The role of Gerrymandering, Facebook, and the lack of a 50-State Strategy in political violence

If the U.S. loses its habit of peaceful transitions of power, and if angry extremists using violence toward fellow Americans becomes the norm, you could do worse than look at Gerrrymandering, Facebook, and the lack of a 50-state strategy as major contributing factors.

Of course you could throw in Fox News for good measure.

The guy that shot at those Congressman lived in rural Illinois. Surrounded, most likely, by a bunch of trump voters. Those trump voters in rural towns seem pretty angry and confused to city-dwelling liberals li,e many of us, but don't they also seem really SURE of themselves, too? Like, they don't admit to grey areas, and they are less bashful about spouting off their opinions loudly, even if their main sources are Breitbart or Facebook posts.

If you're a guy that's angry about economic uncertainty and inequality, and you live in he rural Midwest, you might have been a trump supporter in the last election. Especially if everyone around you in your town were also republicans and trump supporters. If you are on Facebook with your fundamentalist / evangelical buds, you get reinforced by a lot of "pray for our president" messages. The political discourse is in a perpetuating, self-reinforcing cycle, as the people that get elected talk about government and politics in similarly coded ways.

Extreme attitudes nurture themselves in protected enclaves -- whether you are part of the extremist group, or you're an angry loner on the outside looking in, who believes he sees how wrong the prevailing thought is, inside the enclave. Being surrounded by "true believers", especially ones espousing their own extremes, it makes it harder to ignore. Maybe it creates conditions to intensify the craziness and anger, at least in "stoichiastic" ways.

Democrats need a fifty state strategy not just to win seats but to soften the dialog in the "red states". The republicans have been breeding extremists for years. Politicians are now talking about politicians in Washington needing to get along, but we also need to find ways to open up the bubble that builds such hate and tribalism into public dialog, even in SW Illinois or rural Oklahoma. If you believe that your neighbors are highly supportive of someone like Trump, and you see them as gullible marks for a corrupt and intractable group of con-men, it doesn't encourage word-of-mouth activism. You may view your neighbors as sheep, and the men in Washington as wolves.

Having pols from both parties make nice with each other is a little bit of makeup for the show, and better than creating hostility, but some of this comes down to needing to elect moderates in red states that can work together and not exacerbate the bipartisan sense that Washington is full of wolves.