[a_conservative]

Republicans do have similar echo chambers. My personal experience, as someone who has moved from left to right but still hangs out in a lot of left leaning circles, the right tends to be more tolerant of dissent.

It's getting harder to remember life before the internet, but it was largely similar. Different pockets of people had different beliefs and tended to choose an echo chamber.

As you said, the circles are bigger now.

The other difference is that media is so less centralized now, the circles are further apart. The centralized main stream media applied a certain amount of social pressure itself that sort of kept the circles from straying to far into "forbidden thoughts". This has largely been destroyed by the internet.

[sharikous]

> It's getting harder to remember life before the internet, but it was largely similar. Different pockets of people had different beliefs and tended to choose an echo chamber.

Before the internet, in fact, it was difficult to seek out information from outside your echo chamber. Now it is a few clicks away, even if you might prefer not to do that.

> The other difference is that media is so less centralized now, the circles are further apart.

I think it is questionable to say that. The mainstream part of the internet today is very much centralized.

> the right tends to be more tolerant of dissent.

I agree with that. I remember when the "inclusiveness" buzzword started to gain traction and I naively thought that the meaning was being welcoming to all, regardless of political opinions. Boy, I was wrong.

[100011_100001]

> the right tends to be more tolerant of dissent.

...some restrictions may apply. Abortion, gay rights, immigrants, any non Christian religion; especially Muslims, policy brutality against people of color, healthcare to all, living wages the list goes on...oh and Biden actually winning the election.

However, I am not trying to attack you. To give you credit, media is more extreme and biased, except for specific news outlets and sites. Of course based on your beliefs we might not agree on which ones those are.

[a_conservative]

I simply meant that my experience is that those on the right don't deploy ridicule as much when dissent is expressed. I'm not speaking to the individual issues you listed at all, of course we disagree on some of those and likely agree on others.

This is obviously subjective, but I have spent some time in 12 step groups. Addiction cuts across the normal divisions we have in life. It affects the poor, the rich, every political affiliation, and so on. It does get a person out of their echo chamber somewhat, at least the typical echo chambers a person may have been in. 12 step groups can be their own echo chamber.

I personally transitioned from left to right politically while in 12 step groups. I transitioned from left to right while being a part of a mostly left-wing family. I've seen the condemnation and the ridicule deployed against conservatives. I've deployed it!

At some point, I began to look back at what my own personal experience was with conservatives, and I saw that my ideas of conservatives didn't match up with my experience. The conservatives I had known, didn't talk about tolerance, but they certainly practiced it when a dissenting opinion was expressed.

As a thought experiment: Imagine your views on a core left issue changed. Say you had some personal experience with abortion that pushed you into a more conservative position on this particular issue. Can you tell the people in your life with whom you discuss politics with? Can you talk about it on your social media with as much gusto as you used to talk about your more left-wing positions?

Also, if you look around HN, it's not hard to find comments that are pledging their allegiance to certain ideas before then offering criticism. These comments typically look like this: "Of course, I believe __x__, __y__, and __z__, but I do wonder about this aspect of x sometimes"

Why do they feel like they have to pledge their allegiance to __x__, __y__, and __z__ before offering any criticism?