| American politics occupies a postage stamp on a continent of political possibility. Perhaps this is true for "mainstream" politics for most of the past 100 years. I'm not so sure it applies to political activism on campus (i.e. Evergreen), the Alt-Right, Antifa, explicitly White Supremacist fringes, Redneck Revolution, &c. It is bizarre to argue about left and right when it takes a microscope to differentiate the two. Agreed, but as I point out above, the small difference between the traditional Democrat and Republican parties isn't the issue in 2018. If you don't like "leftward shifts", when did you decide to vote Democrat? As a child of immigrants, I was basically raised to vote Democrat. I showed up for the first primaries for Obama, noting the ham-fisted attempt of the local democratic secretary to get us all to incorrectly fill in the forms to disenfranchise us. I remember distinctly when basically no one would ever use the term "White Supremacist" north of the Mason Dixon line without being considered a conspiracy nutcase. I remember when the dismantling of due process and the wholesale labeling of the rural population as "deplorables" would've been considered stupidity from the mouth of a Democratic candidate. I remember when "safe spaces" on campus would've been immediately rejected as infantile nonsense by Democrats. I remember when the kind of toxicity, fact-free imputation, and leaning on emotional images in we see in today's politics would have been called out by Democrats as an intellectually dishonest mode of operation. Not to say that politics were free of such nonsense and pollution, but back then, it was widely recognized as nonsense and pollution and not thought of as an intellectually and morally worthy activity. |