Posted on 08/25/2017 5:27:50 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
For several months following the extraordinary outcome of last year's presidential election, much of the country found itself stumbling through a severe case of politically inspired post-traumatic stress disorder.
Many anti-Trump conservatives, liberals, progressives, and those further to the left were at first stunned and then consumed by a mixture of outrage and revulsion that showed itself in the enormous protests that followed President Trump's inauguration. It also fueled spasms of blame-casting, with a rotating cast of characters coming in for abuse: Russian President Vladimir Putin, then-FBI Director James Comey, the press (for unfairly focusing undue attention on Hillary Clinton's email server management practices), and finally the nearly 63 million Americans who voted to elevate a sociopathic moron to the Oval Office.
The cycle of anger and blame continues to this day. But by now the outrage has been balanced by signs of hope for the future. Hardly a day goes by when Trump's legion of critics don't console themselves with poll numbers showing his approval ratings at historic lows and muse about the inevitability of his impeachment, removal from office, or resignation. For many it has become simply unthinkable that Trump might serve out his term, let alone that he would run for and win re-election in 2020. Any day now, most likely very soon, the darkness will lift, with political normalcy restored.
Sorry, but I'm not buying it.
For one thing, the chance of Republicans impeaching and removing from office the head of their own party is quite low and will remain so no matter what the multi-year-long investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller ultimately reveals. Then there's the fact that Trump managed to get nominated by his party and win the general election with historically weak polling numbers; that should give pause to anyone inclined to assume he'll be brought down by unpopularity.
But there are deeper reasons why optimism for the political future of the country is unearned. Something profoundly destabilizing is happening to the United States. Trump is a major symptom, and a contributing cause, of it. But it goes far beyond him, to implicate vast swaths of our politics and culture. No, this doesn't necessarily mean (as some have begun to suggest) that the country is hurtling toward "a new kind of civil war." But many bad things can happen short of a literal bloodbath in which citizens organize into factions and start killing each other en masse.
We see it all around us every day and use a range of names to describe aspects of it: extreme polarization, negative partisanship, spreading politicization of everyday life, the breakdown of democratic governance, the hollowing out of liberal norms.
To highlight one recent and especially prominent thread of examples among thousands since the 2016 election, consider how events in Charlottesville, Virginia, less than two weeks ago have radiated out into the country and the culture. Several hundred people, some of them heavily armed, showed up to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. They were greeted by large crowds of counter-protesters, some of whom were far-left "antifascist" anarchists. Violence escalated throughout the day, culminating in a murderous terrorist attack by one of the alt-right protesters that killed one counter-protester and injured many others.
The radicalism on each side was catalyzed in part by the internet, which (as Angela Nagle has laid out in her recent, essential book) has become a breeding ground for political extremism. Once that extremism had produced actual acts of political violence, what the country needed most of all was for its president to forthrightly denounce the bloodshed and prejudice of the alt-right and uphold the rule of law, including the decision of local communities to make their own democratic decisions about which monuments to remove or build. Instead, in a series of contradictory and inflammatory statements, President Trump seemed to go out of his way to defend the decency of the far-right protesters while eliding any distinction among ordinary counter-protesters and the antifa troublemakers.
Along the way, Trump also lashed out at those seeking the removal of Confederate statues, accusing them of stripping the country of its culture and heritage, which effectively placed him on the same side as the original alt-right protesters. He then went even further, to warn in incendiary terms that monuments to such foundational American figures as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would soon be in jeopardy.
At that point, as if to confirm the president's polarizing statements, demonstrators began toppling Confederate monuments in other communities. One group even took a sledgehammer to a 225-year-old statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore (with the act of iconoclasm captured in a video posted on YouTube and shared widely on Twitter, complete with a far-left narrative voiceover justifying the vandalism). Meanwhile, cable news chased ratings by finding commentators willing to turn the president into a prophet by defending such acts and making the case for removing statues of Washington and Jefferson from public places throughout the country.
In all, it's been a perfect storm of political and cultural polarization — and one that goes quite a bit beyond the rule recently proposed by journalist James Kirchick: "Every day, the American left behaves in ways designed to ensure Donald Trump's re-election." While that may well be true, the process also works in the reverse direction, with the right provoking the more high-minded center and center-left to move leftward and downward, into ever-more strident politicization.
We saw it this week: Trump gives an unhinged 80-minute tirade of a speech at a rally in Phoenix, including incessant lacerating attacks on the media (and especially CNN) for being his enemy. Then following the speech a panel of pundits on CNN lays into him for being a deranged lunatic who's unfit for high office — thereby making his case to his most devoted supporters.
And so it goes, round and round. President Trump is a big part of the dynamic, but removing him from the picture won't automatically steady the ship of state — especially when the act of removing him would convince millions of his admirers that, if anything, his paranoid, conspiracy-tinged accusations about the "swamp" of Washington, the deep state, and the media were understated.
The country is locked into a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing polarization — and it's unclear what could break or even temporarily disrupt it to buttress the center.
Or rather, it's unclear what could break or disrupt the cycle via democratic means. The extra-democratic path has grown clearer in just the past few weeks.
Of all the forces and factions at play throughout the executive branch, it is the high-ranking military officers alone who have seen their reputations burnished in the months since Trump was elected. They speak with caution and circumspection about complicated matters of policy. They coupishly countermand Trump's most intemperate tweets and polarizing public statements in the name of higher principle. They persuade an unschooled populist president to pursue policies favored by Washington's bipartisan (pro-war) establishment.
Trump loves his generals, and so do many of his most vociferous critics. That should worry American patriots every bit as much as the chaotic polarization that increasingly consumes us.
Destabilizing extremism to the right and left, the promise of salvation from the political whirlwind in the form of military rule from the center — as recently as two years ago, no one would have predicted such possible alternatives for the near-term American future. Yet here we are.
We can't know where we'll be four or eight years from now. But the case for optimism grows weaker with each passing week.
>> Many anti-Trump conservatives, liberals, progressives, and those further to the left were at first stunned and then consumed by a mixture of outrage and revulsion that showed itself in the enormous protests that followed President Trump’s inauguration.
Many anti-Trump conservatives... consumed by a mixture of outrage and revulsion...
Not buying it. Linda Graham (who called Hitlery Rotten Clinton a National Treasure) ain’t a conservative and neither is McVain.
I’m going to need to know how many “many” is. Conservatives were rejoicing that Corrupt AF Hillary was denied the top office. She’s a crook and everyone knows it. There would be no accountability and the country would go in the Jake Crapper.
President Trump is a big part of the dynamic, but removing him from the picture won’t automatically steady the ship of state —
There’s going to be a fight. Lets get it started and over with. Peter
and this Trump derangement syndrome would not be possible without the FakeNewsMSM playing the major role:
followup to earlier thread -
Surveillance Videos Contradict Channel 12 News Report on Confederate Memorial Vandalism
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3580631/posts?page=23
original article now has: Update: Channel 12 changes tale on Confederate memorial vandalism after New Times story.
25 Aug: Phoenix New Times: Channel 12 changes tale on Confederate Memorial vandalism after New Times story
by Ray Stern
The Facebook site of the reporter, Bryan West, has been taken down, too...
Also of note, Channel 3 (KTVK-TV) and Channel 5 (KPHO-TV) published the surveillance video on AZFamily.com last week, but edited out key scenes of the suspect’s arrival and departure. AZFamily also cut out the part near the end of the video where West and the cameraman show up, and the report failed to explain to viewers that the source of the light on the memorial is a news van’s headlights.
The 911 call that West made about the vandalism has not been released by the Arizona Department of Public Safety...
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/confederate-memorial-vandalism-report-by-channel-12-news-gets-changed-video-deleted-after-new-times-story-9628634
BOYCOTT ALL FAKENEWSMSM.
Once Marxism gets a foot hold in a government they will burn down the country to stay in power. We are at the brink of loosing out freedom. Powerful people are paying for these rent a mobs. The synchronization of the media in sedition means that if this escalates Americans are going to have to decide if we are going to allow them to destroy our freedom.
The closer you get to the concentration camp, the harder it is to survive if you fight. If you don’t fight, you die.
I'm posting my favorite .gif, even though my feelings on this are much more complex:
We have North of 500 million guns and trillions of rounds of ammunition. Who is going to put us into concentration camps?
At my heaviest (just over 400lbs) I could still do quite a bit better than that.
My enemy’s pessimism is my optimism.
For a lefty, I’d say this assessment is unusually cerebral and constructive, usually they’re simply screaming that they’re on the right side of history, we’re evil, etc.
I’m hoping this kind of lefty restraint and sobreity remains rare:
I actually think Antifa and Statue Defacement is angering a whole lot of people and I want it to continue.
Best would be for it to totally stop for now and then resume with great gusto about 2 weeks before the elections.
Ah, one who will not be lead quietly...
Welcome to the club. Guess I need more ammo cause these brown shirts are a bad sign.
The article is accurate than it is more about polarization than just Trump.
Does anyone believe that if Ted Cruz had won, the establishment would have accepted him and not immediately discussed removing Ted from office by any means necessary?
The establishment assumes they are entitled to power.
The right thinks they are entitled to freedom.
I don’t see any solution in the near future. Neither side is trying to educate or convince the other side. Wackos on each side repeatedly mention violence, illegal activities and insults that just alienate and make each side impossible to offer a plausible rationale why anyone should be a convert to their side.
For our side, I am mystified why some are so opposed to converting others to our way of thinking.
I love the defeat of my enemies, the smell of their fear and to read the lamentations of their journalists.
Feel-good schadenfreude article of the day, thanks for posting
Excellent post.
Yes, if instead it would have been Cruz?
We’d be sitting right here in the same place.
GWB’s “New Tone”..? They screamed to the highest rafter.
We have the best guy right now, for sure.
Yep, the LSM seem to spend most of their creating and reporting on their own “news” stories. And boy can they tell some whoppers.
Yep, the LSM seem to spend most of their time and effort creating and reporting on their own “news” stories. And boy can they tell some whoppers.
FWIW.
This author is not a light weight.
Excerpt from a New Republic article he wrote in 2007
https://newrepublic.com/article/63289/atheisms-wrong-turn
“In describing their atheism as illiberal, I do not mean to imply that the new atheists are closet totalitarians. On the contrary, all of them understand themselves to be contributing to the defense of freedom against its most potent enemies, at home and abroad. Yet the fact remains that the atheism of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens is a brutally intolerant, proselytizing faith, out to rack up conversions. Consider, for example, the sloppiness displayed by all of the authors in discussing their political aims. Do they seek to defend the secular politics favored by the American Constitutional framers? Or do they have the much more radical goal of producing a secular society—a society in which the American people, as a whole and individually, have abandoned religion? The former is a liberal goal, the latter an illiberal one; and it is inexcusable that each book leaves readers guessing which objective its author favors.”
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