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.

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  1. Joseph Eagar Member
    Joseph Eagar
    @JosephEagar

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    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.

    The American left is basically a neofascist movement.  They check all the boxes: hierarchical ethnic politics with “sacred scapegoats”, groups who must be hated at all costs; a tendency to blindly follow leaders; corporatist governing style; etc, etc.  It makes sense that once someone escapes one part of “leftist” belief they inevitably flee from it altogether. 

    • #121
  2. Maguffin Inactive
    Maguffin
    @Maguffin

    Joseph Eagar (View Comment):

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
    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.

    The American left is basically a neofascist movement. They check all the boxes: hierarchical ethnic politics with “sacred scapegoats”, groups who must be hated at all costs; a tendency to blindly follow leaders; corporatist governing style; etc, etc. It makes sense that once someone escapes one part of “leftist” belief they inevitably flee from it altogether.

    Or get chased away with pitchforks – once you deny part of it, you become the enemy.

    • #122
  3. Tocqueville Inactive
    Tocqueville
    @Tocqueville

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):

    Tocqueville (View Comment):

    Old Bathos (View Comment):

    Tocqueville (View Comment):

    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. (snip)

    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.

    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.

    You have to be honest & have a conscience. I was raised with both.

    • #123
  4. Tocqueville Inactive
    Tocqueville
    @Tocqueville

    Leftists like to think of themselves as intellectual rebels. This is very important aesthetically too. The farther they get from this, the weaker they are. I hope they are out of their depth as overlords. The right has a chance to get in on that: Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin (who is increasingly conservative libertarian : watch a video from 2015 – he’s so in denial). 

    • #124
  5. Unsk Member
    Unsk
    @Unsk

    The reason why the Left now believes that “conservatives” no longer deserve to be protected by any of our inalienable Constitutional rights is that for decades many supposedly  right of center people have allowed the Left to rip apart Americans rights  with impunity and have far too often made excuses for this destruction of our rights. This latest refusal to recognize any rights of conservatives is just the next logical step in a very long journey that we have been on for almost a century. 

    The way back is to enforce the Damn Law and enforece the Constitution stringently with an “originalist” conviction without wiggle room.

    There are literally thousands of examples of how the Left has ripped apart our Constitutional rights from Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, the Right of Life, Liberty and Property, Equal Protection, and much, much more. That said, we must face the fact that America may be at a Tipping Point; if Conservatives do not win the next election, based upon the recent behavior of the Democrats they may use their deep down Totalitarian convictions to go on a Jihad against Conservatives that will make your gut wrench and you convulse with fear.  Then, the reaction by many conservatives would not be rioting, it would be an out and out Civil War with millions dying. 

    To pull back from this abyss, and it is a dreadful, scary abyss, the Trump administration needs to stop messing around and address three issues immediately and forcefully:

    • The Blue State and Blue City Democrats, with the help of our Federal Health Care Bureaucracy in their illegal imposition of these Pandemic lockdowns,  have gratuitously denied tens of millions of Americans their right to Liberty and in essence their right to their financial livelihoods. Many now fear this “lockdown” of many cities and states will go on well into next year and in the process wipe will out financially many of our most protective citizens of the middle class.  Using this  financial wipe out as an excuse, it is feared that the Democrats will try to nationalize many industries and cower millions into a Welfare State Dependency where there will be no escape. The Trump Administration needs to assert people’s right to work, worship and run their business as they wish and damn the media. 

    • Again these same Blue State and Blue City Democrats are inflaming the Black Lives Matter situation into a full blown crisis where many could be  driven from their homes and businesses in fear. Like the Bolshevik, Cuban and Red China revolutions before them, the Left will try to use this chaos to intimidate and cower millions into submission. Trump has to come down hard on this lawlessness. 

    • Finally there is China. China has attacked us with a biological weapon, and China has bought the loyalty of the American Corporatist Oligarchy  to enslave us. Time to respond. Trump has the tools to slam both China and the Oligarchy into submission. He just has to do it. 

    • #125
  6. lowtech redneck Coolidge
    lowtech redneck
    @lowtech redneck

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):

    Flicker (View Comment):
    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.”

    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.

    True, but they were already there anyway, they’re not losing any money that wasn’t already sunk costs.

    • #126
  7. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    It’s often said that conservatives think that liberals are people with bad ideas, and liberals think conservatives are bad people… with ideas. But I’ve never been comfortable with this view. All people are evil – or fallen, or “broken,” or sinful. So I have always tended to think that liberals are evil people who believe evil things, and conservatives are evil people who believe good things. And I have always thought that there are fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives. Briefly and very generally speaking:

    • Conservatives say that you should be able to use a gun to defend yourself, but you should not be allowed to kill innocent children in the womb. Liberals say that you should go to jail for defending yourself, but abortion is fine, and even desirable.
    • Conservatives generally believe in a particular God, and liberals don’t believe in God, or believe in any god or gods, or in a self-created and envisioned spirituality.
    • Conservatives believe in the intrinsic value of each individual, and liberals believe in the supremacy of the society and government.
    • Conservatives believe in certain basic moral laws, and an afterlife with a divine judgment with a reward or punishment. Liberals believe in a nebulous “karma” without any specific judgment or any individual reward or punishment.
    • Conservatives believe that human beings cannot be perfected in this life, but believe in a perfected afterlife in Heaven; but liberals believe that humans can be essentially perfected in this life and do not believe heaven but rather in a utopia that can be achieved by human agency here on earth.

    These are clearly Biblical values versus pagan values, and this conflict is as old as Cain and the first cities.

    • #127
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