Because of polarization people are being forced to align hard left or right. The lack of third parties or any sort of middle-ground is a huge problem.
This is exactly why debates like these start to devolve into counting up all of the hypocrisies and flaws of one side or the other. We'd prefer to find a candidate that ticks all our boxes and instead we settle for the lesser of two evils.
Everyone has a set of issues that they feel are most important and they disregard or downplay others.
At the same time, many people categorize these issues as
existential, meaning that if things don't go their way then it means
total catastrophe. I think the majority of this categorization is complete BS but it's the bedrock upon which this polarization functions. The social media echo-chamber fosters this loudness-war approach.
If there's no nuance in politics then it's no longer able to discern the true existential from the trivial. For instance, I strongly believe that unisex bathrooms (left) and rolling back the decades-long precedent of roe v wade (right) are a lesser concern right now than trying to tackle climate change. But since the GOP won't even
acknowledge climate change, I am more willing to tolerate the woke nonsense on the left in order to address the bigger problems.
A great tool to be able to objectively classify issues is Maslow's Hierarchy of needs.
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The reason why the woke nonsense bothers me is that it resides in the upper tiers. They are problems that would be nice to solve but only after the ones at the bottom are handled. You can't have all this spiritual fulfillment if you're not sure where your next meal is coming from.
The problem with the right is that by focusing on the basic needs (aka, jobs, economy, foreign competition) only in a short-term way it ignores more macro-level threats. For instance, by not locking down in the short-term you allow the pandemic to rage which forces even reactionary governors to either lockdown or just stand by and allow hospitals to overrun and people to die in the hallways. And by "bringing back coal" and rolling back environmental regulations you temporarily double-down on the status quo at the expense of the long-term survivability of the planet.
So I look at the political landscape and I see these frustrating blind-spots on both sides.
I think with Trump and Trumpism in particular the objections go beyond ideology and more into tactics. Trump attacking the checks and balances of government is an automatic disqualifier in my book. Once government itself fails to function properly then we wind up with a dictatorship in which democracy is merely there for show as it is in so many countries.