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The Unending Search for Republican Extremists
Before Barack Obama was elected president, he served about three years in the US Senate, during which time his voting record was further left than any other Senator. Then, during her campaign, Hillary Clinton was asked (twice) what was the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist, and she couldn’t answer. All this, after decades of passionate denials from Democrats that their politics were similar to socialists and communists. And then, in the two most recent presidential elections, the Democrat party very nearly nominated Bernie Sanders, a self-described lifelong socialist. Republicans have been decrying the recent trans-gender trend as more evidence of moving our culture further and further toward the extreme left, although many Democrats claim that is simply a straw man argument. Until President Biden nominated a transgender person to serve in his administration.
Meanwhile, Democrats claim that extremist Republicans are white nationalists, and they present a clear and present danger to American society. If this sounds absurd, try to understand the Democrats’ problem: finding an extremist Republican is not so easy. At the very least, the supply of Republican extremists seems to consistently fall short of the demand from the media and other Democrat propagandists. We’re pretty boring, overall, and in general we’re happy to live and let live. Those who don’t seek to control the lives of others are generally hard to describe as extremists. But the Democrats need Republican extremists, so they came up with white nationalists. Which I’m sure exist, although I’ve never encountered one. So they must be exceedingly rare.
But regardless of how rare they may be, the real difference is that Republicans do not elect such extremists to be President, they don’t appoint them to Presidential administrations, and they don’t present them as symbolic of the Republican party as a whole. If there are right-wing extremists, the Republican party ignores them. But there are clearly lots of left-wing extremists. And the Democrat party elects them. Consistently. That’s a big difference.
Again, ‘extremists’ don’t really have a role in such a naturally understated group as Republicans. There are Republicans who don’t like Ted Cruz because they think he’s ‘too extreme.’ Ok, Ted Cruz is a lot of things, but he’s certainly not as far right as Obama, Clinton, Sanders, and the transgender nominee are far left. Not even on the same scale.
Republicans avoid extremists. People like that are scary to conservatives.
And the media calls the Republican party ‘extreme,’ while praising the more ‘moderate’ Democrat party.
I wonder if this makes any sense to my Democrat-voting friends.
Published in General
It is true that leftists and conservatives start with different premises. But the support for public schools does not primarily emerge for concern about the poor. Charter schools that help the poor are bad in the leftist mind. The love of public schools is that they are an expression of state power that focus on conformity and equality.
It doesn’t really matter if they are effective at making good workers or citizens. The point is that they represent goodness so the results don’t matter. That the school system has become so corrupt that it hurts poor people and poor minorities (upperclass minorities send their kids to private schools like how upperclass people do) is immaterial because the telos of public schools is the state’s power and the state’s justice.
This is probably more true than many of us would like to admit…
Do leftists themselves know this? The normie democrat voter thinks that government helps poor people. But intellectuals who have read any economic history should understand that capitalism makes people rich and that governments are often a barrier to the advancement of the poor and downtrodden.
But that obvious empirical reality doesn’t mean much to the intellectual leftie who should know better. Is that because in his heart, the intellectual knows that the government can be a perfected expression of human benevolence even if all of history says otherwise?
What do they spiritually and or intellectually believe in?
Just got the word from MoveOn into how to fight back against White Supremacy. Have no idea how it got my cell no. 5 points:
Stuff our mothers taught us when we will six years old. Then the punchline:
5. Fight for reparations.
Always about the money isn’t it?
It’s really about the power that the struggle for the money will bring. It’s always about the power.
What surprises me is how I have gone from a mild mannered grandma to a Nazi while never changing my views that small, limited government and more liberty is the answer… all because I wear homemade, Hawaiian print shirts and Dr Seuss face masks. I have made those shirts for 35 years, either from flower prints or pepper prints. I don’t consider Thing 1 and Thing 2, a cat, an elephant, and fishes controversial, but here we are.
As I just posted at the WSJ, extremism isn’t bad. Illegal violence is bad, whether it comes from moderates or anyone else. But extremism is protected by our Constitution. Republicans should be extremists if they want to have any redeeming social value. So should Democrats.