets that define their overarching moral compass.

A person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat...or hate everything about Republican values except they got burned by Obamacare so they vote Republican. There is virtually an infinite level of nuance that can be a deciding factor in why someone votes for someone.

> the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values

This is an incorrect and cynical statement. I understand why you feel this way (for one thing, it's the exact type of language coming out of many of each party's idealists) but it's simply false.

One party supports gun rights while the other supports gun control. Those aren't values. Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety.

Abortion rights is about personal liberty. Gun rights are also about personal liberty. Both sides care about personal liberty.

The competing talking points aren't always conveniently about the same issue though. For Democrats their border policies are about compassion and human rights. For Republicans their border policies are about domestic prosperity.

Do Republicans care about human rights? Yes. Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes. To pretend otherwise is to willfully push apart the tribes in your own mind, and to trivialize the perspective of the opposition.

The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.

> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values".

I strongly disagree. In this duopoly of a political system, most people on both sides are just picking the lesser of two evils. Meanwhile, we are creating an alarmingly decisive political society by choosing not to associate with those who vote differently than us. Perhaps most importantly, we lose the opportunity to actually shift the political positions of others (and ourselves) by not engaging in healthy and non-judgmental political discussions with our friends and neighbors, ultimately increasing polarization even further.

Not everyone is voting based on their values—some are simply voting their wallets or the special interests they align with. Someone who is pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about. It doesn’t necessarily mean their core values are different than yours, but instead maybe simply just their priorities.

I would say that the partial counterpoint to that is, for most people their values are also largely tribe based, in that their values are not purely fixed, but rather tend to adapt to loosely track the tribal consensus. Very few are the ones willing to stick to their convictions under pressure.

There are clearly some (many?) shared average axiomatic values that seem to be common between very different cultures/religions (although individuals vary much more significantly), but it's much easier to obsess on the places we differ.

Where I strongly disagree is the idea that groups with different fundamental values can't necessarily find common policy ground. A good example is Basic Income, where you can find agreement between groups on opposite sides that both embrace the idea, but for very different value-driven reasons. In many cases, you can also agree to disagree, and just keep your collective hands out of it (eg. separation of religion and state).

I reject this idea, someone voting for the "least worst candidate" does not wholly endorse everything they stand for

As someone said in this thread, in the US two-party system, coalitions are formed before the vote vs after in other countries

The whole purpose of this piece is to precisely encourage pointed discussion about values directly and skip the proxying

I think the assumption that political parties represent two completely distinct sets of values is overly simplistic. In reality, there's a significant amount of overlap between them—what often differs is the style of messaging and the framing of ideas.

Personally, I find it hard to fully identify with either the left or the right. I share beliefs and values from both sides, depending on the issue. This makes it difficult to adopt a clear-cut political label, and I think that's true for many people.

Politics today often feels more like a battle of narratives than a clash of core principles / values.

p.s. my perspective is non-US one.

> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.

The largest two U.S. parties have been heavily minmaxing the propaganda they release to divide districts on the most effective issues they can convert into election wins. Their values are "get elected to office" but the propaganda can't be so straightforward because there aren't a lot of voters who are easily converted by that directness.

Voters have values; political parties and candidates have propaganda. Game theoretically the winning move is to compete on comparative advantage of an issue within a voting district; because (for example) Democratic voters are split on the death penalty it's a very useless propaganda point for the party as a whole [0]; sticking to one side or the other would lose more elections than it would win. Note that this is very different from ranking the importance of values and focusing on the most impactful to real people; the (implicit) hope is that by focusing on effective propaganda issues then some values may be preserved through the election process. In practice politicians also horse-trade for future party political capital in preference to espoused values.

One fundamental problem is that without a parliamentary style of government where coalitions are required to form a functioning legislature the usefulness of values in elections is greatly diminished. If I may say, the Republican party has done the best at shedding the illusion and explicitly transferring power to the party itself to enforce the values held by one man, which is the ultimate game-theoretically strong position for a political party. Disconnecting the ultimate value-judged outcomes of elections from the political machinations that win them has been incredibly damaging to democracy.

[0] https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/the-end-of-the-abolition-er...

> leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent

I'd say they invest in messaging around the values they want voters to believe they represent.

i.e., marketing and ensuing reality diverge regularly with politicians, regardless of affiliation.

> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.

Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol.

And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns.

> and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

That's not new.

On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future.

> If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.

This makes 0 sense. Democrat and Republican "values", to the extent they are even real, no way represent the full spectrum of values one can have.

Further, the Democratic party has a 27% approval rating and the Republican party had like 47% and I bet its falling. So even within your narrow framework this is a bad proxy because both are clearly unpopular.

> "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values"

You should test this hypothesis by talking to someone for 10 minutes, then guessing who they voted for.

My hypothesis is you wouldn't do better than 50/50.

> In this world, asking "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values".

Only if you ascertain the (inverse of the) mapping of values -> vote correctly, and it's definitively not what the parties or the tribes themselves profess.

For myself [0], I sympathize with many of the issues Trump ran on while finding most of the Democratic platform cloying and hollow. But I value effective policy, being accountable to intellectual criticism, and a generally open society far far more. (And at this point in my life, a healthy dose of straight up actual conservatism, too!)

[0] and while it might seem needlessly inflammatory to include this here, I think it's unavoidable that people are going to be trying to read partisan implications from abstract comments regardless.

> In truth, values and ethics are fundamental to effectively discussing politics.

People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining. They'll still happily argue about it for the post part, unfortunately.

You can see this effect after some elections where people "fall in line" with their party's new presidential candidate on some issue.

Values alone leads to supporting solutions that sound good but don’t work. “Free money for everyone” speaks to values of equity, fairness, and empathy… while creating all kinds of side effects like inflation.

If you are going to focus on values, apply them to a rigorous analysis of what works.

You make a great point about values. It's potentially the biggest issue with the linked article. You got a weirdly large number of dissenting replies, so I just wanted to say that. I think it's irrelevant whether or not there are "two mutually exclusive" sets of values. What's relevant is that one's values can point you more in one direction than the other.

That's why I love claiming to be a third-party voter so much. It breaks their brains and their response informs whether or not they are worthy of my respect.

The two sides dont actually have different values, they have small wedge issues that unscrupulous individuals/groups over-exaggerate for their own gain. Im center left but still see myself in Trump supporters, were basically the same people who basically want to live our lives

> The policies are different too, but over time we've gone from a world where there were at least some cases where the two parties had different policies for how to reach the same goals, and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

What difference do the parties have? They are both the 'corporate party' maximizing shareholder profit at all costs including killing brown people overseas or murdering Americans at home if they cant pay for healthcare.

Even the language that the different parties use is targeted at certain sets of values; Arnold Kling wrote this short book on the subject ("The Three Languages of Politics"): https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/ThreeLanguag...

"The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt is another, more nuanced (and complicated), but extremely interesting take on the subject of how values drive political affiliation.

Your need to insult the author proved his point.

Values are largely posturing. Push comes to shove most people don't really care about what they say they care about. Tribal heuristics of trust are way more important.

You're just describing tribalism.

> to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values

I think your use of the word "world" is telling.

Trump, the Republicans, and the global right are focused on their citizens.

The Democrats and the global left are more focused on the world and their role in it.

It's no longer just two approaches on how we can have the strongest economy. Each party has a weighting for how much to consider every issue across the world.

For example, there are people who would be happy with less growth, lower income, but more action on climate change.

I went through the top responses to you, and indeed, nearly 100% of the pearl-clutching "you're so wrong" have comment history that strongly suggests right wing / libertarian / neocon beliefs. In related news, no one admits to voting for Nixon either.

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