Dichotomization

People are lazy.

That’s not news, and it’s not even bad, if put to good use. But encouraging laziness in political logic is deadly. We now live in a world where like-minded people form echo chambers and drive their collective opinion to extremism. The bottom-line political philosophy of both Democrats and Republicans has become, “The opposite of what the Other Side proposes!”

This isn’t going to end well.

Real choices are hard. They require consideration of both “sides” of issues; they require listening to your opponents’ arguments and trying to understand how they see things. They require compromise.

Examples are plentiful on Medium: they frequently take the form, “Extravagant expenditures for A should be suspended until problems X, Y and Z have been solved!”