[brickfaced]

Strikes me as odd how one flavor of commenters who've long called for the "end of the American Empire," reductions in our "overseas military imperialism," and closure of the VoA "propaganda outlet" now stand by the institutions of said Empire to the death.

[mike_d]

I don't hold that view point, but if even the critics can see this as something evil, that should tell you something.

You can not like your neighbors partying and playing music until 3 AM, but also have the moral compass to know that setting fire to their house is not the solution.

[dlcarrier]

Either party will argue against what the other is doing, while they do it, but it's what happens as the parties swap leadership that makes it clear what the party actually dislikes.

They don't discontinue everything the other party implemented, even when it's easy to do so, and that's the true indicator that the party is okay with something, regardless of the partisan complaints made when it was initially implemented.

[Aloisius]

I don't think so. What's described isn't one party attacking another for positions they supposedly support. Neither of the mainstream parties supported the "end of the American Empire" - that's something you really only heard from paleo-socialists, anarchists and contrarians regurgitating Cold War Soviet propaganda.

[01100011]

It's sad that otherwise reasonable folks either aren't aware or are too embarrassed to acknowledge their political biases.

But here we are. Trump is bad(and hey, he mostly is), so now we're justified in lying in any way shape or form that it takes to inflict some harm on his ideas, actions or person. The first casualty of someone like trump is our own character. We can't admit anything he does has positive benefits because to do so would be to give an inch to literal hitler.

If you went back 20 years and asked your average liberal activist they'd be all in favor of rolling back American "imperial actions and organizations" like USAID(long suspected to work closely with the CIA since at least the 60s). But here we are, debasing ourselves for politics' sake.

[googlehater]

I find this interesting as well, so I think it's unfortunate you are downvoted. In a similar vein, the ultrapatriotic type that loved the USA being #1, having influence everywhere, also seem to be cheering on the dismantling of the soft (and some hard) power structures. But I get the feeling there's some granularity we are both missing, and the group saying those things then and these things now (pro/anti Trump reactionaries), isn't as big as we think.

[brickfaced]

The simple answer is that one group's ideological allies grabbed control of the Empire and now they don't want to give it up.