I’ve noticed lately on social media that there seem to be people who have a real problem. Not the MAGA diehards, of course. Trump could do almost anything and still have their loyalty. (Although taxes this year are getting their attention. Surprise! Tired of winning yet?)
No, the people I’m thinking of are the middle of the roaders who don’t pay attention to politics; the people who think ‘political’ is an insult and a dirty word; the people who say they don’t care about party — they vote for the person, or their particular issue, and so on. The people who stay home on Election Day because nobody meets their standards. The people who pay more attention to sports than what’s happening in their state capital or in DC. The people who mean well but are conflict-averse and just wish it would all go away.
Their problem is Donald Trump is making it very hard to pretend politics and parties don’t matter, that they’re all the same, that both parties put their interests ahead of country, and so on. (You know, it’s possible to support party AND country at the same time — if your party is still sane.)
It’s driving some of them crazy because they can’t ignore politics the way they used to, trusting the country would keep running mostly ‘normally’ no matter who was in charge. They have more important things to do with their lives, right?
But here’s their dilemma. Trump is bad. The Republican Party is completely behind Trump. You can’t separate them or easily pretend to yourself that Trump isn’t the whole party unless you are in serious denial. There are still perfectly good people who call themselves Republicans — but they can only do so by closing their eyes to what’s going on. (Yeah, just like the ‘Good Germans’ we have “Very fine people”.) Mind you, they try mightily to keep the delusion going, but Trump keeps making it harder with every tweet, every broken promise, every new revelation of corruption, every racist sexist comment, every appointment of another terrible person to a job for which they’re unfit.
And God knows the media is conflicted. As has been pointed out, most of the media hacks out there came of age during the Clinton years, so they have a reflex attitude towards Democratic politicians to look for scandals to bring them down. (Clinton rules and all that.) Then add in the 911 trauma, where everyone fell in line behind W because terrorism. All the lies, the corruption, the criminal acts — they mostly got a pass because no one wanted the terrorists to win. They’d rather focus on individual bad behavior than systemic malice.
Somehow the party that completely blew the warnings before 911, couldn’t catch Osama bin Laden, and invaded Iraq to no purpose is still supposedly strong on defense — and Democrats aren’t. (Obama hated the military, Obama went on an apology tour, and so on.) The same party that racked up trillions in the national debt is still supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility — even though the economy blew up on their watch under W. The party that has embraced a serial adulterer, sexual predator, con-man, and pathological liar is still the party of ‘family values.’ The party of small government is the one that built an immense domestic spying apparatus during the W years — and is now using ICE like a state security apparatus.
But the media still falls back on those cliches by habit. And they desperately want to keep on pretending that there’s no real difference between the parties — because to admit otherwise would blow up their narratives, piss off a good chunk of their audience, and upset their corporate owners. The very important talking heads would stop appearing on their shows and the inside information would dry up. So, both-sideism is still their preferred default with a few exceptions. (That, and IOKIYAR).
But Trump and the GOP are making that ever harder to pull off.
So here’s the problem for the uncommitted. If they want to stay in their safe space, they have to ramp up their contempt for Democrats and pound even harder on the old cliches about taxing and spending, special interests, the whole nine yards. After years of being able to call out Democrats for their flaws for ‘balance’ against GOP failings, they are confronted with Trump who has defined GOP deviancy so far down you can’t see it with a telescope. In their quest to avoid polarization, they actually increase it. Paradox!
A lot of them just can’t make that leap, that maybe Democrats aren’t just as bad, or not even the worst thing, that maybe Republicans don’t deserve any credibility. Meanwhile the Mighty Wurlitzer of the wing nut propaganda empire of talk radio and FAUX NEWS keeps the drumbeat of hate for Democrats going loud and strong. The mainstream media picks up and amplifies their messaging.
But every day brings us that much closer to the cliff edge, and it gets harder for them to avoid looking at it. You can sense their fear and frustration building up. You can sense the desperation with which they deny how bad things have gotten — and who is to blame. Their cries for unity and non-partisanship even as they double-down on reflex both-sideism would be pathetic if they weren’t so misguided and counter-productive.
For some, the response is to become ‘woke’, to get off the sidelines. It has become personal in some way that opens their eyes. Something happens that they can’t dismiss or ignore. Maybe it’s Nazis marching in the streets, or a child dying in a holding cell. Maybe it’s seeing the factory in their community ship jobs somewhere else, despite promises (and tax incentive payoffs) to the contrary.
For others, they turn to despair and/or nihilism, or take refuge in the comforting solipsism of libertarianism. (For some it’s a short step.) After years of conservative anti-government indoctrination, they reject the idea that government can do anything to improve matters, that there are any honest politicians anywhere, or that anything but the status quo of some illusionary past age of glory is desirable or possible — even as it breaks down before their eyes.
Here’s a sample of that attitude from a site discussing rail travel as part of the Green New Deal:
anything the govt. Has there tendrils in ends up worse than it was before. That's how we ended up with Amtrash in the first place. Promises will be made that can't be paid for, taxes will be raised which will hurt taxes payers more, politicians will line their pockets including cortez. By the way, how will people travel overseas without jets? Not that I will ever get to go overseas or anything. People not working? The utopia has been tried before. People who are poor or considered useless are eliminated by starvation or ripped from the womb. Sound familiar? Some were gassed. No I'm not willing to let this great experiment end since it works better than most.
That person may not be a fan of Trump, but they sure as hell don’t sound like they’re ready to engage in any leaps of faith either.
The Republicans are trying to counter disenchantment with Trump and the GOP by ramping up the hype and playing division for all its worth. Calling the GND Socialism, and equating Socialism with genocide, claiming Democrats are cheering killing babies at birth while booing God — they’re pushing the pedal to the metal in the race to the bottom. It’s all they’ve got.
Amanda Marcotte captures the dynamic at work here, referring to the mess in Virginia:
But I'd argue that what Republicans are up to here is more sinister than garden variety hypocrisy. Their larger purpose is to push the idea that no one actually cares about racism or sexism, and that all protestations to the contrary are just postures that liberals adopt for political gain. Their strategy is to seed the notion that everyone is a bigot motivated by greed and naked self-interest, so they can then turn around and hold Republicans out as slightly better because hey, at least they're honest about it.
emphasis added
All the media attention in Virginia is on the Democrats — but this guy isn’t going anywhere yet that I’ve heard. The media is reflexively terrified of progressives — even as the GOP is openly demonizing the press. (Years of bullying the press by the Right continue to pay off.) The media exploits every fault line in the Democratic Party (and there are plenty of them) because Democrats in Disarray is a standard narrative that writes itself. (And the GOP is always happy to feed them stories reinforcing that.)
How many stories have you seen framing the idea that Nancy Pelosi is selling out the progressives and pushing corporatist policies behind the scenes, instead of pragmatism tempering idealism with experience? How many Democratic politicians reflexively abase themselves and come down hard on other Democrats the instant the press comes to them with more dirt dug up by Republican operatives? It’s an unthinking response to the problem of continually being painted as being ‘just like them’, where the natural response to demonstrate otherwise gets pushed to extremes. And the real bad guys and gals just laugh it off. A world where people can believe Roger Stone is a persecuted martyr is definitely through the Looking Glass.
The Dark Arts of the GOP ratfckers are in heavy use. Black Lives Matter was turned into a war on the Pigs by black people. Putting Roe v Wade protections into law at the state level has been turned into baby murder on demand all the way up to the delivery room. Religious tolerance has been turned into the imposition of Sharia Law. The resurgence of White Nationalists, the KKK, Neo-Nazis is nothing compared to the threat of Anti-Fa. Talking about race is the real racism. Climate change is a hoax, Democrats want to open the borders to hordes of drug-smuggling murderer-rapist terrorists riddled with disease, want to tax everyone into poverty while stealing elections with voter fraud, while making kids gay, and hating God and puppies. The bigger the lie, the harder they push it.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better — if it gets better. There are no guarantees in history and the US has torn itself apart before — check out the 1960s or the 1860s — or any of the other times American Exceptionalism did a prat-fall on its face. Calling polarization bad and worrying about it is pointless if you ignore WHY polarization is happening. The differences are getting too big to paper over. Again. They’re real, and they’re substantive. False equivalence is becoming perilously close to a mortal sin.
One thing is certain. Life for the both-siders, the uncommitted, the holier-than-thou non-partisan, non-political “Good Americans” is going to become increasingly untenable. Tough. It was ever thus.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Eyes on the prize. Forward momentum. Resist.