It started with her knitting circle — encountering “roving gangs of online social justice warriors” who “started going after anyone in the knitting community who was not lockstep with their ideology.” A wave of viciousness, prompting her effort to escape her echo chamber and actually listen to Trump fans. She found they weren’t bad people, not racists or Nazis, and could justify their opinions using arguments — in contrast to the left’s “shouting and ranting.” She says it’s driving other Democrats to leave the party.
Then she attended Trump’s New Hampshire rally, and was struck by the positive energy there, marked by optimism and love of country, in contrast to a recent ill-attended Democratic event where people booed and shouted at those backing the “wrong” candidates, and were all doom and gloom and criticism of America.
She concludes, “most people on both sides are good, decent human beings who want the best for the country and have dramatic disagreements on how to get there. But until we start seeing each other as human beings, there will be no bridging the divide.” Borysenko voted in the NH primary for Buttigieg and then changed her registration to independent.
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I changed my own registration from Republican to Democrat in 2017. Because I actually couldn’t see my lifelong party through Borysenko’s rose-colored glasses.
Yes, there are honest disagreements about America’s direction. Yet honesty is not the hallmark of today’s Republicanism. At the top it’s disingenuous to the core. Epitomized by weaponizing phony concerns about election fraud to block many citizens from voting.
Borysenko is right that most in the rank-and-file are not bad people. But unfortunately they’ve been sucked into a cult of followership for someone very bad indeed.
And as for the country’s direction — while we’ve always had policy disagreements, this is about America’s character. Respect for truth, facts, and reason — when that goes, everything else goes. Humankind has made great progress from a dog-eat-dog world. America had a huge role in the vanguard of that progress. But Trump is Mister Dog-Eat-Dog.
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I enrolled Democrat to combat what, for years, I’ve excoriated the left for, that Borysenko writes about. The mindset of totalitarian intolerance. The insistence on ideological purity, with any deviation delegitimized, punished. Long seen on “liberal” campuses, it’s metastasizing in our wider political culture.
Some Sanders fans are mere starry-eyed idealists.
But Borysenko is wrong in seeing the problem only on the left. Certainly there’s Republican intolerance for anyone not a total Trumpsucker. And meantime he’s not only whipped up a deranged hatred for Democrats, it’s mainly based on lies. I was no Hillary fan, but her demonization bore no relation to reality. At least Democrats’ hatred for Trump is grounded in what he actually does.
America today is in a profound crisis of its civic soul. It’s no hyperbole calling this our most important election at least since 1860. The Republican/Russian campaign will be a shitstorm of lies, disinformation, and ruthless dirty tactics.
Sandernistas fancy he’ll energize many new voters. Maybe so; but such polarizing extremist candidates energize even greater numbers to show up to vote against them. You say you want a revolution? Thomas Friedman wrote, I’ll show you a revolution: four more years of Trump. America will be irretrievably transformed.
What we absolutely don’t need is a November gotterdammerung between two opposing revolutions. Instead, a return to decency, honesty, sobriety, sanity. For two centuries we’ve progressed greatly in making life fairer and better for more and more people. We need not revolution but to resume that incremental humanistic evolution. Unfortunately, that’s not what Bernie is about.
I’m starting to wonder if, pragmatically, Bloomberg is the last hope.
I’d rather have Bloomberg buy his way to the presidency than Trump lie his way to it.