Skip to main content
Politics

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

6
  • "dissent or deviation from the party leaders public political stands" Do you think this argument holds in times of cancel culture?
    – Shadow1024
    Commented Jun 5, 2023 at 20:30
  • @Shadow1024 That's an interesting observation - the cancel culture has indeed made leaders of political parties across the political spectrum more sensitive to criticism and thus contributed to more authoritarian tendency. This seems more true in the US - we now see some US media outlets that leaned towards liberal and progressive politics now sometime take hard-line stance in favour of Democrats, ignoring neutrality, and becoming more "Fox" like. (Note though that doesn't all together negate what I said - conservative political philosophy is more naturally inclined to authoritarianism.)
    – sfxedit
    Commented Jun 5, 2023 at 20:41
  • I've seen a few studies in which the highest tolerance for dissenting views was actually among moderate conservatives, (lowest chance of stopping talk to someone who expressed totally opposite views), while the least tolerant were far left. This shouldn't work in right-wing unity favor, except maybe getting disagreements look less serious. I wonder rather about different mechanism - which side is getting all people who dream about being revolutionaries and rejecting old establishment?
    – Shadow1024
    Commented Jun 5, 2023 at 20:59
  • @Shadow1024 As someone else pointed, from an international perspective both the US Democrats and Republicans seem to be a party of moderate conservatives. As long as the party is dominated by moderates (or centrists as some prefer to be called), that's good for both the party and the nation. It's when the extremes - the far left or the far right - hijack the party and / or the political agenda that we see the kind tension we see currently in US politics. I believe that apart from the political ideology, how a party looks at dissent also depends on the party leaders personality.
    – sfxedit
    Commented Jun 5, 2023 at 21:34
  • As someone having international perspective (Polish), Republicans are indeed a moderate conservatives with odd fetish towards guns and lack of health insurance, while Democrats (as long as big business donors are not harmed) are willing to go far left even by the most left leaning EU countries standards (defund the police, most draconian COVID-19 policies, late abortion, sex change treatment for kids, etc). At least paying lip service to such policies is likely to attract some revolutionaries, while compromising for median voter is likely to make those revolutionaries unhappy.
    – Shadow1024
    Commented Jun 6, 2023 at 15:11