re: So is Trump's backbone and toughness why Democrats resort to harassment?

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The political fight is always an intellectual debate

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This is the problem with your stance.

Traditionally politics was indeed the fight of a more intellectual debate on differing ideas. Those who would argue based on emotions over logic were generally weeded out. Even things like the Great Society were argued on far more of a logical cause/effect level than the emotional shrieking we find today.

As the common voter has gained access to faster information and larger megaphones what we see is a large population of emotional debaters as well as those willing to outright lie (whether it's to sow dissension or just chaos). These people feed each other through their confirmation biases and wrap it all up in a vacuum of like-minded thought.

My mother has always been fairly level-headed but over the past year she's turned into the stereotypical FB re-poster of anything she sees that supports her political beliefs without doing a single bit of fact-checking. We align politically so it pains me to see her posting easily disproven bullshite.

To put it all into a nutshell, this goes back to my belief in the a-hole Eventuality. The larger a group gets, the more likely it becomes that some a-hole will join. As more assholes join, the original mission of the group will begin to distort. What we're seeing is the a-hole Eventuality of so many people with little ability and/or desire for logical debate entering the arena and shitting on it with their emotional fulminations.