We know that the Internet does not represent reality. If it did, one would assume that in every conversation that you have with someone, topics like gender or whatnot would always surface.
So, in reality, do these things affect you in real life?
Are the mainstream issues really all that common?
Despite the election results of 2020, do you think that americans are really that divided?
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I think the division is real, but people are generally less aggressive in person. It is entirely possible to have conversations without getting into politics.
Edit: It’s also worth noting that political division does not imply division in all aspects of life. I know people who have very different political beliefs from me, but we are united on other fronts. People and relationships are more complicated than mere politics.
Which mainstream issues are you referring to?
No people don’t talk about politics in every conversation. I would say Americans are extremely divided though.
One the internet people are very divided. IRL for people who touch grass. No where near is much.
Do random people bring them up on the street? No. Is the division real and are state legislatures (especially GOP ones) getting openly more brazen? Yes.
people IRL are very divided but were generally not duking it out in the street. i could get through most of my day without talking about politics and the only reason i say “most” is because i work for an, what i feel, incredibly politically active and conscious organization
It will certainly very for different people, but I know four trans kids and one non binary kid, and I really don’t know that many kids. One has had “top surgery” aka a double mastectomy, and one is one hormones. Two have autism. This is one reason the local girl scout troop shut down: they didn’t have enough members after a couple decided they were no longer girls. So yes, this affects my family.
Edit: but does it surface in normal conversations? No.
Internet discussion forums are a subset of the media, which is designed to be confrontational. I’m Dutch (but live in California), I see you seem to be Portuguese. Does the [violence seen at Montijo’s Campo da Libertade](https://www.espn.com/soccer/vitoria-setubal/story/4499985/police-fire-shots-as-portuguese-game-descends-into-chaosfighting) affect you? Or is it like the [F-side violence in Amsterdam](https://www.instagram.com/p/Br_IM-qjyPx/) and it’s sporadic and only picked up by the media when an out-of-the-oridinary number of people are killed or injured?
FWIW, I’ve been living here since 2003 and have never seen a gun in person. And, whatever divisions you imagine in American society are no more severe than those in your own.
In real life, there tend to be actual relationships that people have a stake in preserving, whether work, friendship, family, etc. and people operate very differently when that’s the case.
Also in real life, there are a lot fewer hyper-partisans than you find online. Most of us are trying to keep our integrity and make the best choices we can in an imperfect political system.
So based on what you mentioned:
> Gender, lgbt rights, banning guns, police brutality, all the nine yards
And the details of your question:
To be totally honest, my opinion is that these are issues that (while serious) statistically affect a very small percentage of the population, but are played up as major wedge issues to keep people from unifying on the issues that actually statistically affect the majority of us, those being:
Extreme wealth inequality
The housing crisis
The opioid crisis
The infrastructure crisis
The mental health crisis
The healthcare crisis
The climate crisis
Bad work culture due to a relative lack of employee rights and protections which contributes to the birth rate crisis
Like, all the others are called crises for a reason, but it’s easier to make a fuss about inflammatory wedge issues and use those as a reason why you can’t collaborate on any of the other things that might financially affect your donors
All of these things matter deeply to people, but many of us are busy living our daily lives also.
Do gender issues matter? Yes, they matter a whole effing lot. I have transpeople in my family.
Do gun issues matter? Yes, I’d like to go to a theater without there being a safety announcement about what to do in the event of a person shooting at me.
All of this stuff matters. If you want to have conversations about them IRL, go get involved with activists that do things related to them.
It’s relatively easy to avoid controversial topics in general conversation at work and similar environments. The division in the US is bad, though. I’m a left-leaning independent and have friends who have moved far left and far right over the last few years. This division has effectively ruined one of my closest friendships, the one I had with my sister. It’s put a minor strain on another. It sucks.
Guys, I’d love to acquire some knowledge about American culture, about what it actually means to be living in America.
Are there any viable sources? Any youtube channels? Anything you’d recommend that actually depicts real life in the US?
Division is real, most of the issues are relevant, but people put on more filters when interacting in real life. It is hard to find yourself in an echo chamber just by chance, and out in the public means being surrounded by people of all views and backgrounds. Practically, politics isn’t a topic that’s very popular or common to discuss under most settings, and in many scenarios, bringing up politics is discouraged. There is a social taboo that prevents most people from initiating political discussions because doing so could lead to unintended conflicts and burn bridges.
Another aspect of political views that doesn’t manifest in internet echo chambers is the complexity and diversity of a person’s opinions. The Left vs Right distinction is an over simplification of a person’s views on different issues. No one is 100% progressive or conservative, and even amongst progressive and conservative views, there still exist variation. For example, a pro-affirmative actions and pro mass immigration person might also hold anti abortion and anti gun control views, which makes “left vs right” a pointless distinction. There is enough division and variation within a single person’s views that to be completely engaged to a single set of narratives is unusual.
Internet echo chambers encourage more extreme positions because those positions are usually less likely to be comfortablely shared offline, and extreme positions can elict more emotional reaction without the need of stronger argument; hence, they are a source of validation fishing. In real life, people tend to moderate their expression of views, because talking face to face is a whole different dynamic than typing behind a keyboard. A person who frequently posts extreme left leaning contents online isn’t likely to call every white person an oppressor on the street, nor would it be likely for a heavy right wing poster to tell all minorities on the street to get out, or proactively telling strangers to never abort a baby. Of course there are exceptions, but for people that fall under the exceptions, they tend to suffer from some serious issues that prevent them from joining the norm.
>Despite the election results of 2020, do you think that americans are really that divided?
No. I’m a pretty conservative guy, and my two best friends are pretty liberal. We disagree on most things, and yet are still friends. I have lost friends due to them getting politically radicalized, but that’s hardly a new phenomenon.
>Gender, lgbt rights, banning guns, police brutality, all the nine yards
These are all real issues. You don’t just go into the streets and people start talking about them unprompted, but these are real issues.
I also think foreigners who know English are able to consume our media and may become familiar on a surface level with our issues, but don’t speak say…Russian or Mandarin, don’t consume their media (which tends to be much more insular) and don’t know the issues going on in countries they don’t speak the language of.
I also think in general we’re more open with addressing our issues and venting our frustrations whereas many other peoples elsewhere like to sweep their problems under the rug and pretend they don’t exist.
As someone who absolutely does not like guns (my husband and I do own hunting rifles though) …I will say…I do not ever feel unsafe in terms of gun violence. Yes it’s absolutely horrible that it happens and we need to be doing much more , But I feel extremely safe in my every day life. And I say this as a 28 year old woman with a young child who goes out and about often.
The division is real, but those topics mostly don’t come up in daily conversation except for very specific subsets of people.
Where they affect people, they just deal with things as best they can on their own or with their immediate support structure. Where it doesn’t, then why would it come up?
People also tend to be a lot more polite and conflict avoidant in person, with most opting to shy away from any stumble into an uncomfortable conversation.
I live in a “battleground” state. the only place it bleeds over to real life is signs in yards. all the other issues, I’ve never seen brought up in person. I’m sure it happens, but i’ve yet to run across it.
No
Not really.
Americans are definitely very polarized, that’s very true, but people rarely talk politics offline. There’s an extremely small but extremely vocal group of Americans who make their political affiliation their entire personality. Unfortunately, in 2023 this extremely small group includes most journalists.
Look at the midterms. People aren’t buying the conservative trans panic. We’re more unified than it seems.
That said, I am a gay man so lgbt issues are brought up in my circle a lot.
Yes, these are real issues. Regarding police brutality. It is a problem in America. Better training in general, and training in other methods of dealing with suspects could lessen incidents of police brutality. As far as guns, I lived here all my life and never seen a gun. Having said that, gun violence is a problem in this country. Healthcare here is complicated. Quality is great. But Healthcare isn’t really affordable. But I’ve also read (I may be wrong) that with universal healthcare, quality of care is a downside of that system.
You know, that’s a great question. All the hours I spend reading and arguing shit on the internet, I don’t talk about with real life people at all.
Personally, these issues have mattered a lot in my life and disagreements on these issues have led to the dissolvement of many friendships over the years. I am elder Gen z and there is little tolerance for being socially conservative, and as a minority, these political issues aren’t things that can be put away but they’re a part of my everyday life.
Several of my family and I discussed the Bud Light/trans issue very briefly at Easter and we all felt that it was a dumb move. I say this to point out that most of us live in areas that aren’t very divided. We are heavily Republican while in a Democrat area prob everyone would likely agree on other things. It is rare that people would get hostile over these things in real life as they don’t actually matter. Americans are obsessed with these issues because we aren’t trying to get clicks or likes in our daily lives.
No
No not at all. The issues are real and concerning but Americans are overwhelmingly very polite and friendly in the real world.
>We know that the Internet does not represent reality. If it did, one would assume that in every conversation that you have with someone, topics like gender or whatnot would always surface.
When I have an actual conversation with someone, we talk about food, the weather, how much work sucks or whatever. It takes a while for politics to come out, if at all.
As others have been saying, yes, the divide on these issues are real. And its about as large as it gets.
I have close family friends who like to talk politics (or rather can help but ooze it out of themselves), and happen to be in the opposite political camp. Not only do we disagree on these issues, we go two steps further.
For that first step, Americans on either side of the aisle have entirely different media organizations which focus on reinforcing attention to particular metrics and trusted sources then those on “the other side”.
While CNN might bring on some statistician who’s looked at Gun deaths to make a point about how gun availability correlates to school shootings, FOX will bring on another to show how “transgenderism” correlates to school shootings. These are then presented to the viewer as resting on the most solid foundation, while straw-men of the opposition are stood up to be knocked down, giving the illusion that the authority must have thought this through to come to their conclusion.
To take it to that second step, most of the time both sides aren’t even focused on the same issues, so they can’t even be compared to each other. While CNN is doing wall to wall coverage about a school shooting that just happened to reinforce their audience on gun control, FOX will be running a story about how the Biden administration bungled the Afghanistan withdrawal.
At the end of the day, you have to dig on the sources of each media, which people dont really want to do anyway, since their participation in the entire fiasco of American democracy is limited to questions of direct stake, of which theirs is usually ACTUALLY none.
Sorry for the rant.
As to how this impacts us? Well the vested interests functionally gets to ignore most of our opinions on everything. For moralists, every so often we’re told a basic fundamental right we thought belonged to all of mankind actually does not, and we were stupid or naive to believe it did. Sometimes we get lucky and our side “defends” basic decency or humanity. For Pragmatists, we get to roll the dice again and hope for someone who knows what they’re doing (they do not). If you’re REALLY unlucky, you’re part of the “frontier” of human rights who gets to be stripped of your supposed human rights because your side lost that day, sorry mate :/
Before leaving on that huge downer, it should be noted there are definitely still a huge bedrock of shared cultural norms. But those are so deeply ingrained, they aren’t even considered in our politics. Those aren’t mainstream issues because they aren’t up for debate. For example, the temperance movement gets ZERO coverage in news media. The status of Alcohol is basically settled in the culture eye, so we dont talk about it. There’s a lot of stuff like this still there.
Culture war people are insane.
I can’t imagine having so few problems in life that I would get upset over who was on a can of mediocre summer beer.
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It’s very tense. Generally you figure out people’s views over time, through jokes or comments, but usually people never directly engage in political talk.
And if they do, it’s often much more respectful
They matter to me and a good amount of other Americans but we generally steer clear of discussing them except with our closest friends or in places that are a good venue for contentious discussions. Conversations with people that I’m not close with are usually about whatever we have in common
Most mainstream issues have little impact on my life, but I still want things to change.
I think people can and do talk about it too and there’s common ground to be had. However, our politicians only care about themselves so they aren’t going to be reasonable since the people bankrolling them don’t want that. If Congress worked like a functioning body, we’d have discussion of issues rather than one side in power just blocking the other side because that’s what they’re supposed to do now.