It’s such a mystery how anyone got the idea that mainstream Democrats were dangerous communists and nihilists who wanted to destroy America and must therefore be given no quarter.
https://twitter.com/ifthedevilisix/status/1217267600775962626
Ben was consistently one of the most widely shared voices on Facebook in 2020. He of course does not condone the violence of last week, and I’m sure is shocked that some of his listeners might take such actions.
Conservatives: Liberals are an alien life form that poses an existential threat to the future existence of America.
Liberals: Um, that's a really ridiculous, entirely inaccurate, and anti-democratic thing for you to say.
Media: Both sides criticize each other's extremism.
Liberals: Um, that's a really ridiculous, entirely inaccurate, and anti-democratic thing for you to say.
Media: Both sides criticize each other's extremism.
IMO, "asymmetrical partisanship" is one of the key concepts that explains US politics since the 90s. This explainer is from 2014, the year Shapiro made the comments in the linked video above. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
Years of anti-communist rhetoric rendered our political culture hamstrung when it came to identifying dangers on the right. Too many conservatives and centrists looked to their right and saw only overzealous super-patriots (but never proto- or actual fascists).
But when Jack Kemp sneeringly calls Al Gore a "socialist" in 1996 as if that's entirely disqualifying and will put us on the slippery slope to the gulag, everyone nods sagely and says "yes yes, must lower top marginal tax rates to avoid slippery slope to gulag."
It should go without saying that the US's history of giving every benefit of the doubt possible to people on the far right has everything to do with the fact that such people have been, 99.9% of the time, white and often middle or upper-middle class.
That "slippery slope" idea is basically a meme-ified version of Hayek's "Road to Serfdom." Even Hayek, however, was not exactly what the contemporary right would want him to have been.
https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/968954860455342080?s=20
Imagine being a an elected official and thinking "Metal detectors are communism" is a thing one could say without your constituents laughing you out of office. That is today's GOP.
https://twitter.com/RepDLesko/status/1349153861865496577?s=20
By @RepDLesko's standard, the NRA is a communist organization because they made people go through a metal detector before attending President Trump's speech at their 2018 convention. ajc.com/blog/buzz/what…
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