I'm surprised income and wealth inequality didn't enter into the discussion. That seems like a significant contributing factor to sectarianism and the culture wars.
Economic dividends concentrated in a smaller group coupled with technology that is accessible to everyone and amplifies the differences between the two groups seems to portend a bad outcome.
It's not popular to point out, but a lot of the divisiveness is designed to keep wealth inequality from ever really being talked about. It's to keep the lower classes fighting each other over less important stuff, sometimes downright silly stuff.
My wife and I were just arguing about Adam Toledo, and had boiled it down to which frame within a single second of video matters the most. Obviously we were getting nowhere. How on earth could you get the truth out of that?
Then somehow we got onto "wait, why are so many people in desperate circumstances?" That's the real issue, but the polluted discussion around it wants to be able to divide into Frame 1 and Frame 2 camps.
Too many things are like this. NBC or whoever might go "See? Here's George Floyd cuffed and at the car. End of video" while the BBC might have that, but also the next few minutes with a much more two-sided struggle. I'm sure somewhere else they abridged it to nothing but the part where the cop flies out the rear of the car. Now we have three different truths to lash out at each other with while no one is paying attention to root causes.
> Now we have three different truths to lash out at each other with while no one is paying attention to root causes.
But I don't think this is true. There is plenty of writing about root causes, plenty of writing about reforms. I know, because I was interested in adjacent topics a while ago and it did not took that much effort to find it.
I am here talking about journalists, lawyers and generally activists pushing for larger reforms and what they perceive as root causes.
Yep, though I'd flip it: Concentrations of power create opportunities for wealth inequality. Or they're not even different things. Whenever something is centralized (Google), or a chokepoint is created (Suez, Panama), or network effects stabilize a monopoly position, then the people who control those contested single points of failure become wealthy; their wealth is their control of those resources (e.g., Bezos' shares in Amazon). Prices are Lagrange multipliers; they're forces impinging on a constraint (e.g., limited land in SV). Whereas systems that are more local and distributed create less concentration of power and wealth. Unfortunately they also tend to be less efficient. Where they win is in redundancy and robustness. I suppose this means that if you want more of the latter, then you need more chaotic conditions. Which might be even worse.
Why focus on a politically fraught issue like taxes/wealth redistribution as a path to addressing issues which are are not constrained by party politics? Surely it would be easier to gain a broad base of bipartisan support for legislation addressing corruption, if corruption is the problem, or concentration of power, if that's the problem.
It seems to me that wealth equality is nothing more than a handy wedge issue. The concept of 'fairness' is baked into our monkey brains[0], which makes it easy mechanism for engendering anger, in the hopes of turning anger into votes.
Economic dividends concentrated in a smaller group coupled with technology that is accessible to everyone and amplifies the differences between the two groups seems to portend a bad outcome.