In America 2018, whataboutism is the last refuge of scoundrels, and bothsidesism is the last refuge of cowards.
Read the whole thing. (And see the update below.)
I’m going round and round with a couple of friends on Facebook. One is constantly taking me to task for being confrontational; he prefers to work ‘quietly behind the scenes’. The other is a hardcore bothsidest who thinks Hillary was as corrupt as Trump.
God save us all from my friends; they mean well but we all know what the road to Hell is paved with. More from Krugman:
False equivalence, portraying the parties as symmetric even when they clearly aren’t, has long been the norm among self-proclaimed centrists and some influential media figures. It’s a stance that has hugely benefited the GOP, as it has increasingly become the party of right-wing extremists.
You might have thought that the horrifying events of recent days would finally break through that norm. But you would have been wrong. Bothsidesism is, it turns out, a fanatical cult impervious to evidence. Trump famously boasted that his supporters would stick with him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue; what he didn’t point out was that pundits would piously attribute the shooting to “incivility,” and that Sunday talk shows would feature Fifth-Avenue-shooting advocates and give them a respectful hearing.
This needs to stop, and those who keep practicing bothsidesism need to be shamed. At this point, pretending that both sides are equally to blame, or attributing political violence to spreading hatred without identifying who’s responsible for that spread, is a form of deep cowardice.
emphasis added
UPDATE: underwriter505 turned up a video that explains in detail where the polarization is coming from, and calls out the bothsideism that is giving it cover. It’s ten minutes that makes the record clear. Please find time to watch, and share.