While you can hold whatever beliefs you want, I find this in particular to be especially really interesting considering the Republican Party that you like to exonerate so much is bending hella hard to a President who is acting/has been acting "cartoonishly villainous" for as long as he's been in office.
I don't really think they're much better and I think the way the President acts is unbecoming to say the least. That doesn't change how I feel about the Democrats, though. There's definitely a very real problem with people on the left harassing people on the right over political differences and there's very little indication that this is even recognized as a significant problem internally. I won't vote for Democrats until there's an about-face on that because I think it's the core of the left's toxicity right now; everything the Democrats do right now is poisoned by that mindset and until there's at least some
admission that it's a really nasty problem, I think supporting the Democrats would be bad for the country. Right now, I'm not very happy with either the Democrats or the Republicans. I briefly entertained the idea of voting Republican, but after thinking about it, I don't think that'll happen. I'll probably end up mostly voting Libertarian like I usually do, but I have to review all of the candidates first.
The entire reasoning for your post is also interesting, considering that you use the larger democratic base heckling top-ranking Republican officials as some sort of moral line that's been breached,
Yes, I generally think encouraging violence over political differences is a pretty bad line to cross. Self-defense is one thing, actively telling people they should go out and harass their political opponents is another.
but apparently not the fact that the Republican Party refused to do literally anything about children being separated from their families? What about tolerating the fact that during this, toddlers were forced to represent themselves during immigration court? What about when the President starting cozying up to Vladimir Putin during the Summit, threw the country under a bus, and all that did was earn some "scolding" from the Republicans and no real action from them? They're the ones in power, surely they'd be able to do
something, right? Imagine if Obama did half the stuff Trump got away with -- Mitch Mconnell would just personally stuff impeachment papers down Obama's throat.
For all the disappointment and pessimism you express about the Democrats and their base, you seem either perfectly content with (or ignore) the fact that the party across the isle is currently doing nothing to stand up to a President who's pretty content with throwing LGBT people under the bus, as well as the fact that -- oh look -- the GA Republican Secretary of State
is accused of blocking 53,000 voter registrations (the vast majority of which are African-American) because of fears of "voter fraud" lol which is a classic Republican cop-out move.
These are completely separate issues that really have nothing to do with the original point of encouraging harassment over political differences. Rather, it's a list of your personal grievances with the President and his politics, some of which I outright agree with, others which I could probably spend some time arguing separately. Considering I'm not voting for the President (he's not even up for re-election), I don't see how any of it is relevant unless you're offering it up as a reason why harassment over political differences is acceptable.
Let me explain why I take issue with this so much. Mankind has a very long history of solving our problems through violent means. Violence is our natural response to perceived injustices, valid or not. Early forms of government organized this so power was centralized and people weren't killing each other to solve disagreements, but that meant ordinary people didn't really have any way to redress their grievances other than to hope the despot was reasonable.
The system that the founding fathers created was designed to allow ordinary people to resolve problems through peaceful and intelligent means like discourse and advocacy. Any problem you might have can (ideally) be resolved by working within the system, you just need to be able to convince people to your way of thinking. There are definitely some flaws with our system that interfere with how it should work in an ideal world, but the core idea was still a very good one.
Normalizing harassment as a way to redress political grievances moves us backward toward our old way of conflict resolution. No matter who you are or what you believe, there will always be some great villain committing some great evil. It's normal to want to dehumanize the people you disagree with, to want to stop the "great evil" through the most direct means. It even feels good because you're "fighting evil." It's also wrong and undermines a system that I believe was a huge step forward, one designed to allow a violent species to resolve problems through non-violent means while still giving ordinary people some degree of power over the way they are governed.
I mean, I can go on and on. You'd like to use Maxine Waters as an example of Democrats going too far? That's funny considering that Ted Cruz joked about his opponent sharing a jail cell with Hillary Clinton.
That was poor taste but I don't think it was remotely similar to inciting harassment.
Also interesting that you apparently don't see Republicans as "stubborn". Have you forgotten that the GOP has made it their life goal to repeat Obamacare, including abolishing protections for people with pre-existing conditions? Hey, here's a gem actually --
some House Republicans are actually campaigning on being the champion for those who suffer from pre-existing conditions despite voting to repeal the ACA -- so you can make what you will of that. In my books, that's certainly cartoonish in the sense that it's just so ridiculously funny and mindblowing in 2018 in the age of publicly available information that people would lie so blantatly like that, but that's just me.
I get that you don't like the Republican Party's politics. I disagree with a lot of their politics as well. You're not getting the core problem I have with the Democrats. It's not about what their stance is on healthcare or abortion or whatever; it goes a lot deeper than that.
Like I said, you're free to ultimately choose what you want to believe, but to pretend the Republicans are god-fearing American patriots who's hands are clean of all sort of moral wrongdoing is ridiculous.
I don't think the Republicans are free of moral wrongdoing at all. I have a lot of problems with the Republican Party's politics, and I have a lot of problems with the way Trump in particular behaves. I don't yet see the Republicans having as severe of a problem with responding to political differences with harassment, though.
Hey, remember when Montana GOP Rep. Greg Gianforte assaulted a reporter and pled guilty of assault? And then a guy called Donald Trump praised him for exerting violence?
"Any guy who can do a body slam, he's my guy!"
"I heard he body slammed a reporter and he was way up, and I said, wait a minute, I know Montana very well, it may help him!"
Here, so you can listen to it yourself:
https://youtu.be/QwiaCUUScqc?t=62
I mean, I think it's a bit strange for you to go all-in on a random democratic representative for "emboldening" people who think that violence is a legitimate reaction when you have the president of the US and leader of the other party publicly praising a GOP congressman who committed actual assault.
I have to admit, that's a good point. I don't at all like that Trump defended that. I think it's morally wrong to justify violence as a response to political differences, however the reporter may have been acting. The underlying implication is that it's acceptable to use violence if someone's doing something you find annoying; I think that's wrong, and I think it's wrong to defend it.
I mean, remember when a guy called Donald Trump said he'd like to punch a protester in his rallies? And when he promised to pay the legal bills for any of his supporters who assaulted one of those protesters? And when one of his supporters did sucker punch a protester and he blamed the protester?
That's also a good point.
Like, I think you have a very serious case of seeing motes in every Democrat instead of the 10-metre-tall beam called Donald J. Trump, who is using the highest office in the country to do every bad thing you accuse democrats of, combined into a single, relentless person.
I definitely agree that Trump inciting people is a major problem. It's entirely possible my grievances with the left may be blinding me to similar issues present on the right, or issues that are starting to become present on the right. It doesn't change how I feel about the Democrats at all, but it may be that Trump has started the Republicans down the same path that originally distanced me from the Democrats. If that's the case, it's very worrying. At the very least, I don't want to enable that in any way. I appreciate the response, it definitely gave me something to think about.
The Republicans certainly aren't clean either, not even remotely, but the main point I got out of twocow's post was more how it seems that people these days are so very willing to turn a blind eye to or try to justify any wrongdoing that their chosen side commits, while calling out the other side for the very same things. People demand fairness and accountability, but apparently only from the people they have deemed their enemies.
It's something that I think applies to not just Democrats and Republicans, but to all social/political issues in general really.
For sure. It's something I've done, too, I won't claim to be innocent. It's really easy to see the injustice in what the other side's doing, it's a lot harder to see it when it's the people you like.
