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The "understanding" until now has been that Democrats get to be as vicious, racist, and divisive as they want to be, freely challenging the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with their policy agenda, and the only acceptable GOP response was a meek call for unity.
Dems can, for example, freely denounce everyone who opposes their policy agenda as a Nazi, which is very definitely a challenge to their patriotism. Repubs are supposed to respond only by calling on everyone - prominently including their own constituents - to be nicer.
Democrats were very comfortable with questioning the patriotism of anyone who opposed Barack Obama's agenda. VERY comfortable. The media never had any problem with it whatsoever.
The GOP response to vicious Democrat rhetoric was always required to include a ritual denunciation of their own voters. They could never call out the Dems for divisive rhetoric without making it a general call for *everyone* to be more civil.
Perhaps most importantly, Republicans weren't supposed to attack the Dems' IDEAS as inherently divisive, hateful, or unpatriotic. They could tut-tut rhetoric but were required to proclaim Democrats were great Americans who meant well, even if they got a few things wrong.
Quite often, Republicans would refrain from responding to vicious Democrat rhetoric or dangerously anti-American ideology at all, because saying anything took them perilously close to words they feared the media would punish them for uttering.
Repubs told themselves Dems were only hurting their own cause with wild, hateful, emotionally charged rhetoric. They would alienate thoughtful voters who would turn to the sober and thoughtful GOP.
This left Republican voters feeling alienated and abandoned. Why wouldn't their representatives ever stand up for them, trading punches with the people who called them ignorant and immoral, questioning their patriotism and their very humanity?
The Dems weren't just insulting Middle America to whip up their voting base with the kind of populist campaigns Republicans have been intimidated out of waging. They were - and are - saying GOP voters have no moral standing to influence crucial policy debates.
The totalitarian Democrat platform is all about deplatforming, disenfranchising, and dominating. They imperiously command that huge numbers of hard-working Americans have no right to vote on, or even talk about, policy debates with trillion-dollar implications.
You want border security? You're a Nazi who supports concentration camps. Resist socialized medicine? You want poor people to die. Opposed to reparations? Shut up, racist. Oppose environmentalist lunacy? You're genocidal. Want lower taxes and regulation? You're a selfish SOB.
In every case, the Democrat strategy is to tell huge numbers of Americans they aren't really, fully American citizens. You deserve no seat at the table in these policy debates. Everything you vote for will be nullified. You don't even deserve free speech.
As for how they see themselves, Democrats make a HUGE fetish out of refusing to identify as fully American. It's always qualified, hyphenated, diluted. They're loyal to their vision, not the country as it is today, its history, or its interests.
The new wave of radical Democrats would spit in disbelief at the notion they are supposed to represent and respect the Americans they despise. They've explicitly said as much. They have zero respect for American citizenship and see no greatness in the American people.
Trump took the rhetoric of the Craptastic Four seriously and told them to live up to it. He didn't make a racial insult, threaten to deport them, deny their citizenship, or even tell them to get out of the country for good.
He told them to go to the countries they clearly see themselves as representing, to AT LEAST the degree they think of themselves as representing Americans, implement the policies they view as superior to the American way, and return with the results.
Trump called them out on their vicious bullshit in a way Republicans are never, ever supposed to do. Repubs aren't supposed to take Dem rhetoric seriously or hold them up to it. They're supposed to assume the best of intentions and ignore the extremism. Nuts to that. /end
