Michael Baharaeen has written a Substack piece with this quite reasonable title: “Growing Tribalism Threatens the American Experiment.” You will find, I believe, that it is unusually balanced compared to much modern journalism.
The author pleads for efforts to reach out to the other side, find common ground, etc., pleas you’ve seen and heard before. He argues:
Part of the reason it can seem to difficult to reach across the tribal divide is because of an assumption that those on the other side of it are acting in bad faith. If people from the other tribe hold what we consider to be bad values, it must be because they are themselves bad people or hold a perverse desire to be bad. But Occam’s razor would suggest this is unlikely. If we didn’t come to our own beliefs out of a desire to be a bad person, chances are pretty good our opponents did not either.
Unfortunately, being a bad person isn’t what the right believes, with considerable evidence, the left wishes to be. A substantial body of findings suggest many on the left suffer from various types of mental disorder, and the rest are their enablers. Their policy prescriptions come from trying to reconfigure society such that the anxious, the depressed, the delusional, and the spacey can all be comfortable wallowing in their dysfunctionality.
Q: You know what they say about trying to teach a pig to sing?
A: You won’t succeed but you will infuriate the pig.
The left’s policy prescriptions are the functional equivalent of trying to teach a pig to sing. They don’t work and they irritate the hell out of the rest of us.
Their policies amount to a kind of well-meaning utopianism that ignores the realities of healthy human nature. The recent election was us “normies” rejecting those Harrison Bergeron-lite policies.
