I certainly don’t think that the political discourse I’ve seen throughout my adult life has done anything to help people imagine individuals that hold different views as anything other than self-interested schemers or ‘sheeple’ caught up in the rhetoric purveyed by self-interested schemers (the latter being ‘reduced to their mere sociologies’). As much as I think the satire by the likes of John Stuart and Stephen Colbert is a sophisticated and important contribution to the political conversation – it doesn’t make it any easier to imagine the GOP constituency as intelligent, well-intentioned individuals with different viewpoints that deserve respectful discussion. Watching Fox News may be even worse when it comes to fostering an image of non-conservatives that’s anything but cartoonish.

I’m rambling now, but I can’t help mentioning the episodes in the West Wing where the characters like Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter) and Christopher Mulready (William Fichtner) are introduced. The greatest portion of the drama created in these episodes comes only from the very idea that that such intelligent, learned, good-hearted conservatives exist (and that the main characters are smart enough and have enough integrity to recognize them as such). And I think it’s entirely telling that the general audience of the show could easily be expected to think that this was a dramatic and exciting turn: conservatives who are people too? We might as well discover dogs that can talk.

As far as this election season goes, I really don’t see social media as doing anything other than enabling this trend to continue – we all know it’s easy to dehumanize people we encounter online. But I agree things are especially bad this year. And I think I know partly why. Where in the past it has often been hard to complexly imagine the constituency of candidates we oppose, for many people it’s now hard to imagine even the candidates as complex, real people. Trump already seems to many like a gross parody of a republican. And it’s hard to imagine he’s secretly disingenuous and cleverly manipulative. He seems more like the tail that’s now wagging the dog – someone who dumbly absorbed the popular rhetoric of the right and now mindlessly regurgitates it without any self-consciousness. And that really does ‘reduce him to no more than his sociology’. The views of Clinton from the right might afford the image of her some real agency, but probably only insofar as she could become a one-dimensional, self-interested schemer. And that’s hardly better than a talking hairpiece when it comes to ‘complexly imagining the other’. And with the failure to complexly imagine extended from only the opposition constituency to the opposition candidate (or for reluctant Clinton supporters, both candidates) it’s only natural that the problem also worsens in degree as well as extent. – Or that’s my 2 cents, in any case.

ad hominem arguments are perfectly fine as long as they are persuasive. Here is one example that one site gives as an example as an “ad hominem”:

“William Bennett…, leader… of the antirap campaign…, [has] had no trouble finding antipolice and antiwomen lyrics to quote in support of [his] claim that “nothing less is at stake than civilization” if rappers are not rendered silent. So odious are the lyrics, that rarely do politicians or journalists stop to ask what qualifies Bennett to lead a moralistic crusade on behalf of America’s minority youth. Not only has he opposed funding for the nation’s leader in quality children’s programming (the Public Broadcasting Corporation), he has urged that “illegitimate” babies be taken from their mothers and put in orphanages.”

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adhomine.html

Moralists really are horrible people and we should not listen to them.

In that, elections invite people to engage in two possible forms of “magical thinking” (1) “I can predict the future” and (2) “If we do or say or believe the right things we can control the future.” This is inevitable, to some degree, because the nature of elections are that politicians go around making their predictions for the future and telling us, as voters, that we have to make an important choice which will guide the direction of the country for the next X years.

But, given the prevalence of magical thinking, it’s really, really easy to feel like the people that one is debating with aren’t arguing in good faith.

That doesn’t explain why this election feels different from previous ones, however, and I both think that there are some unpleasant dynamics in terms of how that plays out on social media and am not personally smart enough about social media to have a good theory about the nature of those dynamics.