Are you curious why politics has become so polarized? I believe it is because politics have become so centralized. It’s not hard to understand the dynamics. When politics is decentralized, political discourse has less at stake. And it is easier to facilitate communication among a small community than over a vast nation. If all you had to do was convince your neighbors of a local policy change, you would have time to discuss things with some nuance and you would all know better the actual impact of any enacted initiatives. If you did make a mistake, you would all have fairly immediate feedback and be able to take brisk corrective action.

When politics is centralized, the winner takes all, the communication is less nuanced, the impacts are less known, the policies are more far-reaching, and change is slow. That’s a recipe for polarization. If convincing the distant and scattered opposition is the difference between the enactment or non-enactment of a basically irreversible national policy, you don’t really have the luxury of waiting for other people to understand your perspective.

Everyone said Romney was a hypocrite for supporting “centralized” healthcare even while he opposed Obamacare. But there actually is a major difference between those two things, even if they are ideologically similar. The difference is this—I didn’t suffer because of Romneycare. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t feel the need to weigh in on Romneycare, though I weighed in heavily and often on Obamacare.

It’s hilarious to me that people somehow think it’s possible to promote greater cooperation in the federal government when the federal government is now being tasked to represent the interests of everyone. You realize that the only way such a national system could possibly work is if everyone were basically the same?

And I know for sure that national educational standards are aimed at narrowing the ideological gaps between American citizens. But it’s not going to work. Especially if they are successful in homogenizing the American mind. True and actual diversity has the same purpose in ideology as it does in genetics: it prevents the civilization-crippling effects of inbreeding. The current polarization of politics is the last gasp of the vestiges of rational civilization against the inbred retardation of ideological uniformity. Enjoy it while it lasts.