This stood out to me:
The poll comes also as Republicans hold a slight partisan edge over Democrats, which shows that 45% of Americans are Republican or lean-Republican, while 42% are Democrat or lean-Democratic, per Gallup.
That’s a change from previous years, including in 2022, when an equal number of Americans said they consider themself a Republican or a Democrat.
Democrats held a partisan edge over Republicans in 2020, 2018 and 2016, per the average of Gallup party affiliation polls from those years.
I think it’s pretty unreal that everything that has happened in the wake of the 2020 election and January 6th and Roe and so much more has apparently only cemented people in their partisanship. Absolutely wild.
My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.
So instead of going to church so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics, they go online so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics.
Seriously.
I believe this too and I don’t even think it’s controversial, I think it’s fairly mainstream tbh.
Look at that stupid conservative congresswoman who got up in front of a bunch of conservatives at a “prayer breakfast” and said, totally casually, she only made it on time because she turned her boyfriend’s request for a quickie down.
These people aren’t religious, they don’t even know what it means to be religious.
My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.
I don’t really think traditional religion has been replaced by political ideology per se. But I do think religion in the US has formed a symbiotic relationship with politics.
If you go to an evangelical church service in many areas, it is pretty much nothing but a Republican political meeting. In some churches, you’re not even welcome if you’re a Democrat.
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The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Yes - some number of people have melded religion and politics. There’s nothing new in that.
But I’m talking about a different dynamic.
Religion is only in part, and arguably not even primarily,about deities and creation myths and such. To some significant degree, and arguably primarily, it’s about establishing and maintaining a sense of identity and community, and providing self-affirmation. People adopt and practice religion in large part so that they can self-apply a label that represents a particular set of values and virtues that they wish to project, and so that they can surround themselves with, and gain positive feedback from, like-minded fellow believers.
To that end, each religion has a set of values and virtues that are presumed to be possessed by whoever wears their label, a designated community of believers, a set of beliefs to reassure the believers that theirs is the one true faith, and a designated set of enemies upon whom to blame all wrong and toward whom to direct their hatred, reinforcing both their sense of virtue and their sense of community.
And those things are the things for which a growing number of people in the west are turning to politicsl ideology. They’ve just filled all the gaps that would otherwise have been filled by traditional religion with secular counterparts. They still have a faith which they share with fellow believers, they still have a label they can wear to designate their faith, they still have tracts and preachers and their sermons, which are still alternately about the inherent correctness of their own faith and the evil of the heretics and unbelievers, they still have a set of morals by which they can maybe attempt to live their own lives, but much more importantly, against which they can judge others, and so on.
It’s really all of the same sorts of things serving the same purposes - it’s just different insofar as it’s centered on politics instead of religion.
I don’t think it’s even particularly notable except insofar as so many seem to be completely unaware of it. In fact, I would say that that broad dynamic of seeking identity and community and self-affirmation by investing oneself in some specific belief system and joining with others who share those beliefs and thus that identity is one of the most common and basic human traits. For some reason, it’s come to be associated (and often disparagingly) with traditional religion, but people actually do the same thing with any number of different ideas or credos.
And currently, and particularly in the west and particularly online, a significant number of people do it with politics.
Seems like past a certain point people will just keep doubling down because turning back would be admitting that you’ve been a fool.
What is crazy about American politics is that “one side” is not just wrong or misguided, but very wrong, demonstrably so. So very wrong that it is insane from an outsider pespective to try to imagine by what wild loops of logic you could end up so very wrong considering that we’re all supposed to be watching the same movie. You can point at basically anything, on any issue at random, and try to reverse engineer the Republican stance on an issue, and you will face absolutely paper thin, weak arguments, weak premises, unverifiable claims every time, about everything, and in a very unmistakable way that the line of reasoning is, again, not just a bit wrong, but very wrong.
I knew a lot of people weren’t very good at that abstract thinking stuff, making deliberate assumptions and at identifying signal from noise, but frankly, I did not expect almost half of the human race to be absolute morons when it comes to critical thinking. Good luck everyone.
