Republicans frequently invoke “equality” in pushing against affirmative action (“why should one race get an advantage over others”?), “morality” in abortion (“it is murder to kill the unborn”), “responsibility” (arguing for “personal responsibility” all the time in issues like welfare, urban poverty, school performance,) “justice” and “respect for law” in illegal immigration (“we need politicians who will properly enforce the laws on the books and eject illegal immigrants,”) “freedom” in gun rights (“Second Amendment gives freedom to own guns,”) etc.
The fact that you cannot see that shows that people interprets those terms only from their own lens. Bear in mind that ISIS also has an extremely strong sense of morality.
(Before someone misinterprets my words, I’m not comparing the Republican Party to ISIS; I’m just saying that just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean they don’t have a strong sense of morality. Plenty of good and bad things are done in the name of morality.)
That’s sort of a bad premise with a lot of bad assumptions. Just because people vote differently than you’d like them to vote doesn’t mean they are the ones opposed to democracy.
Right. They are *always *at risk. At the same time, the safeguards against that risk have proven to be extremely strong. There is no evidence to my eye that those safeguards have vanished or are unequal to the task today. I lived through the Civil Rights/Vietnam era under Nixon. That was scary. Today is merely clownish by comparison.
I lived through that era also. This one scares me worse, for two reasons:
For one, in the 60’s and 70’s everyone was pretty much watching the same three TV channels, and had a similar idea of what was actually going on. There was a lot of disagreement as to what should be going on; but people were less likely to be drawing on an entirely different basis of information. And nobody, or effectively nobody, was saying that little girls hadn’t actually been blown up in their church, or burned by napalm.
For two, a lot of the disagreement about the Vietnam war was between generations within the same families. This made it nastier in some ways (and I don’t want to diminish how nasty such things can get; families split during the Civil War, after all, and risked actually killing each other), but it also made it harder to entirely write off people of different opinions as being people who just shouldn’t matter. – it occurs to me that reason 2 doesn’t apply anywhere near as much to the civil rights issue, though there was some generational shift there also.
This is worse than the Nixon era because of the blatancy of the grift and partisanship. There were a lot more traditional conservatives in the electorate than there are now but they knew corruption and power grabbing when they saw it. Today’s right fears losing power far more than it does losing respect for governing dishonorably.
I agree that the split realities are a very real threat. I’m not as sure as you that this is something new.
I’m a science fiction writer. Many decades ago, way before anyone thought of the internet, I had an idea for a novel set in a civilization based on two rival newspapers that reported news in opposite fashion, and the growth of two parallel timelines based on them. It was too complicated to work out so I never wrote it. But I sure wish I had, because it would now be cited as almost supernatural prediction.
I hate to be an optimist on anything, but I don’t believe the current situation is permanent. Demographics doom the aging, rural, white conservative core to become ever more a minority while today’s minorities will become the majority - and the majority electorate - sooner rather than later. Trump’s loss will break their power structure and there doesn’t seem to be anybody out there to replace him. President Tucker Carlson? Don’t think so.
As has been said earlier, both sides still agree on the same ends. They disagree on means. That’s also been true many times in the past. America will survive its idiot populations. That’s what optimism looks like.