[CM30]

Hmm, I'm not sure the former holds true anymore. We're seeing societies getting far more polarised with some extreme rhetoric and and proposals coming from political parties, especially in places like the US and Western Europe.

Kinda makes me wonder if politicians and political parties are fishing for engagement and focusing on the most extreme parts of their supporter base too.

[estimator7292]

> Kinda makes me wonder if politicians and political parties are fishing for engagement and focusing on the most extreme parts of their supporter base too.

Yes, that's been the explicitly stated goal for the last decade or two. Like, no one is even attempting to hide it.

[m3047]

A lot of them are just moneymaking machines, they don't really want community engagement. This is demonstrated in their approaches to community organizing / engagement. I directly witnessed this as a boardmember of an organization ostensibly representing over 100,000 voters:

1) The "90%-ers" view of the suggestion that they identify and court their supporters from (for them) the "40%-er" constituencies because they would be able to sway other 40%-ers due to the "liking" "weapon of influence" (Cialdini): this was mostly treated like a suggestion that they lick dog vomit.

2) Community / consensus building: what issues should we focus on? This was done by dividing participants up by some feature and then having those subgroups come up with maybe half a dozen concerns each. (Something is supposed to happen here before the next step.) Then those concerns were listed on a board and the concern(s) which were reflected across the most subgroups were selected to focus on. The missing piece, which the organizers absolutely knew about: the caucus! What goes wrong without it is that concerns about pedestrian safety, speeding, children walking to school, people getting to bus stops, etc. all get listed differently by the subgroups and... awwww, too bad, you were the only group which cared about children walking to schools... but every group cares about saving the whales (no offense to the whales)! But no whales live here, so what are we to do?

[daveguy]

> Kinda makes me wonder if politicians and political parties are fishing for engagement and focusing on the most extreme parts of their supporter base too.

They definitely are. The goal for Trump this election was clearly to stoke the base with inflammatory rhetoric bolstered by influencers spouting that same rhetoric.

"They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the pets."