At the same time I can't deny that it does irk me when they spew hatred of anyone who doesn't blindly trust them (basically calling them "fascists", "Nazis", etc), the amount of blatant lies, the outright denial to even listen to other points.
I have come to view 100% of all impassioned, non-deliberate/reasoned politics as "self-preservastionist."
i.e., whatever politics the individual is passionately espousing, he believes that allegiance to that political group is vital for the preservation of his current way of life.
For these Silicon Valley types, for instance, they are extremely reliant upon a U.S. military-financial empire that is able to extract resources from the rest of the world and funnel that into the U.S., which then funnels into tech stocks and tech employment. Many of them are also foreign-born and feel a lot more comfortable with the political party that wants them there (because they're cheaper for Big Tech to pay than natives) rather than the political party that does not want them there.
Take Google. Google has not made anything profitable aside from Google Search and Google Ads (formerly AdSense)....
maaaybe YouTube. It's
not clear if YouTube makes money or not:
When I worked [at Google] a long time ago execs were routinely asked about whether particular products were profitable and the answers made clear that they usually had no idea. Too much shared infrastructure that can't be clearly accounted to any one product, and many products justified with hard to measure things like making web search better.
I guess Google Chrome would technically be something Google made other than Google Search (that is entirely profitable because its default search engine is Google Search; thus, Google Ads).
Instead, Google just acquires infinity techs that have the potential to disrupt its ad business, tries to make them work for itself, fails, then sunsets them:
Killed by Google is the open source list of dead Google products, services, and devices. It serves as a tribute and memorial of beloved services and products killed by Google.
killedbygoogle.com
Google has an ENORMOUS amount of bloat and is filled with completely unnecessary people working on unnecessary projects.
Every one of these mega corps is this way. People think "capitalism is efficient." Once a corporation achieves market dominance, it loads itself up with inefficiencies and bloat; it makes more money than it knows what to do with, then squanders it on a million pointless people and hires. This is only possible because there is so much money floating around in the American sphere that these corporations can afford to have all this bloat, instead of having to shave themselves down and run lean, so they end up hiring all these mostly-useless people doing mostly-dead-end things.
Universities are another example. Take a look at this chart:
That has been happening at the same rate at universities across the U.S. It is a big part of why college has gotten so expensive. Why do universities need 260% more administrators today than they had in 1990, when the student body has only grown 75%? These are useless people employed in make-work roles that are dependent upon government largesse and policies that encourage their hiring (e.g., "Director of Equity & Inclusion"). All these people will be ferociously partisan against people with politics who, if their politics was ascendant, would jeopardize these people's livelihoods.
For me, whenever I hear partisan politics, I hear, "I need the government because [X]."
Partisan left-wing politics is "I need the government to suck in money from taxes and globalist policies and give handouts and also welcome me and more people like me here."
Partisan right-wing politics is "I need the government to kick ass elsewhere in the world and get money through military adventurism and push people to believe what I believe about faith and country."
Both of these people are secretly terrified of what will happen to them without Big Daddy Government there to do whatever they desperately want it to do. That terror manifests as hysterical attacks against their political opponents.
Once you realize it is
fear driving them (fear of loss of status, inability to self-preserve, etc.) you view it differently.
They may still be dangerous if they start viewing you as "the enemy."
But you can understand their lashing out as impotent rage at an existential threat. Those partisans on the other side really
do threaten their way of life. If you want to know who is fearfully dependent on government to prop their lives up, just look for the partisans.
Nowadays, someone around me says "PARTISAN STUFF!" and I hear it is "OMG DON'T TAKE MY HANDOUTS AWAY PLZ!"
No matter which side of the political aisle they're on...
You just view them as weak and afraid. Hard to take it much personal after that.
"Thinking men" they are not.
(there are also the young kids, who have just been programmed/indoctrinated. In that case, they think they are dependent, but as they age some of them will start to feel less dependent and will shrug off their indoctrination, or even flip and conclude the side they thought was protecting them actually stands against them, etc.)
Chase