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Democrats No Longer See Republicans as Fellow Citizens
One difficulty that Abraham Lincoln had in fighting the Civil War was that he understood that if the Union won, they would then be fellow citizens with the newly defeated Confederates. He was fighting a war against people with whom he had a great deal in common, and with whom he would have to cooperate to govern their unified country in the future. This somewhat limited his ability to ruthlessly destroy his opponent, and made his battle planning more complex.
Yesterday’s hearings with Attorney General Barr looked to me like the Democrats don’t feel similarly constrained. In fact, the last few decades of leftist behavior suggests that American leftists no longer feel that they have enough in common with American conservatives to make an effort to cooperate with them on, well, on nearly anything. I find this extremely concerning.
Many Democrats openly disdain Republicans and avoid associating with them. If a college student is outed as a closet conservative, even if it’s not true, the social stigmatizing of that student is absolutely vicious. A girl who is set to start as a freshman at Marquette this fall nearly lost her admission to Marquette because she openly admitted that she was a Republican. These are not isolated incidents, and they are no longer limited to academia. Cancel culture is now mainstream.
When you add the vicious social stigma to the literally vicious new militant wings of the Democrat party, like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, NFA, and so on, you end up with an extremely hostile environment for Republicans. Republicans no longer feel welcome in their own country.
In yesterday’s hearing, Attorney General Barr asked the assembled Democrats,
“This is the first time in my memory that the leaders of one of our two great political parties, the Democratic Party, are not coming out and condemning mob violence,” he said. “Can’t we just say the violence against the federal courts has to stop? Could we hear something like that?”
The room was silent. The attorney general challenged their loyalty, and not a single Democrat objected. For them, it was just another day at the office.
This trend did not start with President Trump. This sort of thing was starting when I was in college in the late ’80s; it’s much, much worse now. Democrats and Republicans used to be friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens, but over the past few decades, Democrats appear to have reached the conclusion that they don’t have enough in common with Republicans to make any effort to cooperate with them in any way.
The Civil War appears almost civil by comparison. That’s an exaggeration, but not by as much as I’d like.
So imagine what happens if the Democrats win this next election. Heck, imagine what happens if they lose.
I don’t see how this can end well.
Published in General
Even if this is true in terms of the number of things contested and their qualities, individual liberty and rights enumerated and guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are existential to the survival and continuance of the American republic and all of that is under direct attack by Democrats.
We had the same problem in the Revolutionary War and Civil War.
I think you need to distinguish the less important matters from the more important matters. Failure to do this is exactly the ailment from which the society is suffering. Those of our society who are incompetent in this regard take a minor unimportant position expressed by an individual and propose stripping that person of all constitutional rights guaranteed by our republic and that act is of big and existential importance. Maybe you can address why you think we are making a big deal over nothing.
So have the Democrats:
I’ve lost a close friend to this madness. She came to our house for dinner on many Sundays. We traveled together in Portugal with a group of friends. We hiked the NW together. All this is over. She’s sullen and consumed by race politics and demonstrations. She goes to the riots repeatedly. No more smiles or easy laughs. Just political lectures and serious looks. All of a sudden she’s discovered how much she hates this country and it has made her very unhappy.
A very good example of a big deal, that you apparently consider nothing, is the exclusion of conservative viewpoints from almost all social media platforms in the public market. This has never been the practice in America in our lifetimes and is a dire sickness in the society.
Yeah, that sums it up about everything from violence against federal courthouses to the color of Obama’s suit on our side.
I don’t keep up with the left enough to know what they think we’re doing to destroy the country. But we’ve seen them get worked up enough about piddly Trump actions to know they’re in the same boat. Or worked up about Trump’s actions as President in their imaginations before he was inaugurated. See, eg, Maddow’s concern about people like her being sent to camps.
I have confidence that the American people will figure it out.
During my lifetime the American people didn’t fall apart over Nixon, ditched Carter, supported Reagan’s anticommunism, elected the Contract for American Republicans, wholeheartedly supported W against an actual existential threat, voted in people to oppose Obama, and rejected Hillary.
The trend is good.
My impression was this, now I know why Pelosi wanted Schiff’s committee to do the impeachment. She went to the group with the fewest stupid members. As to leadership, there was no good choice between Schiff and Nadler.
Right, this is what I’m saying. The original post says that Democrats are doing this to Republicans, but I’m saying that all of politics is subject to this malady.
I remember the right doing this, too. We weren’t very good at it. Remember the Dixie Chicks controversy back during W? The Right shoulda said, “Hey, we don’t care about your politics, we like your music.”
Because I remember what Fox News was like, what Rush was like, during slow news weeks.
People have written about columnists who have to crank out one or two a week, and the challenge that is when not much is going on, right?
Do you think not much is going on now?
Trump’s re-election will be a good sign but not enough for Americans to relax and act as if the Communist threat is subdued. The Democrat Party is being driven by communists and that has never been the case in the past. I grew up taught the Communist Party was illegal because it advocated the violent overthrow of American government. We are now seeing how that works.
Leftism is humorless. It’s puritanical in a way that many puritans were not. Puritans loved beer and they often dressed in colorful clothes. They also sang happy songs and they probably told various jokes. (Though probably they were far cleaner than the ones I and Boss Mongo tell.)
Leftists believe that guilt and condemnation are holy.
Well, the COVID thing is new and big and highly disruptive, but that’s not political. But we’ve turned it into a great attack on liberty re masks, and the evil deep state bureaucracy killing lots of people so that the market will be better for certain corporations. The economy is not the disaster that many expected through it.
The re-escalation of racial issues has been couched as a Marxist/Anarchist attempt to have a revolution because there are Marxist/Anarchist elements who are always looking for an occasion, even though most people on both sides aren’t remotely interested. And there are groups posing as other groups to stir things up against other groups. Even with a scorecard, it’s hard to keep up.
Barr’s hearing is the normal disgusting Pro Wrestling kabuki theater.
SCOTUS has been iffy, but the right has a lot less to complain about than the left.
The take over the world Islamosphere has been pretty quiet.
And every presidential election, ever, has always had the fate of the Republic hanging in the balance.
There’s really no comparison to Rush’s 90s rhetoric and 2020’s violent agitators burning down our cities with tacit approval from Democrats — who just can’t seem to find the time to denounce it, or attempt a great gaslighting by calling this violence a myth.
Rush was one voice. Right now the entire media, entertainment, academic, corporate and political machine endorses the violence on the left, and the absolute destruction of America as we know it. There is no comparison.
Sherman must not have got the message.
Oh, it’s happened before. Conservatives being excluded, that is. According to a new book The Radio Right, JFK and LBJ sicced the FCC on radio station owners for having broadcasters like Clarence Manion, Carl McIntire, and Billy James Hargis on their airspace. At least one of those, McIntire, had a weekly audience of 20 million, which was only matched by Rush Limbaugh in his early national broadcast years (with at least 50 million more people in the nation, I might add).
This is the first time I can recall where my leftist friends — those who I once thought of as rather apolitical such that I didn’t even know they were on the left — are fully on board with the Marxism. They’ve bought into the message shouted at them by the entertainment, media, corporate sector and they don’t know of any other way to think. It’s alarming. And I think you err by dismissing it as “same old same old.”
I don’t know what the Left would have to complain about. Supreme Court Justice has got to be one of the easiest jobs in the legal profession. There’s only one document for reference.
OK, sorry about that, I think I see where I was ambiguous.
In one of my first comments, I said that Rush was saying that the Clinton administration’s goal was to destroy America. And I’m sure that he didn’t coin this maneuver. I wrote that because the original post was saying that Democrats don’t regard Republicans with due respect, and I was suggesting that Republicans also do that, and that it’s wrong, and that the culture is untethered from the transcendent so we scream at each other as we drift in the abyss. (OK, I didn’t exactly say that, but it kinda flowed as I was typing, and I like the melodrama)
Then you quoted me about Rush and Fox News during slow news weeks manufacturing controversy for their audiences. NPR and the left media do that, too. That is not relevant at all to violent attacks on federal courthouses, which are very, very bad.
And I’ve also been hearing, “…the entire media, entertainment, academic, corporate and political machine…” doing whatever for most of my politcally aware life, and it turns out they don’t really get their way very much.
But maybe this is the time, so we ought to be vigilant, as always.
I was really referencing more the fact that a major service delivering publicly held entity is blocking out customers for their expressed political beliefs. That makes them essentially a political entity. That’s the tech giants. The media is also doing the same. We expect that from government entities like the FCC since they are under the control of politicians.
Radio stations rely on audience feedback and sales figures. If the audience feedback is negative, or even hostile, and the sales figures go in the tank, the stations do what the stations do.
I had a Dixie Chicks album. I liked one song. Most of the rest of them were okay. I didn’t complain to a radio station. I didn’t buy any more albums either. The Left tried to pick them up and carry them. They still perform. I still don’t care.
Right! We survived the Fairness Doctrine!
Yeah, this social media access issue is a new problem. I’m not a legal scholar, but it’s something like they either need to say their a utility, a bulletin board at the public library, and anyone can post anything anytime, or they just need to be upfront and say they’ll censor anything they want to anytime they want because they’re a private company.
I kinda want the former, but I really don’t want more challenges avoiding prurient or gratuitously violent content.
Right, this may be the big one.
I truly do not understand why use keep saying that the actions of individual conservatives (in the past) is the equivalent of what we are seeing daily by the entire Democrat leadership and national media. It appears to me that you are deliberately taking a contrarian position in this discussion… to generate comments?
I thought something like that when Rush Limbaugh was brought up. He is one single person. I’ve never seen a congressional committee display what we saw yesterday with every single member of one party acting as if they had been injected with something that makes them all of one mind, and that being stupid.
Well, I suppose Rush is an individual, but during the 1990s he basically was the conservative movement. And Fox News is not an individual.
Yeah, I took a bit of contrarian position to the original post. I thought I agreed with it, and I do. I’m sad about it. The only thing I’m contrarian about is that there are a lot of voices on the right that think the same way about the left. I’m sad about that, too.
Was it worse than Kavanaugh or Clarence Thomas or Bork? (My memory runs out there) Oh! House Un-American Activities!
I think we want that to be displayed by our own party. Except for the stupid part, but stupid means “disagrees with me”.
I mean, we wanted that when Holder was being questioned about Fast and Furious, and Hillary was being grilled on Benghazi. and all those times we lamented, “Why can’t Republicans run these hearing like Democrats?”
Like I said, it’s pro wrestling theater, and we want our people to throw chairs, too.
In summary, I grieve with the original post, and that the right does that, too. I’ll concede we’re not as good at it with actual politicians.
Oh, that was probably an aberration because everyone knows that Bernie Sanders followers are learned, reasonable people.
Actually, both Swalwell and Cohen strike me as people who would sneak up behind a person and sucker punch them if they thought they could get away with it.
I’m a strong believer and supporter of America’s founding principles embodied, to the degree possible, at the founding and then amended, sometimes in accordance with those principles and sometimes not, so I’m a constitutional conservative. I make no choice to be on the ‘right’ as opposed to the ‘left’. If you are not able to see that the Left in America does not support the Constitution, I would say that is why we are making contrary statements here. The Left is consistently moving further away from supporting the Constitution and demonstrates that by embracing the China governed by the CCP.
But they don’t. Which makes the “both sides are guilty” comparison a little silly.