Thread by @drvolts

This is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen.

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1311282192337772546

A quick word on WHY this is dumb, to connect it to something I've been thinking about. One thing you learn when you study religion & philosophy in school is, basically, how to argue. One of the key things to learn is that arguments, any argument, only make sense ...

... relative to shared premises. Part of arguing is digging down to find those shared premises & then figuring out where, downstream of them, you divert from your interlocutor. Without shared premises, you're literally not arguing, you're just saying words at each other.

Sometimes you have to go pretty far down to find those premises. "There is a world." "Human welfare is the goal of human society." Things like that.

It seems to me a big part of what's happened over the last few years/decades of US politics is that the left ...

... has slowly (SO slowly) come to the realization that the right does not share many of the premises it takes for granted. Democracy is good; voter participation should be maximized; rule of law is more important than the advantage of any particular faction; etc.

It can be extremely disorienting. Like, you're arguing about the details of some North Carolina voter disenfranchisement scheme, assuming that *of course* deliberate voter suppression is bad, *of course* it's better if every eligible voter votes, thinking your interlocutor...

...is just confused about the mechanisms of the law, or mistaken about the prevalence of voter fraud, or some such. It's vertiginous to realize that, no, they really don't think certain voters should vote; they really do think GOP victories are more important than full democracy.

You can kind of see this (*finally*) happening across the Dem establishment, the slow realization that what they had taken as fundamental precepts of the US political system are in fact *not* shared premises. The right is not unaware or mistaken about what it's doing.

Anyway, to bring this back around, the entire mental model of the US political parties as two sides, with a coherent middle, is based on this unspoken assumption of shared premises. But if there are no shared premises -- or rather, if the shared premises are so far down ...

... that they consist in things like "there is a world" -- then the "center" is vapor. It has no political content.

Shorter: in a fight between law-bound democracy & ethnonationalist minority rule, there is no coherent center. Pretending there is just obscures the truth. </fin>