Do you think that you could fight division with division? I know how that sounds but hear me out.

What do you think would happen if blue states and red states made a pact to try and heavily incentivize all people on the left to relocate to blue states and all people on the right to relocate to red states?

Perhaps the reason things are so hostile between the aisles has a lot to do with the fact that people who want vastly different things from their government are being forced to live under the same lawmakers and enforcers. If they had their own dedicated spaces don't you think that would allow for a great deal of decompression? Distance makes the heart grow fonder and all that?

Sometimes the solution to issues can seem counterintuitive but work very well; for example, did you know that if someone bites you the best thing to do is to force whatever part of you they're biting into their mouth as hard as you can?

Your first instinct will be to snatch it away but that will give them room to bite down harder. If you force it into their mouth it will open their jaw and allow you to quickly remove your appendage from their teeth.

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TinyViolins · 31-35, M

The split between Democrats and Republicans, more than age, more than education, more than race, religion, or gender, boils down primarily to urban vs. rural. That's the single biggest predictor of whether someone will vote red or blue.

You can't exactly urbanize all rural areas or deurbanize large cities. It's not something that demography will solve since rural areas are dependent on cities for money and technology while cities are reliant on rural areas for food and resources.

It'll lead to the exact problem we had with the Articles of Confederation, where each state was looking out for it's own interest and spited the federal government for trying to unify them.

SW-User

@TinyViolins i see what you're saying but with our strong federal government I feel we could much more easily address those issues than we could back then.

Nowadays our fed gov has the means to ensure that vital resources are exchanged between states in such a way that is mutually beneficial for both parties.

Arbitrated interstate commerce so to speak.

TinyViolins · 31-35, M

@SW-User The federal government could easily be weakened with extreme enough legislators or presidents, which is what the electoral college is doomed to produce with states becoming more partisan and more extreme after this realignment.

We need more moderation, not more polarity. I think the only way to do that is to break up the duopoly with more third parties and more independent candidates. The best way to get them on-board is by breaking the stranglehold at the state level.

Make it so that anybody can run in a primary, instead of having one Republican and one Democrat one. Then make something like ranked-choice voting where people can vote for more than one candidate so they don't have to feel so strongly about one, and they won't become so embittered when their top choice doesn't make the cut.

SW-User

@TinyViolins fair enough. I like what the #RepresentUs movement is working toward...pretty much all you've said here.

My only qualm is that what you've said and what they say is so much more complex than just sending people to their respective corners and having the fed gov actually work for their livings by playing peacekeeper.

TinyViolins · 31-35, M

@SW-User The problem is a cultural one, not necessarily a political one, and it's guaranteed to be a losing argument when you tell someone their culture is wrong.

Life moves very differently in an urban environment compared to a rural one, yet our political mechanisms are expected to represent both. That becomes exponentially more difficult when you have curated media outlets feeding each audience an unbalanced diet of information which exalts one political party and demonizes the other.

The solution is to create more cultural bridges so that people can actually trust and respect each other, because it makes us more likely to work together instead of quarreling from opposite ends. We can promote civility by promoting empathy, but there's only so much the federal government can do with that regards.