I suppose it’ll continue until enough people believe that it’s possible for a third party to win.

I think ranked choice voting would make it much simpler to foment that change. People need to be able to trust that breaking from the party line has a real chance of success, but that can’t happen without demonstrating support.

If we can’t have real ranked choice voting, a third party could build a website to let people coordinate votes according to ranked choice, and hopefully carry the result as a unified bloc to the polls. Have an agreement that if a certain threshold of participation is met, vote for the ranked choice result. Otherwise, lesser of 2 evils.

It’s a problem, but I don’t think it’s as unsolvable as that. Figuring out how to overcome the strategies being used to divide us could rapidly repair the damage. Education, both in and out of school, is a crucial element of that. The ones frothing over “liberal tears” clearly don’t want to find common ground, so we would need to learn how they communicate and why they won’t listen, then find a strategy to break through that barrier and help them on their way to broader skepticism. In essence, once we cure the disease, we need to vaccinate them to mitigate the next outbreak.

There’s been some focus on this area of research. We have evidence that “strong men” rise to power by capitalizing on fear and anxiety. They set themselves up as a savior who will get rid of the scary problem by blaming someone/some group that is innocent but unknown (and therefore a suspicious stranger) to their base. They start with (comparatively) small lies and build trust among their following. Once the more suseptible slip into this form of groupthink, they’ll fall for bigger and bigger lies, and are very difficult to recover. The question is, how do we wake up they who scream of “sheeple” without an event so tragic it traumatizes an entire generation? The last few times involved massive wars or similarly harrowing events. Events so massive they dissillusioned the followers and forced them to confront the fact that they got played by a charismatic (to them) narcissist with a superiority complex.

Unless we can figure out how to snap these people put of it relatively peacefully, we’re most likely going to be in for a really, really bad time before it gets better. With any luck, at least in the US, maybe Trump will get thrown in prison and the Republican party’s leadership will turn on Trumpism or collapse before they can take control. Maybe if their chosen authority figure is imprisoned and disowned by their team they’ll be able to see clearly again.

I think you’d need to start by getting them to admit that the heat is a problem without mentioning climate change. Don’t use any of the buzz words they’ve been taught how to respond to. Just try to get them to have a conversation where they have to come up with their own answers.

In fact, maybe don’t even start off with anything related to the topics they’ve been told what to think about. Ask about something they care about more directly that isn’t on their party’s agenda. You’d need to keep at it long enough for them to start understanding you’re not their enemy, which could be anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks/months, depending on how deeply entrenched they are. Then, start trying to work towards the lesser issues their authority doesn’t bring up often but has expressed an opinion on. Basically, you need to de-indoctrinate them.

If you can get them to talk about an issue without recognizing immediately that they’re in danger of contradicting their chosen authorities, then slowly transition towards getting them to talk about more and more “dangerous” topics, you might help them to bridge that disconnect and start thinking critically about the key issues.

That all said, You’ll have an easier time working with people who haven’t been deeply entrenched in an authoritarian ideology. The less developed their beliefs, the easier it’ll be to guide them towards thinking about their beliefs critically. That’s one reason it’s so important to teach critical thinking in primary/secondary schools.

logic will never convince them because they aren’t arguing from a position of logic. It’s about conforming to the beliefs required to be part of their tribe and/or protecting themselves from coming to terms with the harsh realities of climate change. It’s reactionary against a challenge to their beliefs.

You would need to first convince them to consider that their respected authorities could be wrong. But within this reactionary mindset, being wrong is disgraceful. So unless they lose respect for their leaders or manage to shift away from believing fallibility is disgraceful, I don’t know if they can be convinced.