I know they aren’t but that doesn’t stop me from saying “Excuse me” when I stub my toe on the coffee table, or shouting, “Not one chance, asshole!” at the computer cord that tries to trip me.
I believe Michael Cain has also been known to talk to (or taunt) computers....
I was standing in the grocery the other day when I heard Mick Jagger wailing, “You’re enough to make a dead man come!” And I thought, “In about ten years, that will be nursing home music.”
LOL.
I have expanded by learning new artists, but the sound is all in the country/rock/folk/blues range.
It sounds like our tastes are quite similar, wonkie, (even down to those same albums among others) although I admit I came to country pretty late, and still not to the same extent as the other categories. Folk was probably first, then rock, and of course the latter was heavily influenced by blues. I have never been able to get into rap, and this post is the first I've heard of reggaeton; I'm not crazy about it.
But all of that aside, as a purely strategic matter, it’s a really bad idea to give Trump any reason to send the army into your city or town.
I think this is exactly right. This is a battle which must be fought with brains, with serious strategy, not (very understandable) kneejerk, impulsive emotion. And, as an aside, that's also one of my justifications for acting with (my definition of) civility.
I’ll also note, for everyone’s edification, that the much more modest increase is for charges of assault. I take every one of these charges with a grain of salt.
I can't remember the specifics, but didn't the feds recently try to get someone charged for throwing a sandwich at some kind of officer (maybe not ICE) and then couldn't get the charge to stick?
What TonyP just said, particularly this masterfully sly section:
Maybe the facts ARE exactly what the “official government website” (with its “Democrats have shut down the government” banner) says they are. I get more suspicious when it comes to statistics. Have there been vastly more cases of ICE-doxxing than, say, judge-doxxing? Have more ICE agents than judges been harmed as a result of being doxxed? I don’t know what “official” government statistics show, but I have a hunch the present government might fudge them a bit.
Thank you lj - since bc's going into spam with 3 seems to show that ATM only 2 is safe, perhaps a limit of 6, which means 5 would be safe? That's my vote.
On duration, how about 21 days or 28?
On subscribers, I can't really see the advantage (although being able to see one's past comments could be useful). On editing one's profile, would that be like when I changed to GftNC from the full version for weird Typepad cause? Perhaps not necessary here?
Upvote/downvote: IMO totally unnecessary, and an unwelcome development from what is our normal way of dealing with each other.
1. I'm amazed that bc got sent to spam with 3 links. I don't even think 10 is too many.
2. IMO 14 days may be too short. I never counted, but my impression is that some of our best threads at the old site went on for longer than that.
3. I'm not sure what this means, unless the sentence on Limited Capabilities means "Only a user with the subscriber role can generally:", although frankly I'm not sure what it all means even then! How would any of our information be "in the wild" anyway? Does it mean that all subscribers would be able to see each other's contact details etc? Don't underestimate quite how clueless some of us ancient non-tech types are!
I've just read hsh's link about the Young Republicans. Surprise, surprise. And also to see that J D Vance continues to distinguish himself. Jesus F Christ.
Ha, that's what comes of not looking at the papers (or anything else) till 6.30 pm*! Thanks hsh.
Now from me: on the issue of Biden's v Trump's records, I was going to snarkily ask bc what, as a lawyer, s/he thought about Trump's annexation of the entire (as near as he can) legal system and DOJ to go after his "enemies". I was going to contrast it with the prosecutions and convictions of Trump while Biden was POTUS, but lo, I don't have to. Here (from the Atlantic) is something today:
Well! I'd barely heard of this Ben Meiselas guy before, but it looks like he may be getting the message across - bigger audiences than Joe Rogan apparently. What do any ObWi people think of him?
Meanwhile, someone watching Trump's speech in Israel just called me; apparently he turned to Keir Starmer and called him the President of Canada. That should go in a showreel along with the war he settled between Cambodia and Armenia. Talking of calling a spade a spade and getting it across to the wider electorate...
I agree: what Pro Bono said. And on his last bullet point, about the SCOTUS, it's going to be interesting to see if this makes any difference (my guess is not, but I suppose it could give a bit of cover in case any of the disgraceful 6 is starting to feel uncomfortable)
I liked that Ryan Powers article. It's possible that my calls for civility can be misinterpreted as a call for "etiquette" or "decorum". I'm very aware of how often we misunderstand each other (two countries separated by a common language etc). In fact, I approve wholeheartedly of taking hard, tough action against the enemies of democracy, and of calling a spade a spade. If someone (Trump, Vance anybody else, including Ds) lies, I favour calling it lies. If a policy which e.g. directly contradicts what the ruling party said they would do while campaigning is introduced by stealth, I approve of calling it out and doing what's necessary to impede it. If attempts to subvert voting rights (gerrymandering etc) are made, I approve of doing what's necessary to impede them. And if unconstitutional actions are made by the government, I approve of demonstrating and taking other necessary actions (law suits, states' rights related etc) to oppose them. I agree that the Dem national leadership have been lily-livered and hidebound in their opposition by obsolete norms and assumptions.
What I mean by civility is the opposite of Ubu's behaviour. You don't have to insult and demean people to openly and factually describe what they're doing, including how and why. Calling dishonest, corrupt politicians dishonest and corrupt when you can support the accusation is a moral and practical imperative. Where my call for what I call civility particularly applies is in two situations: 1. when arguing and debating with people who defend the actions of those in power, in which case it is perfectly possible to factually describe what is happening without insulting them (e.g. demonstrating that lies are lies), and 2. when arguing and debating with people who might otherwise be considered on the same side as oneself, when there are occasional doctrinal differences but their basic intentions are otherwise congruent with one's own. In this second case, the irresistible case of the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea springs to mind; as well as being an illustration of a kind of narcissism of small differences, such infighting is counter-productive and does one's opponents' work for them.
Where American politics is concerned, I only wish there were more journalists and Dem politicians prepared to call a spade a spade, in such a way as to get their message truly across to the wider electorate. And I wish that there were platforms on which they could do so. Wit and creativity (like the dancing costumed protesters in Portland) really help in this, when enabled. And even Gavin Newsom's attempt at wit is better than nothing!
I think wj is absolutely right, nobody using the word knows what definition of "elite" anybody else uses. In the case of Rory Stewart, it can be quite hard to imagine how he wouldn't know he was part of "the elite", having been educated (as he was) at Eton and Balliol. It is of course a point in his favour that he only attended one meeting of the Bullingdon Club having realised how appalling their prevailing behaviour was, but on the other hand I believe they make a bit of a fetish of only selecting the "right kind" of members, which would mark you out as being a member of what many people (like Etonians for example) understand "the elite" to be. The only thing that would perhaps make sense is that he imagines the elite to be about money: he is right when he says that Oxford professors are not what most people these days consider "rich". Of course, before they started the immensely popular podcast, neither was he, although I believe he and Campbell are now!
I sympathise with novakant's view of Campbell, it took me a long time to get over his behaviour on Iraq etc. And I have never forgotten how he stormed onto the C4 News, with no notice, and tried to browbeat Jon Snow about the Dodgy Dossier. Watching it again makes me very much miss the calibre of those kinds of journalists (JS, not AC).
Aha, got it, thanks lj and Michael. I wasn't even sure the links would copy over, and the graphs, tables etc didn't, but at least I'll know what to look out for in the future. I haven't abandoned the idea of front page posts, lj, but a) this seemed appropriate to put in this thread, and b) I'm wary of there being too many new posts because I've always found the meandering, semi-discursive nature of our long threads one of the most appealing aspects of ObWi - like a bunch of friends sitting around chewing the fat.
Meanwhile, the NYT editorial board at least tells it like it is. Too bad the Rs have so bought into the fake news/MSM lie that they think they can safely ignore it:
OK, my comment which was "awaiting approval" has now disappeared, so it looks like it didn't gain approval. If so, lj, I think it's important to know why, so I (and everybody else) can avoid such a failure in the future. If it was the length, at the old site all I would have had to do was split it into two comments, so if that were confirmed I could act accordingly.
I have no idea how this will copy across (in the original there are loads of links - hopefully here in blue - and images etc which I think have not copied) and I have certainly gathered that Ian Leslie is not everybody here's cup of tea. But although I don't know how much of this is completely right, I found it interesting. I have italicised the part that particularly interested me, and bolded the portion of that which is something I have been aware of for a long time. Years ago I used to call this phenomenon "cluster of attitudes", and not only is it infuriating, and misleading, it is IMO really lazy.
How Moderates Win In a Hostile Environment Ian Leslie
Oct 11
Paid
It has not gone unremarked that Americans with different political views distrust and dislike one another. This is usually framed as a 50:50 division between supporters of the two main parties: two vast armies, fighting for entirely different values and policies, facing off in a cold civil war. Look under the surface, however, and something more complex is going on.
First of all, it’s not true that the America’s population can be easily divided into ideological camps, and while such questions are much debated among political scientists, there’s a good case that Americans overall haven’t become more extreme or rigid in their views. What’s happened is that America’s political culture has been poisoned by a minority of ideologues on either side.
Ideologues, in the sense used by political scientists, are voters who have consistent beliefs, organised into recognisable patterns. If you know they’re against immigration, you can predict they’re also anti-abortion and pro-gun. Non-ideologues either have no strong views on politics, or they have strong opinions which don’t follow a standard template.
Although the number of ideologues has been growing (they’ve doubled over the last twenty years) they still represent only about a fifth of voters. Most Americans aren’t as structured in their views and don’t easily fit into Democrat or Republican boxes. Many of them are ambivalent about the most divisive issues, like abortion. Plenty of them have a mix of liberal and conservative positions.
Ideologues have disproportionate influence and power, however. They shout the loudest and generate the most political content. They’re also the ones funding and running political parties. (Politicians are more ideologically consistent than most voters, partly because they have to be to get ahead but also because many of them are predisposed to be).
Another reason that ideologues matter so much is that they exhibit more anger, distrust and hostility towards the other side - and those feelings are contagious. While most voters don’t share the political fervour of this minority, they have absorbed their animosity. Voters who identified as Democrat or Republican didn’t used to have strong feelings about those who leaned the other way - it was just politics, after all - but they do now. “Affective polarisation” has increased and spread throughout the population.
High levels of negative feelings about those on the other side have become normal. This is true even among independents. Most independents lean toward one party or the other. Between 1994 and 2018 those with “very unfavourable opinions” of the other side increased from 8% to 37% among Democratic leaners, and from 15% to 39% among Republican leaners.
In short, ideological polarisation is a minority pursuit, but affective polarisation is a national pastime. Most voters don’t actually have very strong views on economic or social policy and couldn’t necessarily point you to major differences in the parties’ platforms, but they have a strong feeling that the other side is wrong and bad. They don’t care much about politics but they know who they don’t like.
In Britain, things are a little different. Whenever I hear people say British politics is “polarised” I wince a little. To polarise means to divide into two opposing groups. The term is lifted from America, where nearly everyone votes for one of two parties, and it doesn’t make sense here.
In fact the salient feature of British politics in the last few years has been a decline in the popularity of both main parties and a fragmentation of the vote. Our slightly milder but still fractious political debate takes place between a series of cultural-political clusters which don’t line up neatly with institutional affiliations. There’s more than one way to cut the cultural cake but More In Common’s typology is a useful one (numbers here).
Parties aiming for a parliamentary majority need to straddle different clusters, which is far from impossible. Without America’s party binary, British voting patterns are inherently more fluid. The differences between most voters are not necessarily wide: most Reform voters favour same-sex marriage, for instance, and are vaguely in favour of diversity, even if they want immigration to come down (the latter being true of most voters). I hear a lot of politicians and pundits urging Keir Starmer to focus on his “natural” voters rather than on those tempted by Reform, but that would represent a tragic failure of ambition. Nigel Farage certainly doesn’t accept that he can’t win over left-leaning voters.
There is a sense of pessimism among centrist commentators - a feeling that British voters are both irretrievably atomised and radicalised. I’m not convinced by this. Pollsters who spend a lot of time doing focus groups tend to over-estimate the extent to which people care about politics, and also how miserable and angry voters are. Focus groups are socially awkward events, and one of the main ways British people bond with each other is by having a good moan.
My guess is that, as in the US, a substantial minority of hardliners on left and right generate most of the public anger and animosity, which breeds a listless but pervasive distrust and cynicism among voters at large. (More of the hardline anger comes from the right than the left - see the “Dissenting Disruptors” in More In Common’s framework, a very frustrated, verging-on-anarchist group of voters which now constitutes nearly a fifth of the electorate.) In America and Britain ideologically driven voters are in the minority but on the rise, and they have an outsized democratic impact. America, in particular, places a lot of power in the hands of ideologues, via the presidential nomination process. The Republican Party was famously radicalised by Trump, and the Democratic electorate is a lot more left-wing than it was when Joe Biden won the nomination. We might even say that the future of democracy depends on these voters. So it’s worth taking a closer look at how they behave. I found this new paper on disagreement among ideologues very interesting. It’s by a political scientist, Tadeas Cely, who studies America’s political polarisation. Cely adopts the definition of “ideology” coined by the godfather of modern political science, Philip Converse: “a system of explicit and unequivocal political beliefs”. Ideologues are people who are politically sophisticated enough to know, in Converse’s phrase, “what goes with what”, and stick to the pattern of beliefs that they share with their cohort. Cely ran a survey of a couple of thousand American voters in which he presented them with the opinions of a hypothetical voter on controversial political issues (like immigration and gun control). The hypothetical voters was either liberal, conservative, a mild centrist, or someone with an unusual mix of strongly held views - a “messy” belief system. The respondents were classified in the same way, according to the firmness and consistency of their policy positions. After viewing the hypothetical voter’s opinions, respondents were asked to rate how warmly they felt about this person, using a hundred point “thermometer” scale. Cely found that disagreement between ideologues produces more animosity than other disagreements. Not just a bit more - way more. When two ideologues clash, they hate each other about three times more intensely than after disagreeing with people with equally strong but “messy”, non-patterned beliefs, and four times more than with mild-mannered centrists. Cely’s analysis of how animosity gets triggered is fascinating. In a second survey, he used the same model and told participants that their fictional interlocutor held views on two additional issues (student debt and Gaza ceasefire) without saying what those views were. What he found is that those “unrevealed” opinions increased the hostility of the disagreement. Why? Because the ideologues “filled in the blanks”. After having seen the person’s view on abortion, they just knew what this person would say about Gaza. And it made them furious. We might put it like this: disagreement between ideologues is metonymic. The part stands in for the whole. As soon I know one of your beliefs, I know all of them. More than that, I know what kind of person you are: you’re somebody I hate.
In a sense the whole political environment now operates metonymically. With so much competition for eyeballs, the amount of attention voters spare for politics is smaller than ever, so they make thin slice judgements based on content produced by ideologues on their own side - content which highlights the most outrageous and objectionable ideologues from the other side. Voters extrapolate from the worst to the whole.
If you’re non-ideological, moderate politician, you need to be able to speak to the ideologues on your side.¹ They’re a growing group of voters, overrepresented in the centres of power, who set the tone of the wider debate because of how noisy they are and how intensely they dislike the other side.
But if you only speak to the ideologues, you get trapped inside the ideologue’s rigid belief system, which makes it harder to reach the non-ideological majority. You’d also be faking it, which is quite easy to spot. The trick is to adopt enough of the pattern to avoid being denounced as a traitor by your own side, while adopting one or two elements beyond it which show that you’re not a captive of it.
Pattern-disruption is important both to be noticed in the first place - given that voters are predictive processors with scarce attention for politics who simply screen out familiar patterns - and to prove that the politician is their own person rather than a robot controlled by his or her party or faction. Most voters have ‘messy’ sets of beliefs and they respond to politicians who mirror them in that sense.
This is not to be confused with putting together a ragbag of positions based on whatever policies do well in polling. Ambitious politicians need a set of positions that are internally coherent, grounded in a story about how the country needs to change (beyond ‘get the other guy/party out’). But it can’t be a matching set; it has to be new or surprising in some way.
I’m not suggesting anyone emulate Trump’s brazenly offensive manner or authoritarianism, which have done so much to toxify American politics. But consider how his unlikely success in 2016 was based on a pattern-breaking combination of policy positions: strongly anti-immigration, opposed to foreign wars, pro tax-cuts, pro-Medicare. Consequently he was regarded by voters as less conservative than most Republican candidates, and more moderate than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Or recall Boris Johnson’s greatest political victory. He won the 2019 general election by mixing cultural authoritarianism (Get Brexit Done) with economic interventionism (”levelling up”). That broke the expected patterns and knocked down the Red Wall. Johnson and Trump were very different in style, even if they often get lumped together but it’s important to note that successful politicians practice strategic pattern-disruption at the level of tone as well as policy.
For instance, a moderate politician might not want to present as moderate. “Moderation” by itself doesn’t make noise, and at worst, it signals complacency and weakness. (If Josh Shapiro, the popular and moderate governor of Pennsylvania, wants to win the 2028 nomination, he will have to lean into his inner Bernie.) But pure “radicalism” keeps you in the ideologue box. A “combative moderate” uses the rhetorical intensity of ideologue wing to moderate ends. Hence the current incarnation of Gavin Newsom.
Zohran Mamdani is a pattern-breaker. Progressives often come across as stern and scolding; Mamdani is relaxed, funny, a good listener. He is a radical leftist who wears a smart, some might say conservative, suit and tie. His wire-crossing may end up extending to more than style or personality; it will be interesting to see if he ends up adopting a politically heterogeneous, ‘messy’ mix of policies once in office, as Ken Livingstone, similar in some ways, did in his first, successful term as London mayor.
It is probable that the share of ideologues in the electorate will continue to grow, as social media makes political discourse ever more algorithmic and ever more angry. Politics may eventually become a clash of armies with rigid, unyielding, static positions. But we’re not there yet, and we probably won’t be for quite a while. It is still possible for imaginative politicians to disrupt established patterns and create new ones, and plenty of space for them to do so in the middle ground. What they can’t afford to be is predictable.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Return of the Boat Hook”
I know they aren’t but that doesn’t stop me from saying “Excuse me” when I stub my toe on the coffee table, or shouting, “Not one chance, asshole!” at the computer cord that tries to trip me.
I believe Michael Cain has also been known to talk to (or taunt) computers....
On “Weekend music thread #02 Bad Bunny”
I was standing in the grocery the other day when I heard Mick Jagger wailing, “You’re enough to make a dead man come!” And I thought, “In about ten years, that will be nursing home music.”
LOL.
I have expanded by learning new artists, but the sound is all in the country/rock/folk/blues range.
It sounds like our tastes are quite similar, wonkie, (even down to those same albums among others) although I admit I came to country pretty late, and still not to the same extent as the other categories. Folk was probably first, then rock, and of course the latter was heavily influenced by blues. I have never been able to get into rap, and this post is the first I've heard of reggaeton; I'm not crazy about it.
On “What’s up, doxx?”
But all of that aside, as a purely strategic matter, it’s a really bad idea to give Trump any reason to send the army into your city or town.
I think this is exactly right. This is a battle which must be fought with brains, with serious strategy, not (very understandable) kneejerk, impulsive emotion. And, as an aside, that's also one of my justifications for acting with (my definition of) civility.
"
I’ll also note, for everyone’s edification, that the much more modest increase is for charges of assault. I take every one of these charges with a grain of salt.
I can't remember the specifics, but didn't the feds recently try to get someone charged for throwing a sandwich at some kind of officer (maybe not ICE) and then couldn't get the charge to stick?
On “Opinions on settings”
I think I'll pass for now, lj!
"
I presume I'm not a subscriber. And my handle and email are also automatically filled in.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
What TonyP just said, particularly this masterfully sly section:
Maybe the facts ARE exactly what the “official government website” (with its “Democrats have shut down the government” banner) says they are. I get more suspicious when it comes to statistics. Have there been vastly more cases of ICE-doxxing than, say, judge-doxxing? Have more ICE agents than judges been harmed as a result of being doxxed? I don’t know what “official” government statistics show, but I have a hunch the present government might fudge them a bit.
On “Opinions on settings”
Thank you lj - since bc's going into spam with 3 seems to show that ATM only 2 is safe, perhaps a limit of 6, which means 5 would be safe? That's my vote.
On duration, how about 21 days or 28?
On subscribers, I can't really see the advantage (although being able to see one's past comments could be useful). On editing one's profile, would that be like when I changed to GftNC from the full version for weird Typepad cause? Perhaps not necessary here?
Upvote/downvote: IMO totally unnecessary, and an unwelcome development from what is our normal way of dealing with each other.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
I'm v glad nous's "edited" comment below was rescued. I think it is exactly right.
On “Opinions on settings”
Oh, I've just tried to see what the +0- at the bottom is for - is it for the equivalent of likes and dislikes?
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1. I'm amazed that bc got sent to spam with 3 links. I don't even think 10 is too many.
2. IMO 14 days may be too short. I never counted, but my impression is that some of our best threads at the old site went on for longer than that.
3. I'm not sure what this means, unless the sentence on Limited Capabilities means "Only a user with the subscriber role can generally:", although frankly I'm not sure what it all means even then! How would any of our information be "in the wild" anyway? Does it mean that all subscribers would be able to see each other's contact details etc? Don't underestimate quite how clueless some of us ancient non-tech types are!
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
I've just read hsh's link about the Young Republicans. Surprise, surprise. And also to see that J D Vance continues to distinguish himself. Jesus F Christ.
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Ha, that's what comes of not looking at the papers (or anything else) till 6.30 pm*! Thanks hsh.
Now from me: on the issue of Biden's v Trump's records, I was going to snarkily ask bc what, as a lawyer, s/he thought about Trump's annexation of the entire (as near as he can) legal system and DOJ to go after his "enemies". I was going to contrast it with the prosecutions and convictions of Trump while Biden was POTUS, but lo, I don't have to. Here (from the Atlantic) is something today:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/10/trump-political-prosecution-democrats/684556/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCThgNr42oHPKHeuYkIOS1gc&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I haven't actually read it yet*, but from a brief skim it looks like they do a decent job....
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hsh, do you have a link?
On “The Mother-in-law defense”
Well! I'd barely heard of this Ben Meiselas guy before, but it looks like he may be getting the message across - bigger audiences than Joe Rogan apparently. What do any ObWi people think of him?
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/oct/11/podcaster-ben-meiselas-on-taking-on-the-maga-media-and-winning-the-ratings-battle
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Meanwhile, someone watching Trump's speech in Israel just called me; apparently he turned to Keir Starmer and called him the President of Canada. That should go in a showreel along with the war he settled between Cambodia and Armenia. Talking of calling a spade a spade and getting it across to the wider electorate...
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
I agree: what Pro Bono said. And on his last bullet point, about the SCOTUS, it's going to be interesting to see if this makes any difference (my guess is not, but I suppose it could give a bit of cover in case any of the disgraceful 6 is starting to feel uncomfortable)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/us/politics/originalism-trump-supreme-court-unitary-executive.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tE8.z6ee.Bseton8hbgR1&smid=url-share
On “The Mother-in-law defense”
I liked that Ryan Powers article. It's possible that my calls for civility can be misinterpreted as a call for "etiquette" or "decorum". I'm very aware of how often we misunderstand each other (two countries separated by a common language etc). In fact, I approve wholeheartedly of taking hard, tough action against the enemies of democracy, and of calling a spade a spade. If someone (Trump, Vance anybody else, including Ds) lies, I favour calling it lies. If a policy which e.g. directly contradicts what the ruling party said they would do while campaigning is introduced by stealth, I approve of calling it out and doing what's necessary to impede it. If attempts to subvert voting rights (gerrymandering etc) are made, I approve of doing what's necessary to impede them. And if unconstitutional actions are made by the government, I approve of demonstrating and taking other necessary actions (law suits, states' rights related etc) to oppose them. I agree that the Dem national leadership have been lily-livered and hidebound in their opposition by obsolete norms and assumptions.
What I mean by civility is the opposite of Ubu's behaviour. You don't have to insult and demean people to openly and factually describe what they're doing, including how and why. Calling dishonest, corrupt politicians dishonest and corrupt when you can support the accusation is a moral and practical imperative. Where my call for what I call civility particularly applies is in two situations: 1. when arguing and debating with people who defend the actions of those in power, in which case it is perfectly possible to factually describe what is happening without insulting them (e.g. demonstrating that lies are lies), and 2. when arguing and debating with people who might otherwise be considered on the same side as oneself, when there are occasional doctrinal differences but their basic intentions are otherwise congruent with one's own. In this second case, the irresistible case of the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea springs to mind; as well as being an illustration of a kind of narcissism of small differences, such infighting is counter-productive and does one's opponents' work for them.
Where American politics is concerned, I only wish there were more journalists and Dem politicians prepared to call a spade a spade, in such a way as to get their message truly across to the wider electorate. And I wish that there were platforms on which they could do so. Wit and creativity (like the dancing costumed protesters in Portland) really help in this, when enabled. And even Gavin Newsom's attempt at wit is better than nothing!
"
Pretty much everything russell says @ - oh, no time stamp. His longer comment anyway.
On “Brought to you by your latest captain of industry”
I think wj is absolutely right, nobody using the word knows what definition of "elite" anybody else uses. In the case of Rory Stewart, it can be quite hard to imagine how he wouldn't know he was part of "the elite", having been educated (as he was) at Eton and Balliol. It is of course a point in his favour that he only attended one meeting of the Bullingdon Club having realised how appalling their prevailing behaviour was, but on the other hand I believe they make a bit of a fetish of only selecting the "right kind" of members, which would mark you out as being a member of what many people (like Etonians for example) understand "the elite" to be. The only thing that would perhaps make sense is that he imagines the elite to be about money: he is right when he says that Oxford professors are not what most people these days consider "rich". Of course, before they started the immensely popular podcast, neither was he, although I believe he and Campbell are now!
I sympathise with novakant's view of Campbell, it took me a long time to get over his behaviour on Iraq etc. And I have never forgotten how he stormed onto the C4 News, with no notice, and tried to browbeat Jon Snow about the Dodgy Dossier. Watching it again makes me very much miss the calibre of those kinds of journalists (JS, not AC).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBWE7QzADe8
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
Aha, got it, thanks lj and Michael. I wasn't even sure the links would copy over, and the graphs, tables etc didn't, but at least I'll know what to look out for in the future. I haven't abandoned the idea of front page posts, lj, but a) this seemed appropriate to put in this thread, and b) I'm wary of there being too many new posts because I've always found the meandering, semi-discursive nature of our long threads one of the most appealing aspects of ObWi - like a bunch of friends sitting around chewing the fat.
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Meanwhile, the NYT editorial board at least tells it like it is. Too bad the Rs have so bought into the fake news/MSM lie that they think they can safely ignore it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/opinion/letitia-james-indictment-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sk8.XvAr.7ewQlq_sNfRI&smid=url-share
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OK, my comment which was "awaiting approval" has now disappeared, so it looks like it didn't gain approval. If so, lj, I think it's important to know why, so I (and everybody else) can avoid such a failure in the future. If it was the length, at the old site all I would have had to do was split it into two comments, so if that were confirmed I could act accordingly.
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I have just copied something quite long, which is "awaiting approval". I don't know why - maybe the length.
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I have no idea how this will copy across (in the original there are loads of links - hopefully here in blue - and images etc which I think have not copied) and I have certainly gathered that Ian Leslie is not everybody here's cup of tea. But although I don't know how much of this is completely right, I found it interesting. I have italicised the part that particularly interested me, and bolded the portion of that which is something I have been aware of for a long time. Years ago I used to call this phenomenon "cluster of attitudes", and not only is it infuriating, and misleading, it is IMO really lazy.
How Moderates Win In a Hostile Environment
Ian Leslie
Oct 11
Paid
It has not gone unremarked that Americans with different political views distrust and dislike one another. This is usually framed as a 50:50 division between supporters of the two main parties: two vast armies, fighting for entirely different values and policies, facing off in a cold civil war. Look under the surface, however, and something more complex is going on.
First of all, it’s not true that the America’s population can be easily divided into ideological camps, and while such questions are much debated among political scientists, there’s a good case that Americans overall haven’t become more extreme or rigid in their views. What’s happened is that America’s political culture has been poisoned by a minority of ideologues on either side.
Ideologues, in the sense used by political scientists, are voters who have consistent beliefs, organised into recognisable patterns. If you know they’re against immigration, you can predict they’re also anti-abortion and pro-gun. Non-ideologues either have no strong views on politics, or they have strong opinions which don’t follow a standard template.
Although the number of ideologues has been growing (they’ve doubled over the last twenty years) they still represent only about a fifth of voters. Most Americans aren’t as structured in their views and don’t easily fit into Democrat or Republican boxes. Many of them are ambivalent about the most divisive issues, like abortion. Plenty of them have a mix of liberal and conservative positions.
Ideologues have disproportionate influence and power, however. They shout the loudest and generate the most political content. They’re also the ones funding and running political parties. (Politicians are more ideologically consistent than most voters, partly because they have to be to get ahead but also because many of them are predisposed to be).
Another reason that ideologues matter so much is that they exhibit more anger, distrust and hostility towards the other side - and those feelings are contagious. While most voters don’t share the political fervour of this minority, they have absorbed their animosity. Voters who identified as Democrat or Republican didn’t used to have strong feelings about those who leaned the other way - it was just politics, after all - but they do now. “Affective polarisation” has increased and spread throughout the population.
High levels of negative feelings about those on the other side have become normal. This is true even among independents. Most independents lean toward one party or the other. Between 1994 and 2018 those with “very unfavourable opinions” of the other side increased from 8% to 37% among Democratic leaners, and from 15% to 39% among Republican leaners.
In short, ideological polarisation is a minority pursuit, but affective polarisation is a national pastime. Most voters don’t actually have very strong views on economic or social policy and couldn’t necessarily point you to major differences in the parties’ platforms, but they have a strong feeling that the other side is wrong and bad. They don’t care much about politics but they know who they don’t like.
In Britain, things are a little different. Whenever I hear people say British politics is “polarised” I wince a little. To polarise means to divide into two opposing groups. The term is lifted from America, where nearly everyone votes for one of two parties, and it doesn’t make sense here.
In fact the salient feature of British politics in the last few years has been a decline in the popularity of both main parties and a fragmentation of the vote. Our slightly milder but still fractious political debate takes place between a series of cultural-political clusters which don’t line up neatly with institutional affiliations. There’s more than one way to cut the cultural cake but More In Common’s typology is a useful one (numbers here).
Parties aiming for a parliamentary majority need to straddle different clusters, which is far from impossible. Without America’s party binary, British voting patterns are inherently more fluid. The differences between most voters are not necessarily wide: most Reform voters favour same-sex marriage, for instance, and are vaguely in favour of diversity, even if they want immigration to come down (the latter being true of most voters). I hear a lot of politicians and pundits urging Keir Starmer to focus on his “natural” voters rather than on those tempted by Reform, but that would represent a tragic failure of ambition. Nigel Farage certainly doesn’t accept that he can’t win over left-leaning voters.
There is a sense of pessimism among centrist commentators - a feeling that British voters are both irretrievably atomised and radicalised. I’m not convinced by this. Pollsters who spend a lot of time doing focus groups tend to over-estimate the extent to which people care about politics, and also how miserable and angry voters are. Focus groups are socially awkward events, and one of the main ways British people bond with each other is by having a good moan.
My guess is that, as in the US, a substantial minority of hardliners on left and right generate most of the public anger and animosity, which breeds a listless but pervasive distrust and cynicism among voters at large. (More of the hardline anger comes from the right than the left - see the “Dissenting Disruptors” in More In Common’s framework, a very frustrated, verging-on-anarchist group of voters which now constitutes nearly a fifth of the electorate.)
In America and Britain ideologically driven voters are in the minority but on the rise, and they have an outsized democratic impact. America, in particular, places a lot of power in the hands of ideologues, via the presidential nomination process. The Republican Party was famously radicalised by Trump, and the Democratic electorate is a lot more left-wing than it was when Joe Biden won the nomination.
We might even say that the future of democracy depends on these voters. So it’s worth taking a closer look at how they behave. I found this new paper on disagreement among ideologues very interesting. It’s by a political scientist, Tadeas Cely, who studies America’s political polarisation. Cely adopts the definition of “ideology” coined by the godfather of modern political science, Philip Converse: “a system of explicit and unequivocal political beliefs”. Ideologues are people who are politically sophisticated enough to know, in Converse’s phrase, “what goes with what”, and stick to the pattern of beliefs that they share with their cohort.
Cely ran a survey of a couple of thousand American voters in which he presented them with the opinions of a hypothetical voter on controversial political issues (like immigration and gun control). The hypothetical voters was either liberal, conservative, a mild centrist, or someone with an unusual mix of strongly held views - a “messy” belief system. The respondents were classified in the same way, according to the firmness and consistency of their policy positions.
After viewing the hypothetical voter’s opinions, respondents were asked to rate how warmly they felt about this person, using a hundred point “thermometer” scale. Cely found that disagreement between ideologues produces more animosity than other disagreements. Not just a bit more - way more. When two ideologues clash, they hate each other about three times more intensely than after disagreeing with people with equally strong but “messy”, non-patterned beliefs, and four times more than with mild-mannered centrists.
Cely’s analysis of how animosity gets triggered is fascinating. In a second survey, he used the same model and told participants that their fictional interlocutor held views on two additional issues (student debt and Gaza ceasefire) without saying what those views were. What he found is that those “unrevealed” opinions increased the hostility of the disagreement. Why? Because the ideologues “filled in the blanks”. After having seen the person’s view on abortion, they just knew what this person would say about Gaza. And it made them furious.
We might put it like this: disagreement between ideologues is metonymic. The part stands in for the whole. As soon I know one of your beliefs, I know all of them. More than that, I know what kind of person you are: you’re somebody I hate.
In a sense the whole political environment now operates metonymically. With so much competition for eyeballs, the amount of attention voters spare for politics is smaller than ever, so they make thin slice judgements based on content produced by ideologues on their own side - content which highlights the most outrageous and objectionable ideologues from the other side. Voters extrapolate from the worst to the whole.
If you’re non-ideological, moderate politician, you need to be able to speak to the ideologues on your side.¹ They’re a growing group of voters, overrepresented in the centres of power, who set the tone of the wider debate because of how noisy they are and how intensely they dislike the other side.
But if you only speak to the ideologues, you get trapped inside the ideologue’s rigid belief system, which makes it harder to reach the non-ideological majority. You’d also be faking it, which is quite easy to spot. The trick is to adopt enough of the pattern to avoid being denounced as a traitor by your own side, while adopting one or two elements beyond it which show that you’re not a captive of it.
Pattern-disruption is important both to be noticed in the first place - given that voters are predictive processors with scarce attention for politics who simply screen out familiar patterns - and to prove that the politician is their own person rather than a robot controlled by his or her party or faction. Most voters have ‘messy’ sets of beliefs and they respond to politicians who mirror them in that sense.
This is not to be confused with putting together a ragbag of positions based on whatever policies do well in polling. Ambitious politicians need a set of positions that are internally coherent, grounded in a story about how the country needs to change (beyond ‘get the other guy/party out’). But it can’t be a matching set; it has to be new or surprising in some way.
I’m not suggesting anyone emulate Trump’s brazenly offensive manner or authoritarianism, which have done so much to toxify American politics. But consider how his unlikely success in 2016 was based on a pattern-breaking combination of policy positions: strongly anti-immigration, opposed to foreign wars, pro tax-cuts, pro-Medicare. Consequently he was regarded by voters as less conservative than most Republican candidates, and more moderate than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Or recall Boris Johnson’s greatest political victory. He won the 2019 general election by mixing cultural authoritarianism (Get Brexit Done) with economic interventionism (”levelling up”). That broke the expected patterns and knocked down the Red Wall. Johnson and Trump were very different in style, even if they often get lumped together but it’s important to note that successful politicians practice strategic pattern-disruption at the level of tone as well as policy.
For instance, a moderate politician might not want to present as moderate. “Moderation” by itself doesn’t make noise, and at worst, it signals complacency and weakness. (If Josh Shapiro, the popular and moderate governor of Pennsylvania, wants to win the 2028 nomination, he will have to lean into his inner Bernie.) But pure “radicalism” keeps you in the ideologue box. A “combative moderate” uses the rhetorical intensity of ideologue wing to moderate ends. Hence the current incarnation of Gavin Newsom.
Zohran Mamdani is a pattern-breaker. Progressives often come across as stern and scolding; Mamdani is relaxed, funny, a good listener. He is a radical leftist who wears a smart, some might say conservative, suit and tie. His wire-crossing may end up extending to more than style or personality; it will be interesting to see if he ends up adopting a politically heterogeneous, ‘messy’ mix of policies once in office, as Ken Livingstone, similar in some ways, did in his first, successful term as London mayor.
It is probable that the share of ideologues in the electorate will continue to grow, as social media makes political discourse ever more algorithmic and ever more angry. Politics may eventually become a clash of armies with rigid, unyielding, static positions. But we’re not there yet, and we probably won’t be for quite a while. It is still possible for imaginative politicians to disrupt established patterns and create new ones, and plenty of space for them to do so in the middle ground. What they can’t afford to be is predictable.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.