[brightlancer]

> For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.

Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol.

And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns.

> and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

That's not new.

On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future.

> If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.

[rebeccaskinner]

> Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us

I didn't say that you shouldn't bother with people. I said that discussing _policy_ is not useful if you don't agree on _values_. It's the wrong level of abstraction. To put it in a plain analogy: discussing the best route to get to your destination isn't useful if you don't agree on where you are going.

If you want to engage with someone with different values, then the values are where you need to start. If you want to engage with someone on the best way to get somewhere, you need to start by making sure you both agree on where you want to go.

[brightlancer]

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" is a value statement; in the US, some folks agree with it, some do not.

Under your argument, folks who disagreed about that value statement shouldn't bother discussing criminal justice policy; I think that's erroneous and part-and-parcel of Don't Bother With Those People.

Yes, _some_ policy conversations might be futile if folks have completely opposed values, but I don't think we should apply that generally.

We MUST work with people who hold different values than us, without trying to change their values so that they become part of Us.