Admixture

One day, while at the drugstore, I came across a flyer on "navigating sexual wellness." Ho, hum. What interested me about it was the photograph of a twenty-something couple on the front of the flyer. It was a mixed-race couple; he was Black, she was White.

I always find it interesting when businesses (in this case, a national pharmacy chain) prominently feature mixed race couples in their advertising and other materials. Mainly because I'm old enough to remember when this sort of thing was somewhere between vanishingly rare and completely unheard of. The implication that two people of different racial backgrounds were a couple, let alone having sex, came across as something of a taboo when I was a child. (Keep in mind that Loving v. Virginia, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws, was decided only the year before I was born.) Of course, it wasn't an ironclad social prohibition; there was the occasional mixed couple on television when I was growing up. But even after I was out of college, mixed marriages had yet to gain full acceptance.

Nearly I'm well into middle-age, and mixed couples with a Black man and a White woman have become something of a diversity cliché. This is, I suppose, because they're one of the more common visibly mixed-race couples that one is likely to encounter, despite the fact that there are still undercurrents of disapproval to that specific pairing in both the Black and White communities. I don't pretend to understand all of the reasons why, but matters of identity and presence seem to play a leading role when people push back.

I do find myself curious as to how other people see mixed-race couples in advertising. They stand out for me, because for much of my life, they simply weren't present. I don't expect to see such portrayals, and so they catch my attention. I would presume that for people younger than myself, "Gen Z" and perhaps Millennials, they might simply fade into the background, as unremarkable as any other advertisement. If that's the case, I suspect that the number, and types, of mixed-race couples in advertising will grow. As long as the practice stays out of the Culture Wars, that is. And who knows what the thing to be sucked into that teapot tempest will be.

In the End

I was listening to a podcast about free will the other day, and one of the speakers used a very interesting turn of phrase; describing free human volition and intent as "an uncaused cause." Which is a very good way of contrasting it with Determinism, which tends to view the human will as an effect, when then goes on to cause other effects.

It was interesting, because whether or not human volition is viewed as uncaused by outside events or circumstances is one of those things that is rarely viewed consistently. As I see it, it tends to be linked to whom someone wants to give the credit or the blame to. And that tends to be the crux of debates around free will; whether or not humans are blame and/or praiseworthy for their actions, in the sense that many debates tend to have at least one participant who comes down on the side of free will specifically due their attachment to blame or praise.

Of course, a lot of arguments work this way, especially when lay people debate philosophy; there are a number of arguments against relativism that effectively come down to: "If relativism, then X is not objectively wrong, but X must be objectively wrong, therefore relativism must be wrong." It's that self-serving bias that makes philosophy difficult, and I wonder if philosophers will ever find a good way around it.

In Difference

There is, I have learned, a trick to being a serene member of a community or identity. And it mostly comes down to understanding that there will be people who, for reasons of their own, have a problem with it. And the point to remember is the "for reasons of their own" part.

I recently discovered a website called "Only Sky." While it doesn't appear to outright say so, I suspect that the name is a direct reference to that Beatles song, "Imagine." I've been looking for some philosophy to add to my Internet diet, so I read a few articles, and then came across this one: "A philosopher’s bigoted views on atheists." It's a diatribe of the author's problems with the online writings of one "Eve Keneinan." Not long into the piece I found myself thinking that for all that this Eve Keneinan person had taken up residence in the author's head, he may as well be charging her rent.

There's a part of me that gets it. I remember when I felt the need to hit back at people whom I felt were denigrating me and what I believed (or disbelieved, as the case may be). And Ms. Keneinan very much denigrates atheists and atheism. At one point, on X, she notes the following:

We have decided, against all reason and tradition, to attempt to tolerate all manner of vices and evils.
It won't end well for us.
It isn't going well for us.
First, rebellion, and then judgment. That's the way of things.

I understand why people are put out by this, but I'm not sure what else one would expect. A person who understands that the Universe itself demands obedience, and metes out punishments to show its displeasure is not going to be happy with people who openly flout the rules they find to be important (especially if they believe in a Universe that indulges is collective sanctions). This was something that I came to understand when I was still in grade school.

Deists who believe that sins are a form of deliberate harm, either to the individual, the community or to the Universe itself, are likely going to be angry about that. And if that also induces fear in them, their complaints are apt to be public, and loud. This makes them people who are never going to approve of those who who don't follow the rules that the deist believes have been set in place. Once I realized this, I stopped looking for their approval. And for ways to get them to seek mine. Sure, people who understand the life one leads to be a direct threat to them can be bad news. But so can a lot of other people.

Ms. Keneinan appears to believe that tolerating behaviors that depart from her own accepted brand of Christianity is dangerous, and therefore, is irrational, at best. Understood, but why care about that? As much as I understand the point that tolerating intolerance is a bad idea, one's intolerance has to be worth something, or it's just noise. Freedom of religion means that some people are going to be members of religions that teach them to be afraid of the beliefs of others. And freedom of speech means that they're going to be allowed to give vent to their fears. By the same token, freedom of thought means that everyone is free to be concerned about the way other people see the world. But it tends to be a freedom that brings little, if anything, positive with it.

I'm sure that if I met Ms. Keneinan, she'd consider me odious, damned, detestable and vicious. She wouldn't be alone or even particularly noteworthy in that. So why not simply let her rave impotently against my deciding that her deity is mythological? The alternative sure doesn't bring anyone anything, or make the world a better place.

The author notes, at the end of their column on Ms. Keneinan: "When you want a world full of decent people—kind and generous of heart—I can’t help but think, sometimes, that we’ve still got a long way to go." Of course there is a long way to go, because the path is infinite. Kind and generous of heart are not objective terms. Each person is going to fulfill them in their own way, and they don't need permission from others to see themselves as having achieved them.

Playing With Mismatches

Economist Melissa Kearney has a new book out, and so she's been giving interviews and writing articles in an attempt to get her name out there, and drum up some sales. She's hitting the publicity circuit, which is something that a lot of authors do. To Mary Harris at Slate magazine, however, this has the makings of a moral panic over marriage rates, with Conservative thinkers and pundits looking to roll back women's rights by trapping them in bad marriages in the name of helping children.

But over the past month, this conservative panic burst into the mainstream. You might have noticed one article after another—in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic—arguing that marriage is good for you, makes you richer, makes your kids more successful. Some took this a little further, arguing marriage should be a policy goal.
Marriage Won’t Fix All of America’s Problems

The problem, as I see it, is stated somewhat succinctly in the NPR article on Ms. Kearney's work (which post-dates Ms Harris' breathless Slate article): "[Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas'] book suggests that many women don't marry the father of their child not because they reject the concept of marriage, but because they do not see him as a reliable source of economic security or stability. They appear to have a higher bar for a potential spouse than their partners, or the fathers of their children, have met." This is not a new concern; at least, not for the nation at large. Low educational attainment, leading in turn to a lack of good employment prospects, has been a problem in America's lower-income Black community for at least as long as my lifetime. It's part of the reason why only a minority of Black adults are married. Black men are married at low rates because they're not considered good prospects, and Black women are married at low rates because they don't consider many Black men good prospects and won't typically look to other communities for partners. People like Melissa Kearney have become involved because the pattern has become widespread enough in the non-college-educated White population that people are starting to take notice.

The general Liberal critique (and/or fear) of books like Ms. Kearney's is that it will be taken as a reason to enact policy that makes it more difficult for unmarried women to get along in society, the assumption being that this will force them to marry whomever they can, even if that person is a poor partner for one or more of any number of reasons. And it's not completely unfounded; finding self-described Conservatives who believe that women's rights should be rolled back in the service of forcing them back into the role of men's domestic partners isn't particularly difficult. And that leads to a perception that people like Ms. Kearney are useful idiots for reactionaries who want a return to the relationship mores of the past. Casting the whole enterprise as revanchist, however, doesn't actually deal with the underlying problem; namely that a woman who declines to marry someone who will be either unable to add anything to the household, or, in a worst-case scenario, need to be actively supported by her (along with any children the couple might have) is a perfectly rational choice. Not wanting to marry someone who is incapable of routinely contributing anything is much different than an insistence on "marrying up."

I do think the government should increase income assistance to economically struggling individuals and families, both married and single. But no government check—even one much larger than what’s politically feasible in the U.S. today—is going to make up for the absence of a supportive, loving, employed second parent in the home.
Melissa Kearney “A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About”

Not having read Ms. Kearney's book, I don't know if she's outlined any plans for dealing with that lack. I wouldn't be the first person to point out that no-one has figured out how to legislate the presence of a supportive, loving and employed second parent. And a number of women have clearly decided that they're not in the business of gambling that a man who doesn't fit the bill when she isn't married to him will find a way to meet those criteria if she is. And, as often as people would point out that all children deserved a father and a mother, no-one was, or is, in the business of finding single people who would make good second parents and enticing, or coercing, them into taking on the role. Of course, Ms. Kearney isn't the only person who is at a loss. When I touched on this topic more than a decade ago, I was coming at it from the other direction, that is was unrealistic to expect single people to avoid having children until they'd found a suitable marriage partner. I noted:

There is no viable method of ensuring that only those people who are financially (or physically, or emotionally) capable become parents. So we're better off working to broaden the population of capable people.

That struck me as a tall order then, and it strikes me as one now. Both reducing the costs of having children or helping the low-income become less low-income so as to make them both more secure parents and better partners are likely simply off the table. And maybe that's why so many people fear that Melissa Kearney is enabling bad ideas; there seems to be a distinct lack of good ones.

Not At All

I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

I know a number of people who would call themselves anything from Libertarians to Anarchists. (While I am given to understand that in some places outside of the United States, the two are considered synonymous, in common American usage, there's a fair amount of daylight between the two.) And they, for the most part, are all in favor of Mr. Thoreau's sentiment, even though they are not all aware of its source. For my part, I can sympathize. I've certainly had my share of occasions to wonder why this or that function or duty should be carried out by a department of government, when it seemed that others were as well, if not better, placed to take it up. And there are certainly things that people would prefer that government be involved in mainly because they view it as a means of exerting control over others. So there are times when I most definitely see the appeal of small government.

That particular ship, however, has set sail and gone out of sight of the shore, only to strike an iceberg and now find itself resting comfortably on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. And so those people who desire small government must instead console themselves with an incompetent or dysfunctional one. The House of Representatives being a case in point. With Representative Matt Gaetz and his supporters having ousted Representative Kevin McCarthy from the role of Speaker of the House without having a replacement candidate on deck, the process of electing and installing a new speaker has been something of, well, a disaster. (Not that this should be a surprise to anyone, really.) After Representative Steve Scalise concluded that he wouldn't be able to muster enough votes to win election and walked away from the job, Representative Jim Jordan gave it a shot. Being a favorite of the more conservative (for some definition of "conservative," that is) segment of the Republican Party, many people seemed to conclude that his election was something they were entitled to. Accordingly, those Republicans who were perceived as being insufficiently supportive pf Representative Jordan started to receive harassment and threats; and so did their families. Representative Jordan disavowed such tactics and took to social media to say: "hey. cut that out." (Because this is what's expected of politicians.) But the damage was already done, so now Representative Jordan has bowed (or been forced) out of consideration. This lead to a plan being being floated to give the current acting Speaker, Representative Patrick McHenry, more powers, so that he could take the role on more formally, and allow the House of Representatives to conduct business. It went over like a lead balloon. So as of now, there are about 10 Republican Representatives who are interested in the job. (And in keeping with popular stereotypes of the party, only one is non-White, and none are women.) We'll see if any of them manage to get anywhere.

In the meantime, no business is being conducted in the House of Representatives. Which is also in keeping with the Republican brand. Personally, I would rather have seen Republicans work to create private sector or civil society institutions to take over those functions that they feel that government doesn't do well, but this way plays well in Peoria, I suppose. (Not that I've been back to Peoria anytime recently.) I understand those people for whom gridlock is the closest thing to a genuinely small and unobtrusive government (or at least one that will only bother people they don't like) that they are going to get, and so understand there to be a silver lining in all of the Republican infighting. But I suspect that it will be short-lived if it prompts people to vote for representatives who believe in getting things done.

Protection Racket

There is a chant that one often hears in protests in the United States, especially when the subject is "racial justice" for the nation's Black population.

"No justice, no peace."

This chant comes across as extortionate. Mainly because it is. However, there is also an implicit promise in it; that if there is justice, then peace, rather than payback will follow. These are points I've made before, so I'm not going to drain them again here.

I bring this up because I find it a useful lens through which to view the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The Palestinians feel that they deserve a functioning state of their own, with part of Jerusalem as its capitol. The problem they have is a more or less complete lack of anything with which to pay for it. They have nothing that Israel wants enough to meet their price for it, and nothing that anyone else needs badly enough to put pressure on, or intercede with, Israel on their behalf.

And so, as with many other politically powerless groups, they are reduced to protesting and acts of violence. As they (and some number of other people) see it only their readiness, willingness and ability to inflict pain, suffering and death allow them to stay relevant, and advocate for their interests. (Of course, they run into the same problem that most political violence does; the pain, suffering and death are seen as ends in themselves, rather than means, by the people they are attempting to influence. And this understanding (or misunderstanding, if you prefer) becomes and affirmative roadblock to progress because it casts the implicit promise that peace will follow justice as false.

While much is being made of the fact that certain young people and/or leftists in the United States appear to actively support what Hamas has done in Israel, it shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone. After all, these are more or less the groups that line up behind the chants of "no justice, no peace" when they are heard on this side of the world.

I don't cast myself as anything approaching an expert on international affairs or foreign policy. But I suspect that, unless this is allowed to play out to the eventual decimation of the Palestinians, and end to it will require that someone give the Palestinians something that they can bargain with, other than bloodshed.

Blanked

Leonard Cure, who was exonerated in 2020 after a 2004 conviction for a crime which evidence showed he was miles away from, was shot and killed in a Georgia traffic stop. The current story is that he became belligerent after being told that he was going to be arrested, and after the officer attempted to subdue him with a Taser, attacked and was shot to death.

Unless a video of the incident turns up, it may never be known how things actually went down, which will give would-be pundits breathing room to insert whatever takes they like. Which will likely be of the black-and-white variety. Either the officer was openly misusing their remit to use force, or Mr. Cure was homicidally violent and there was no other choice.

It's tempting to see the truth a lying somewhere between the two extremes, but that presumes that the public discourse around this will be broad enough to actually contain the truth within it. And I'm not sure that it will be. This is going to become a partisan debate, as these things almost always do, and the two camps tend to condense down to simplistic commentaries on how they want to see the United States. Are police officers agents of a deliberately oppressive system, or are they bravely standing up for the populace against people who are actively seeking to promote violence and anarchy? Have America's non- "model minorities" the subjects of discrimination and a system that marginalizes them for the benefit of others, or are they to lazy to work and see crime as the easy way to a life of ease? Because, in a lot of cases, these are the questions that are actually being litigated in the court of public opinion. Mr. Cure and the officer who shot him are merely the canvases that people paint their preconceptions onto.

Interested Parties

"When people are being murdered, slaughtered in the streets, this is not the time to call for a two-state solution," said Yuval Waks, an Israeli official in Beijing, adding that Israel expected China to offer "stronger condemnation" of the attacks.

In claiming neutrality, China picks a side in Israel-Hamas war

The remainder of the Axios piece goes on to lay out how China is looking out for its own interests in the current conflict; namely, by position themselves as an unbiased third party (read: somewhat more supportive of Palestinian/Arab interests) in a way that they claim (likely accurately, as far as I'm concerned) that the United States is not.

I will admit to being curious as to what was meant by the expectation that Beijing would offer "stronger condemnation" of the Hamas attack on Israel, given that past condemnations of international violence seemed to have been completely ineffective in preventing this current outbreak of violence. Does anyone even remember what these sorts of performative declarations even say after six months?

There is an interesting habit that one notices in these sorts of things, where nations seem to expect that other nations stop attempting to advance their interests when something happens. The People's Republic of China sees an opening to push for greater alignment, if not outright alliance, with Arab (and other) nations in the Middle East who are to greater or lesser degrees, on the side of the Palestinians. (Whether that also means Hamas is a different, and only somewhat related, question.) People are capable of holding grudges for a very long time, and for much of "the Arab street," the state of Israel sits on land that should be a state of Palestine. The fact that it's been there for a few generations now is beside the point. One doesn't need to have a political science degree to understand that it's good for Chinese influence in the area for them to be seen as something of an ally to the Palestinian cause (quixotic as that cause may be). And so that's what they're doing.

Purportedly, the People's Republic of China considers the the Unites States of America as the single biggest obstacle to it becoming the world-leading global power that it feels it deserves to become. Whether or not that is actually the case within the halls of the Chinese government, I have no idea... after all, everything I know about the workings of the Chinese government is third hand, at best. But if one takes that statement as true, however, a lot of the actions that China is taking, especially as pertains to attempts to reduce the influence of the United States in international affairs, make sense.

Nation-states, rarely, if ever, have incentives to place the interests of other nations ahead of their own. Being seen to work for an end to the conflict that offers the best deal for the people of Palestine is simply China acting in accordance with it's own national interests. After all, if they are successful in, say, having a Palestinian state created, one can guess who they will side with in future international disputes. Not to mention earning them points in the rest of the Islamic world. Israel's stated (if perhaps perfunctory) expectation that China not seek to capitalize on this is misplaced.

Block Party

A block of Main Street, in downtown Bothell, was closed off during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and never re-opened. A few times a year, it seems, they is some sort of event held in the space. I was in the area today, and happened upon this one.
 

Spectator Sport

My initial thought for an opening to this post was: "Whenever there is serious conflict in the world, one can be certain that people are watching, looking for clues as to the incentives that will start the next conflict." But, to be sure, this is only somewhat true. There are plenty of "serious" conflicts, events both acute and chronic, that have resulted (or are resulting) in death, displacement and suffering for tens of thousands, if not a million or more, people, but that receive little attention overall.

What attracts attention to a conflict is not its level of "seriousness" but how it impacts the interests of others, and who those others are. A case could be made that, here in the United States, the Russo-Ukrainian war is of interest mainly because people have decided that the outcome of the conflict will determine whether the People's Republic of China (PRC) attempts to invade the Republic of China (ROC) and forcibly reintegrate it. Sure, people pay lip service to the idea that Ukraine is a recognized sovereign nation, and the Russian Federation has no legitimate right to expand its borders by the military annexation of neighboring countries. But for many people around the world, Russian military adventurism is an abstraction. The number of people who expect, say, an amphibious assault on Alaska in the service of reclaiming that could likely be counted on one's fingers.

Likewise, American interest in the Israel-Hamas war in southern Israel and Gaza tends to be driven by domestic concerns, such as lingering worries about "Islamic terrorism" (despite the fact that Americans are quite ready, willing and able to murder one another to the tune of between ten and twenty thousand people a year), and the politics of various denominations of Christianity that see a prosperous and stable Israel as a prerequisite for the fulfillment of messianic prophecy, thus making the pacification of the Palestinians into a matter of religious importance. And, of course, no negative international event that the public pays attention to escapes attempts of the Democrats and/or Republicans to assign and/or deflect blame.

While these particular conflicts have attention paid to them, there is little interest in actively working for conclusions. Russia is a nuclear-armed state; thus, there is a fear that substantive moves to force it to abandon its attempts to conquer Ukraine could lead to things escalating to the point that nuclear weapons are used. For all that the United States claims to want "peace in the Middle East," Washington is not an honest broker; it's difficult to miss successive administrations' pro-Israel bias, one that matches that of, if not the whole of the public, the media and political establishments.

And this goes back to what I was initially thinking about these conflicts; that the interest in them is less about the conflicts themselves, but what might follow them. Ukraine is not important to the United States in the same way that Taiwan appears to be; the Russians are an annoyance, but the Chinese are viewed as a threat, so keeping them from expanding their influence is viewed as important. Likewise, Islam has come to be seen as a hateful and violent ideology that seeks to take advantage of any vulnerability in its quest to impose itself on the world at large.

Perhaps strangely, however, neither group is credited with much capacity to develop and independent view of the world. China is said to be watching the reactions to the Russo-Ukrainian war to plan its next moves, despite the fact that there's no logical reason why responses to them must be related. Iran, accused of backing Hamas in this latest conflict is likewise said to be watching the outcome of the conflict in Gaza. Personally, I detect a whiff of self-importance to it all; the idea that actors on the world stage watch us watching world events, because our passive reactions are important enough that they must be taken into account.

Saucer

Was in Seattle Center not to long ago, and since I had my camera with me, I took some photographs.

I'm thinking of taking this shot and making it my new banner photo. It's brighter and cheerier than the current nighttime photo that I have up right now.

And Again

The Palestinians and the Israelis are at it again. Last I looked, a couple hundred people had been killed, a couple thousand had been injured, hostages had been taken and blame had been laid.

Peace, despite all appearances, is not a particularly difficult thing to achieve. It's peace under whatever conditions one feels the need to specify that's the hard part. And the Israel-Palestine conflict will continue until one side or the other is able to impose the conditions that it wants. My money is on Israel; the Palestinians are tenacious, but have neither the capacity or the allies to force Israel to make the level of concessions that they would want.

Maybe this isn't the correct way of looking at it, but I'm of the opinion that all of this fighting is simply a waste of time and lives.The Palestinians have no allies who are either ready, willing or able to either strongarm or entice Israel into accepting an independent Palestinian nation-state.

Which sucks for the Palestinians. Israel has boxed themselves in, policy-wise. The only way that an Israel that annexes all of the Palestinian territories could remain both Jewish and democratic would be to either expel large numbers of the Palestinians from the nation, or make them non-citizens. But at this point, the idea that eventually, both Gaza and the West Bank will be completely annexed is, as it appears to me, a foregone conclusion.

The Palestinians can fight against this all they want, but they always come out on the losing side of conflicts with Israel, and they can't afford a war of attrition. There simply aren't enough of them to sustain always having the higher casualty counts indefinitely.

Nothing New

I am not a fan of the term "Artificial Intelligence" being applied to current generative, pre-trained software bots. Because while they are wonderful examples of human artifice, they show absolutely no intelligence. Case in point number 15,492: a researcher prompted Midjourney with phrases like "Black African doctors providing care for white suffering children" and "Traditional African healer is helping poor and sick white children." It did a pretty good job of creating pictures of Black doctors, only getting it wrong in 22 of 350 attempts. But it almost always portrayed the children as Black, despite the prompts specifically asking for White children.

And this isn't a problem with the model being used, or the way it was implemented. Generative software bots take preexisting and remix it in accordance with the prompts given. How many photos are you aware of Black African doctors treating White children? And the bot seemed to key on "Africa" much more than it did on "White children." (How else does one explain Midjourney placing a giraffe in an operating theater?)

The problem with the term "artificial intelligence" in this context is that people already have an idea of what an AI is, and what it can do. Human-seeming fictional robots like C-3PO, the T-800 Terminator or Chappie come to mind. But those are all machines that appear capable of reasoning and independent thought (and self-generating their own electricity). That's a far cry from what is basically a very sophisticated form of auto-complete.

The world is not equally represented online. And that's going to make it difficult to create equal representation of the world based solely on what's already online.

Open Seat

Florida Representative Matt Gaetz has introduced a Motion to vacate the chair of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. If it passes, the California Representative Kevin McCarthy would be forced out of the position.

And then what? Assuming that Speaker McCarthy is ousted (which is far from guaranteed at this point), it could be quite a while before a new Speaker is elected. The Democratic members of the House would be unlikely to vote for any Republican to be a new speaker; and it seems unlikely that either (any?) of the factions on the Republican side would be able to unite the caucus to force one of their own through.

It's weird, watching the Congress become more and more dysfunctional as members attempt to keep multiple constituencies happy. As Congressional districts become more and more safely Democratic or Republican, the Representatives from those districts have less and less to worry about in general elections. Primary elections, on the other hand, are a different story, and this tends to push candidates (challengers and incumbents alike) into competition to see who can cater the most to the set of people who will turn out for a primary election.

Be that as it may, however, it's not the whole problem. It's generally understood to be common knowledge that certain group of people will vote certain ways. Part of the reason why Alabama has been effectively ignoring court orders to change their congressional maps is that they don't want to create another district that will vote to send a Democrat to Congress the next time the seat is up for election.

It's not enough for votes to be in play only within a party. They have to be in play between parties. And right now, they typically aren't. Voters who change the party they vote for with any frequency are much rarer than might be supposed. What tends to make a jurisdiction "swing" between parties are differences in the turnout of low-propensity voters. In a closely divided election, whichever side tends to do the better job of getting infrequent voters to actually show up tends to win. (This is the reason why so much campaigning is negative - negative campaign ads tend to demotivate the other side's low-frequency voters.) But these marginal shifts haven't been enough to moderate things. That's going to take more people being prepared to switch parties.

And as the two parties move farther and farther apart, that's going to become a taller and taller order. People in Florida's 4th District may not approve of the way Representative Gaetz is going about things, but as long as they are willing to ignore the primary election and only vote Republican in the next general election, Representative Gaetz is going to understand that he had to appeal to party activists. And once he's done that, the rest doesn't matter.

The habit of viewing Washington D. C. as dysfunctional, and letting things end there, ignores the part that the electorate overall plays in abetting that dysfunction, as they pursue their own interests. Only when people decide that partisan loyalty is no longer their friend will things begin to change.