I absolutely despise how partisan our society has become. Politics is my chosen field of study, it's been a lifelong interest of mine, but even I've gotten to a point where I'm tired of seeing LITERALLY EVERYTHING be politicized. It's genuinely upsetting and, quite frankly, infuriating to me.
It really seems like half the population or more has been mindkilled by ideology. What's worse, the people who claim they're "non-ideological" are often the biggest ideologues of all - whether it's Jordan Peterson style "centrists" who's idea of being nonpartisan is letting social conservatives always get their way and dismissing any complaints by minorities as extremism, or Marxists following the approach of Slavoj Zizek who assume that ideology is synonymous with capitalism and "freeing yourself from ideology" is synonymous with becoming a doctrinaire Marxist, or libertarians who claim that "libertarianism is ackshually the absence of an ideology" and pretend that libertarian philosophy isn't deeply ideological in itself. None of them are actually non-ideological, they just assume their preferred ideology is the natural and obvious truth that everyone would agree upon if they could pull the wool from their eyes.
It seems like the only way to avoid the trappings of ideology is to approach a wholly pragmatic and orthogonal approach to politics: Pragmatic in the sense that policies should be evidence-based and results-driven. Orthogonal in the sense that each issue should be assessed entirely on its own, rather than on the basis of whether it fits in with a specific ideology or whether people who agree with you on other issues tend to support it. People need to reject the idea that all of their individual stances need to be connected as part of some larger cause or movement.
Part of me really worries that it's too late for that, though. I feel like the well's already been poisoned. The country's already become too divided and too polarized due to a perfect storm of partisan fuckery, cultural divisions, social media, declining economic conditions, widespread psychological unhealthiness, innate tribalism, and simple bad luck (like a global pandemic that radically changes our modes of interacting with other people).
I genuinely hope that if Biden and Harris win, they can truly begin to heal our country, not just on a policy level but on a social and cultural and psychological level. Biden wasn't my first pick (he was actually close to my last), but who knows, maybe he really will be the Great Unifier he promises to be. More likely, though, the divide will just keep growing. People will take increasingly extreme positions, embrace increasingly extreme views, become increasingly less tolerant of the slightest differences in opinion, and increasingly come to dehumanize anyone they perceive as the opposition.
It's just all so deeply frustrating. A lot of past conflicts were attempts to resolve some fundamental clash of visions, and so resolutions could eventually be reached - sometimes through peaceful compromise, sometimes through horrific violence, sometimes through grueling attrition, sometimes because one side simply died out (metaphorically speaking). But no one in this conflict seems to have any real vision of how the world should be, at least none that are coherent internally consistent; every side is purely reactionary, defining themselves almost entirely in opposition to what the other side wants, in a neverending recursive feedback loop. And so it can never truly be resolved, because it's not actually about anything other than spite and hatred and the worst sorts of tribalism.
