Partisan Hate Is Becoming a National Crisis

[nota bene]

Then you weren't around in the 60's and 70's. This is child's play compared to that era. Here it seems bigger than it is due to social media and cable TV where if the president farts CNN reports he is having intestinal problems and bring on their doctor to explain why we should invoke the 25th amendment.

This is "child's play" compared to the '60's and '70's?!

 

[Bullseye]

I accept your defeat.

I accept your desperation.

 

[Geoist]

You've just demonstrated here what part of the problem is, the blame-casting. We need to be trying to find ways to work together.

I am more than willing to work with people on the other side of the fence. I have been vocal in my support of sane and rational conservatives like Charlie Sykes, Justin Amash, and (sometimes) Rand Paul. My god, my wife and I are surrounded by Trump-loving conservatives on both sides of our families who we have to try and find common ground with, regularly. But I am not going to lie and disillusion myself by saying both sides share the blame equally. That would be dishonest. Once again, there is no one on the Dems side who is the Trump equivalent. There is no one on the Dems side with a cultlike following. Not even Obama.

 

[Grand Mal]

Although he says he's skeptical about whether what Pelosi has said about not going down the road to impeachment unless the reason is compelling "represents a true shift from toxic partisanship," David French says that at least she's doing what more politicians should do, looking beyond one's one "tribe" and thinking of the larger body politic, and argues that this is a "national necessity." From his article:

This morning the New York Times’ Thomas Edsall published an important essay highlighting a new study that analyzed the extent of “lethal mass partisanship.” As Edsall observes, the paper contained some disturbing statistics. Among them, “42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as ‘downright evil.’” A stunning 20 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans believe “we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died.” And if the opposing party wins the 2020 election, 18 percent of Democrats and 13 percent of Republicans “feel violence would be justified.”

We hear quite a bit about “dehumanizing rhetoric” in American public life. Well, it appears that tens of millions of Americans now have dehumanizing beliefs. “One out of five Republicans and Democrats agree with the statement that their political adversaries ‘lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.’”

...It’s in this atmosphere that I’m increasingly of the view that the vanishing, bipartisan class of civil libertarians represent an important ingredient in the glue that keeps America together. The fundamental idea that we should defend the rights of others that we would like to exercise ourselves often requires that we gain greater sympathetic understanding of our opponents’ points of view. After all, the defense of liberty in the public square can never be merely legalistic. To be effective it also has to humanize. Nancy Pelosi & Trump Impeachment -- Partisan Hate Is Becoming a National Crisis | National Review

If you see those with whom you disagree as "more jackal than human," then you're "justified" in the impulse to ruin their lives and livelihoods. But at what cost to the nation?

Come, let us reason together, showing respect for all and malice toward none.

The vultures are circling.

 

[calamity]

Well, a Trump loving Right Wing white supremacist just shot and killed 50 Muslims. But, let’s blame both sides.

 

[SMTA]

The truth is unpleasant, isn't it?

You should try and utilize truth more often in your posts. It is refreshing.

 

[SMTA]

Putin owns the Democratic Party. No foreign government needs spies when they have the Democratic Party as their agents.

And what information, pray tell, do you have that proves this?
As usual, you are long in opinion, and severely short on facts.
Stop posting such unsubstantiated garbage that you can't prove.

 

[calamity]

And what information, pray tell, do you have that proves this?
As usual, you are long in opinion, and severely short on facts.
Stop posting such unsubstantiated garbage that you can't prove.

No doubt. His posts have been pure pull from ass and hit keyboard lately.

 

[SMTA]

No doubt. His posts have been pure pull from ass and hit keyboard lately.

He has always been that way.
He never met a fact that he could recognize. Ever.

 

[haymarket]

Still butthurt you didn't get your way I see.

Your terminology is intended to be insulting, dealing and is contrary to honest debate. Bt then you knew that when you wrote it.

 

[washunut]

This is "child's play" compared to the '60's and '70's?!

I guess that is before your time. We had a presidential assassination, MLK,RFK Kent state. Riots over Vietnam with workers in NYC attacking college kids. Riots in cities over civil rights. Extreme groups like SDS. Nixon, the list goes on.

Yes child's play.

 

[bongsaway]

In your first nine words, you demonstrated that you don't understand what "individual" means.

Is it not individuals who make up the GOP? Or is the GOP like a faceless corporation. It's there, it's just that no individual owns it. I noticed you didn't comment on the rest of the post.

 

[eohrnberger]

Your terminology is intended to be insulting, dealing and is contrary to honest debate. Bt then you knew that when you wrote it.

You telling other about 'honest debate'. Wow. The irony meeter just exploded.

This for the guy who wants to redefine legitimate to what he wants it to mean.

 

[nota bene]

I guess that is before your time. We had a presidential assassination, MLK,RFK Kent state. Riots over Vietnam with workers in NYC attacking college kids. Riots in cities over civil rights. Extreme groups like SDS. Nixon, the list goes on.

Yes child's play.

Thank you for the history lesson, but no--what is going on today isn't "child's play," in my opinion.

 

[nota bene]

Is it not individuals who make up the GOP? Or is the GOP like a faceless corporation. It's there, it's just that no individual owns it. I noticed you didn't comment on the rest of the post.

That's because I realized that there was no hope when you aren't able to distinguish between an individual and a group (a collective of individuals). I spoke of individual action and character, meaning each ONE of us.

 

[Lafayette]

From the Guardian here: Forget Trump – populism is the cure, not the disease

Excerpt:

Yascha Mounk, the author of The People vs Democracy, is a man of impressive establishment credentials: a lecturer at Harvard, a fellow at the New America Foundation and a columnist at Slate. According to his website, he is “one of the world’s leading experts on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism”.

By “populism” Mounk means the species of nasty right-wing politics associated with Trump and various European bad guys such as the leaders of Hungary and Poland. He uses the word as a kind of synonym for racist tyranny and in his account populist politicians are villainous in ways that go beyond the profession’s conventions. Populists, he informs us, tell lies. They dislike the press, they shatter “norms”, and they aspire to be dictators. They carry what he calls, in a revealing phrase, “the populist disease".

If Mounk represents social-scientific professionalism coming to cure what ails us, however, I fear we are in big trouble. He repeatedly tells us, for example, that right-wing populism is a new, consensus-smashing thing; that before Trump and co came along the politics of the western world were “frozen”; that things “barely changed”; that leaders respected “norms”. He never divulges who invented this hateful populism thing, but he does inform us that “one of the earliest populists” was Jörg Haider, a far-right Austrian politician who died in 2008.

I read all this with mounting incredulity. History wasn’t just a nice centrist monotone before Trump and the gang got started. There was a momentous turn in the west that began about 40 years ago; it involved the triumph of business interests over rivals such as the unions and the regulatory state. You know: Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton, Blair and so on. Take my word for it: the rightward turn was a big deal. And it’s still going. It dwarfs Trump; indeed, it subsumes him. Trump’s presidency is just the latest chapter in this ugly story, not some new thing altogether.

As for populism, historians typically trace the populist rhetorical tradition in America back to the time of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. A radical left-wing political party that called itself “Populist” swept much of the country in the 1890s, and protest movements described as populist have come and gone. Populism’s evil right-wing doppelganger is usually dated to 1968, when George Wallace and Richard Nixon figured out how to turn the language of working-class majoritarianism against liberalism. Right-wing populists have been building movements and winning elections in the US ever since.

Mounk barely acknowledges any of this. Instead, he asserts a frightening new vision of populism without discussing the old one. “There can no longer be any doubt that we are going through a populist moment,” he writes at one point. “The question now is whether this populist moment will turn into a populist age – and cast the very survival of liberal democracy in doubt.”

Sounds bad, all right. Demonic, even. But the phrase “populist moment” rang a bell.

'Nuff said, methinks ...

 

[calamity]

Thank you for the history lesson, but no--what is going on today isn't "child's play," in my opinion.

Especially when Right Wing nuts go and shoot up Mosques and Synagogues.

 

[washunut]

Thank you for the history lesson, but no--what is going on today isn't "child's play," in my opinion.

Read my full statement. I said compared to those prior periods. Not that this isn't a real mess. Why can't we have honest discussions on this site?

 

[Nickyjo]

Too late; partisan hate started right after Trump's election , fueled by the liberal media world-wide.
The start of hate geared at Trump and his supporters was a well-organized global "initiative".

Just think reasonable for a moment: how many times have there been protests and riots in the US of A when another country elected a president some of us did not like?


"Following Trump's election to the presidency, students and other activists organized larger protests in several major cities across the United States, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Portland and Oakland. Tens of thousands of protesters participated,[56][57][58] with many chanting "Not my president!" to express their opposition to Trump's victory in the Electoral College (He lost the popular vote by a margin of 2.1 percent).[59] Protests were also held in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Philippines, Australia and Israel with some continuing for several days, and more protests planned for the following weeks and months. ..."

Protests against Donald Trump - Wikipedia


Sorry, but this is an organized hate from the left ... and the left will never ease off from their hate. Just look at the responses on this thread ... (grin)

I must have missed it, but did the left call migrants rapists, did the left spread false info on black on white homicide, did leftists say falsely that New Jersey Muslims celebrated 9/11, did leftists say that a judge couldn't be fair because he was of Mexican descent? I detect a whiff of hate there, don't you?

Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, grabbing them by the *****, and women (and men) demonstrated wearing ***** hats. Sounds fair to me. Don't believe me. You can look all this up in the Trump University Library, or perhaps get a grant from the Trump Foundation to do your research.

The man is a fairly normal conservative president, making life a bit tougher in the workplace and for the enviornment. But as a human, he is a sad, cruel, lonely man.

 

[ashurbanipal]

I guess that is before your time. We had a presidential assassination, MLK,RFK Kent state. Riots over Vietnam with workers in NYC attacking college kids. Riots in cities over civil rights. Extreme groups like SDS. Nixon, the list goes on.

Yes child's play.

I was around for some of that. It's starting to look like the lead-up to those times...and definitely some more sinister undertones going on, especially with greater income and wealth inequality than we had then.

 

[Lafayette]

"The greatest political scandal in American history is being met with denial and obstruction from Republicans, whose party once championed the rule of law.".

Nothing at all wrong with the above "saying".

Except that over the centuries (two to be exact) the Replicants have come to believe that the "rule of law" pertained particularly to tax-law and the aberrant destruction of Income Parity by means of reducing drastically upper-income taxation. (Which does not mean the same income for all!)

Which has brought America and Americans to this distasteful consequence (of aberrant Income Disparity):

"Income fairness" means a statistical-distribution of income levels that is equitable - not equal but equitable. Which America has not seen since JFK/LBJ started taking down upper-income rates in the 1960s (from 90 to 70%) and Reckless Ronnie whacked them back to 30%. Where it has more or less remained, thus making America's Income Disparity one of the worst in the western-world of "market democracies".

(Which leads naturally - if Wealth is After-tax-income - to this graphical occurrence here.)

How does that fact regarding income compare internationally? From the economic research done - for instance here.

'Nuff said? Probably not. Since the dawn of mankind wealth has been the principle motivator of human-beings. Some saying it is "so human as to be natural".

Well, no, it aint natural . Rain and snow are natural. Income Disparity is man-made by governments ... !

 

[washunut]

I was around for some of that. It's starting to look like the lead-up to those times...and definitely some more sinister undertones going on, especially with greater income and wealth inequality than we had then.

Not saying there are not legitimate concerns and reasons for people to be mad. Don't agree with the more sinister undertone though. As a reminder we had the three kids shot in Mississippi who were Freedom Riders. We had police turn water cannons and dogs attack peaceful protesters. The national guard shot and killed four kids at Kent state. There was the 1968 police riot at the democratic convention. In NYC union workers attacked kids protesting the war with their work tools. Hitting girls in the head with them.

So no not even close IMO. I don't care what news you turn into, today it is entertain and opinion less fact. Builds a portrait sort of like a movie you can't turn off. They keep their audience by making it seem like this has to be the end of the world...B.S.

Not saying I like what is going on, but I have lived through materially worse in America.

 

[haymarket]

Of course the article is true. I have seen people display such attitudes on this site all the time, then play victim, and then tell others they don't matter and their feelings don't matter. I have accepted that this is state America is in, and I don't see it getting better with a person like Trump in office. He is not 100 percent to blame, but he definately plays into tribalism and division, and peddles in hate.

Trump is to blame - 95% then.

 

[haymarket]

Not saying there are not legitimate concerns and reasons for people to be mad. Don't agree with the more sinister undertone though. As a reminder we had the three kids shot in Mississippi who were Freedom Riders. We had police turn water cannons and dogs attack peaceful protesters. The national guard shot and killed four kids at Kent state. There was the 1968 police riot at the democratic convention. In NYC union workers attacked kids protesting the war with their work tools. Hitting girls in the head with them.

So no not even close IMO. I don't care what news you turn into, today it is entertain and opinion less fact. Builds a portrait sort of like a movie you can't turn off. They keep their audience by making it seem like this has to be the end of the world...B.S.

Not saying I like what is going on, but I have lived through materially worse in America.

You wisely bring up many events from our past. And we have re-entered the bad old days with Trump who enjoys it and is more to blame for the division that any there person in the land.

Today, there are less obvious ways to achieve the same effect at the water canons and angry dogs we sadly remember. But wealth inequality is a problem that only seems to be getting worse over time.

 

[Lafayette]

Not saying I like what is going on, but I have lived through materially worse in America.

It's not a question of "material" but body-count (from here):
*Vietnam (1955/1975): 58,209
*Afghanistan (2001/2014): 2356
*Iraq (2003/2012): 4489

Foreign interventions that kill our kids and why? Just what-the-hell is so important that we must spend around $600B a year on the DoD (which is more than half the total Federal discretionary budget) to defend our military posture?

Because the kids are enticed into military duty by the promise to pay for their education (if they survive) - see that here: Military Service Gives Students an Edge Paying for Grad School.

Just what the hell is the country coming to? You have to risk your life to get a postsecondary education? (Which is free, gratis and for nothing in Europe!)

Wow ... !