And the rest of the GOP zombie mob.
Stumbled across this draft from sometime last year. No idea who/where it came from, so don’t hit me with the plagiarism label because I never finished synthesizing this cut ‘n paste idea. Seems more apt now than when I started putting it together:
“You correctly capture the intensity of hatred, but you completely and absolutely miss the mark as to why the respective parties make those statements.
Democrats didn’t go batshit absolutist simply because Republicans are the other team. This goes deeper than that. Trump is uniquely horrible, he’s verifiably done uniquely horrible things. I know you know this to be true.
There is some cadre of Republicans who are as tribal as you say… they’re against Democrats just because they aren’t Republicans. But they also say things like “Trump’s done bad things, but Hillary did worse, or she would have done worse things.”
When you ask them to explain “worse”, the responses you get point to things that simply aren’t real (qanon, “post-birth abortions”, or rank hypotheticals “we’ll become Venezuela”, or things that simply reveal an immature concept of “bad” (but her emails).
Tribalism exists, and it’s a factor, but it’s a big error to pretend it works the same way on both sides. It’s another big error to omit the fact that Trump supporters believe in a constructed false reality. They simply believe things that are made-up and imagined.
Having said that, I’ll contradict something I wrote above. Now, 3 years into the Trump presidency, many Democrats indeed have categorically written off Republicans. But it’s not, as you seem to think, because they’re Republicans. It’s because they’ve marched in lockstep to all the crazy, cruel, and delusional bullshit Trump has dished out over the past 4 years. They have proven themselves to be bad-faith governing partners because they are uninterested in governing society as a whole. They have shown themselves a pirate crew determined to loot wealth and power in the interest of preserving their own supremacy. This isn’t something I’d have said in the pre-Trump era, but it’s something they’ve demonstrated through complicity with the Trump crime racket.“