Absolutely, many people can be convinced and reasoned with, I don't dispute that. What I'm saying is that there are people who are prejudiced to such an extent that there is no reasoning with them. You have never addressed how we deal with that problem. There are people like this in society at large and there are people like this in positions of power in government and in the private sector. Both problems need to be addressed in some way, because the people in government and the private sector derive power from the people in society who support them and we can't tolerate this in a civil society. I don't know what order to solve them in and perhaps solving one would solve the other, but it's a problem that prevents us from working together in a more fundamental way as a society. Ignoring it is not an option.
Do you think that it is possible to reason with every person? Do you think that if someone simply sat down with every Jim Crow Southerner and explained nicely that black people deserve rights that would have solved the civil rights issues of the 60s?
>"Okay, the party can't be reasoned with, but what about the people?"
I addressed this earlier, the people can't be reasoned with either, that's what I meant when I said that reasonable GOP politicians get labeled as RINOs and then lose their primary race to the more extreme candidate. In fact, here's a very timely example. Ben Sasse was punished for doing exactly that: https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1357675346062057472
These voters have an outsized effect on government because of the electoral college and the fact that we give more votes to empty land instead of real Americans who happen to live in cities. If we had a fair voting system, these views would be much less mainstream and taken much less seriously. It sounds counter-intuitive but you have to force these people to "be reasonable" by taking away their power if they're not.
>the people who follow them out of tradition but don't fully agree with them.
I think a lot of the voters in this category have left the party, so most of the voters left are the unreasonable ones. Sometimes people can't be reasoned with and the only option left is to limit the damage they can cause.
I thought our government was supposed to be "of the people" (also known as a democracy). Maybe we should expand access to voting (e.g. easier to register, no-excuse mail-in ballots, adding polling places, making election day a holiday, and/or extending voting days). We could also address gerrymandering and other structural issues (e.g. some system other than first-past-the-post).
Now think about which side wants to do this and which side wants to stop them.
It will take the Republicans acting like adults. This is what I meant by both sides being different. The Democrats are interested in governing. The Republicans are not, because they detest the very existence of government.
>When I'm saying we need to bridge the gap between left and right, I'm not saying we need to preserve the status quo exactly as it is.
The Democrats have been trying to bridge the gap for 30 years and the Republicans keep spitting in their face (Newt Gingrich in the 90s, the entire party vs Obama in the 00s). The Democrats seem to have finally figured this out and Republicans are now upset that it isn't working any more. Republicans aren't interested in bridging the gap because if they do, their base will find someone who's "a real fighter, not a RINO".
Do you really think both sides are the same? Do you really think if Biden loses in 2024 he would call upon his supporters to attack the government? Do you really think that even if Biden did do this, that he would find dozens of supporters in Congress? Sometimes one side really is worse and acting enlightened by saying "both sides are the same" is becoming increasingly comical as empirical evidence continues to mount showing that they are not. Trump is the first American president to not peacefully transfer power and he continues to have significant Republican support today.
>The only way out is to fix that mutual misunderstanding, and to stop destroying the neutral space where that misunderstanding can be mended.
Who do you think destroyed this neutral space? Do you genuinely think both sides are equally at fault for destroying it?
There are enough large companies who have committed misdeeds worthy of major consequences that if we actually punished all of them in a meaningful way, the economy would fall apart, because there would not be many companies left.
>If big companies face no consequences, then our society will fall apart.
It currently is and I don't see any sign of it stopping. The foundation was laid in the 80s, the roof fell in on January 6th, and the Democrats don't have enough of a spine to actually fix the problem because Republicans keep calling them mean names.
Name a big company or C-level executive that has faced any meaningful consequences for their misdeeds in the last 15 years. I can think of Bernie Madoff, but he was punished because he swindled rich people. If he swindled poor people he'd be on the cover of Fortune magazine.
I agree that it shouldn't be this way, but I remember 2008 and the fact that zero people were punished. The US government will protect corporate profits at all costs.
And give up on the screen size. The number of people who want a phone to fit in their hands and pockets is effectively zero compared to people who want huge screens to scale up content size or watch videos on their commute.