The EU thread

[Admiral Yi]

I disagree.

[Zoupa]

Good to know.

[Neil]

Is the issue people being made more radical by opposition, or is it just that sometimes the most vocal supporters of political movements create purity tests for things that they absolutely believe in, but where the majority of public sentiment is on the other side?  It's not that people are becoming more radical (or at least most people, there's always people who react to any kind of opposition with violent defiance), but it makes people less likely to support a party, because they've been told that they're either monsters or traitors.  And it's not like the left is unique for that.  I know that I face difficulties in conservative circles because I don't think that the answer to every problem is a tax cut, or that regulation is always onerous.  I think that's a mechanism that's at least partly responsible for a lot of the broad disgust that people have with politics.

[Zoupa]

I think we've reached a point in a lot of our democracies where polarization is so extreme that a large number of folks on the right are literally nazis. It's not hyperbole or overuse of the term fascist. These folks are embracing eugenics, ultranationalism, direct action/violence, and trad-sexism or whatever you want to call it.

At this point, I don't think dialogue and understanding works.