We have to restart our economy now and we have to dramatically cut immigration and also we have to aggressively sanction our largest trade partner all at the same time is one of the more confusing and irrational ideological lines to traverse.

A sad product of the modern political tendency to harvest votes from division instead of uniting people around ideas. Division can be irrational, and usually is.

See also: We must hold China accountable for unleashing this terrible virus on the world but also the virus is not actually bad but also there is no virus and it's all a media beat-up.

Stan Grant’s article is an interesting read contrasting authoritarianism against democratic liberty in response to urgent and extreme situations. I see it a little differently. Accepting restrictions on individual liberty is not authoritarianism. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-11/coronavirus-freedom-privacy-china-authoritarianism/12232992

We drive on the left because it's a system that benefits us all, not because the government is controlling our movement. Take an idea like “we should be able to drive on whichever side of the road we like” to an election and it will lose, because we understand the common good.

What this crisis has exposed is the toxicity of divisive politics to democracy. The fact is that in a two-party system it is easier to seed dissent than build consensus, and that simple idea has developed into a cost-effective and efficient political hack for harvesting votes.

There is no need to work hard to convince people of the value of your ideas when you can simply undermine the opposition. Like the old joke about putting on sneakers before being chased by a cheetah. In modern politics, you only need to outrun your opposition.

You can win elections without a single idea, as long as you can convince people that the other sides ideas are worse than no ideas at all. It’s political rope-a-dope, and it’s a scrappy and effective way to win. But at what cost?

The fatal limitation is that this approach while efficient, is terrible at nuance. Parties are pulled to their fringes because if you say everything to the right of something is bad, you have to stake out EVERYTHING on the left no matter how nuts it is. And vice versa.

Politics should be combative and argumentative. Like in law, an adversarial political system is a vital component in identifying truth (insofar as it can exist in a political realm). But in law we have systems for ensuring our judges and juries hear truth, impartially.

We need to rebuild a system of politics where nuance and truth is vital. Our successful response to this pandemic has been largely due to federal and state politics fighting for policy, but fighting fair. Reverting to the lazy politics of division may well be our undoing.