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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
Yeah, that’s something we have to be careful about.
I could quote Scriptures and apologists about Christianity and I could quote Rush and Buckley and Jonah about conservatism and really make an impression in my world that was limited to political conservative fundamentalist Christians.
Then I stepped into the world of liberal atheists and realized that those same brilliant arguments and bromides and cliches were meaningless in that world.
So we have to adapt what we’re saying to the world at hand. That’s hard work because you have to get into the opposition’s head enough to know what makes them tick without getting so disgusted that you can’t keep working on it.
So tell me more about your world. Sounds nice.
It means that we, at least some of us, believe that mask mandates are an intolerable infringement on our personal liberties. And some of us also believe that COVID would be easily cured but for the CDC getting in the way to allow Big Pharma time to get a profitable product in the market.
This is a hard thing to realize. Almost everyone one of us lives in a bubble. It’s very hard to talk to someone who has never read any book by any conservative about the evidence or the philosophy behind conservatism.
And some of us believe that GW Bush took down the twin towers.
My 70 year old father, always an optimist, says he doesn’t see anything good in America’s future. He said he has never felt like this.
If Trump wins, there will be rioting.
if he loses, possibly because there was cheating, he will (rightfully) contest and it will be nasty.
All the institutions, all the money, all businesses are allied on the side of the rioters, and all allied against this country and its foundations.
The world at hand is that we have Democrats who say one thing (support the Constitution) but then they actually support the riotous mob. I said this in an earlier comment #68:
The Left’s behavior towards free expression does not demonstrate support for individual liberty. And they don’t want me to have guns so they don’t support the Bill of Rights. I don’t know why you keep referring to what they say when it is what a person does that shows their character and beliefs. They can try to amend the Constitution to better fit their priorities.
I don’t have to quote any authority nor do I have to get in the mob’s head. They need to do things in a manner that shows they are civilized otherwise they have no due.
Are these two groups the same?
Or you could put it in casual or layman’s terms.
I had these conversations yesterday here.
Technically, Venezuela still exists….just not any any form that is recognizable, or likely to be anything but oppressive and dangerous toward non-‘Bolivarians’ anytime in the foreseeable future.
We have never survived a period in which half the country, 50% of politicians, 90% of large businesses and the media, as well as 90% of national institutions both public and private, were radicalized by or aligned with a totalitarian worldview that was expressly and purposefully antithetical to the nation’s very founding.
Arvo & Everyone,
The free-market argument for Big Pharma is that they make the necessary investment and bring the product to market so it all works out. The problem with this is what has happened in the last 20 years due to rule changes. Now, NIH and other government granting agencies, are doing the basic and applied research. Then Big Pharma comes in, gets the patent, and cashes in.
The problem is that Big Pharma didn’t make the necessary investment, the government did it for them. Yet, some of the prices that they have charged the consumer have been astronomical. Meanwhile, the government drags its feet when patents run out before they will license the generic manufacturers. All of this smells to high heaven and Fauci has been on top of this garbage pile all along and seems to like it.
I don’t care if you think Fauci is Santa Claus, his feet need to be put to the fire.
Regards,
Jim
If that’s the case, then the people are lost, too.
They might very well be; it is, however, a certainty if one refuses to accept the reality of what we’re facing.
But they don’t understand the basic vocabulary I use. When I say, ‘property rights’ they automatically assume a system of oppressive economic tyranny that exploits the poor. We don’t have a common point of reference.
It’s hard.
I guess you gotta know the territory. They say that if you understand something you a should be able to explain it to a five-year-old.
A couple of years ago, at the dinner an eight-year-old girl asked me, “Uncle Flicker? Why is everything made in China?”
Startled, I said, “Because American companies can make more money by sending their manufacturing overseas to China where the work is done by prisoners and political and religious dissidents at pennies on the dollar.”
Then it was the turn of all the adults around the table to look up, startled.
(I don’t think I added: “And they even take out and sell their organs while they’re still alive.” No, I’m sure I didn’t say that. It was after all dinner.)
The political and religious prisons are actually terribly inefficient because it is a government system where they need guards to oversee absolutely everything and their is no innovation. Slavery is thankfully economically inefficient. Everything is made in China because labor is cheap there.
In a North Korean ex-prisoner’s memoir Eyes of the Tailless Animals, Soon Ok Lee tells of having to sew brassieres to be sold to Russia, but the Russians said they couldn’t sell them because they were so soiled by the seamstresses dirty hands. So the prisoners were all given white cotton gloves to wear while sewing so as to not soil the fabric. Washing hands? Naw.
Never said that Communists weren’t brutal- just inefficient.
I agree with you. I don’t know if it’s inefficiency or brutality that made the prison administrators choose gloves over simple hand washing. I think casual inefficiency.
The brutal part was (actually one of the less brutal parts was) that while sewing if a rat scampered by, the closest person would pounce on the the rat, gobble it alive, and try to get the blood off his hands so the guards wouldn’t know he had eaten. That and one of the punishments used was putting a prisoner to crouch in a small concrete box, the inside surfaces of which had molded-in concrete spikes. You had to place your feet between the spikes and try to squat for days, without leaning against the inside of the box. One woman, when her time was up, crawled out, unable to use her legs. She was never able to use her legs again.
This is atheistic communist dictatorship. And I think Xi probably a dictator.
This.
Are you just now noticing we live in a post-Christian society? Sure, many of our “liberal” (not Left) friends retain some vestiges of Christian virtue, but they, and especially their children, are lost to the Judeo-Christian, American ethos.
During Barack Obama’s reign (and it really was arbitrary rule of one man), I’d often think of one of his egregious, lawless, capricious policy decisions as characterized by, “Waaah, why can’t we be more like the Europeans??” And my follow-on thought was, “because we don’t have the American middle class to rescue us from our idiocy and can’t afford to act like children, stamping our feet and demanding a ride on the unicorn.”
My mother’s sister and brothers. She sent them a celebratory email for 4th of July (dinner table debate about whether this was provocative on my mother’s part; they are lefties and I stay away from things I know will inflame them, or from things which will lead to things which may inflame) and the uncles didn’t respond and my aunt sent back a blistering response.
Ricochet seems to me full of lifelong conservatives a generation older than me in many cases. But the fact that I and my younger sister, both raised without religion by liberal parents are now on Ricochet is evidence that the tactics currently favored by Democrats don’t sit well with at least some Democratic voters.
Even more hopeful would be my parents, both Ivy League educated raised by strong nuclear families on the East Coast. My mother is now very active in a church. Both voted Trump and will vote Trump and watch Fox News now. My mom particularly suffers from feeling her conservatism (or her opposition to the New Regime) alienates from her old activities and even from her extended family. She has paid a heavy price for their commitment to truth. As for my dad, he’s fine hanging out with just her and his grandkids when we’re in town. But during the Kavanaugh thing, he was discussing the hearings with a colleague when a woman approached them and said their conversation (private!) made her “uncomfortable.” So he clams up in public.
As a nuclear family, our antipathy to the totalitarianism of the current Left has brought us together. The Democrats must have alienated many people over the past 5 years. I can’t believe we’re the only ones.
So there’s that. #NotAllLeftists
Tell your parents that Antifa/BLM/Cancel Culture will soon drive lots of liberals to come to share the same bunkers with us. The great thing about the new leftism is that it is autophagic and needs to punish, exclude, and injure all normals, even lefty normals. Maybe we will see a day when grownups again control the debate with wit, respect, erudition, and all those other systemically racist/patriarchal/heteronormative qualities and virtues.
Everyone (talking about ex-lefties here) has a key issue that is the last straw:
for my parents it was Obama era BLM protests + “you didn’t build that” (my sister and I were not on board then.
for me, it started with the campus “rape epidemic”, and ended with Hillary’s nomination in 2016 and the shameful aftermath of the election and the Democrats’ absolute refusal to admit defeat.
for my sister, it has been the most recent rampant destruction of the city she loves, and her liberal friends’ tolerance of criminality.
you just need to be tipped off and then the rose tinted glasses never fit again.
the shock though is all the liberal friends who somehow don’t see what’s wrong, and through some sort of mental contortion, manage to blame it on Trump.
Dave Rubin talks about this frequently. Once you leave one part of the left it has a cascading effect and everything changes.
Dennis Prager has been saying this for years. Once you turn toward truth, you have to reject the Left.
That is surprising, the fact that if one can see a single major false narrative crumble, the whole facade goes. It usually requires the Left to push some particular false narrative too far.
This must be part of the origin of the cancel culture. What you are spouting might be dangerous so just shut up!