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If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.
If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.
We look at the view from the left, then the view from the right. Of course, this is a mere sample of the myriad of disagreements between the two sides.
Part #1: The Democratic Party's Case
Part #1: The Democratic Party's Case
The Now-Mainstream Fringe Of The Republican Party
The Now-Mainstream Fringe Of The Republican Party
It seems that today's Republican party has been taking over by once-fringe – but now mainstream – faction.
A quarter believe [...] that Donald Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 general election. [...] There is a line extending from flying-saucer obsessives to 9/11 truthers to Donald Trump. [...] It is the American coalition of white Christians, papering over doctrinal and class differences—and now led, weirdly, by one of the least religious presidents in modern times.
Seven out of ten evangelical and fundamentalist Christians believe “the modern nation of Israel was formed as a result of biblical prophecy” and that “events in Israel are part of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation.” In other words, before the end-time battles can happen, as many Jews as possible need to be near Armageddon.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Republicans can come off as hypocrites sometimes. Their beliefs are all over the place:
Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real.
Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. [In fact] Atlas Shrugged [is] the story of a heroic cabal of men’s men industrialists who cause the socialistic U.S. government to collapse so they can take over, start again, and make everything right.
Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve. [...] As recently as 2008, their party platform mentioned “climate change” thirteen times, stipulating it was caused by “human economic activity,” and they committed themselves to “decreasing the long term demand for oil” in order “to address the challenge.” [...] The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions.
In 2008 three-quarters of the GOP presidential primary candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016 only one did. That one, Jeb Bush, was careful to say evolutionary biology was only his truth, that “it does not need to be in the curriculum” of public schools, and if it is, ought to be accompanied by creationist teaching.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Republicans are more ideological in nature than their Democratic counterparts.
A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion.” (And a large majority of all Americans believe that the “Constitution establishes [the United States as] a Christian nation” already.) [...] As a matter of fact, the Constitution’s key clause—“no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust”—is kind of a theoretical freedom. Not only have we never had an openly unbelieving president, of the 535 members of the last Congress, exactly one listed her religion as “none.” Among all 7,383 state legislators, there is apparently only one atheist. Eight of the fifty state constitutions officially prohibit atheists from holding public office; of those, Pennsylvania and Tennessee specifically require officeholders to believe in Heaven and Hell; and in Arkansas, atheists are technically ineligible to have any state job or to testify in court.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
For Tea Party Republicans, "government dysfunction is an end, not just a means"1.
The Republican Party started getting pulled towards extreme viewpoints over twenty years ago, when it was taken over by powerful special interests.
[In 1995] the NRA sent a particularly hysterical, 2,600-word fundraising letter to its members. “President Clinton’s army of anti-gun government agents continues to intimidate and harass law-abiding citizens,” as in “Waco and the Branch Davidians.” Today they’re poking into a weapons cache, tomorrow they’ll be taking away everyone’s “right to free speech, free practice of religion, and every other freedom in the Bill of Rights.” The new assault weapons ban “gives jackbooted Government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property and even injure and kill us….Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens.” [...] Former president George H. W. Bush resigned from the NRA in protest.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Though not all conspiracies are Republican: "After 9/11, more Democrats than Republicans believed that the Bush administration allowed or arranged the attacks"1.
How can a country heal its political divide if it cannot agree on a common set of facts.
And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies. You may not want democratic socialism, but Denmark is a real country.
[However] Americans feel entitled to their own facts. [...] Not all lies are fantasies, and not all fantasies are lies; people who believe untrue things can pass lie detector tests.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Republicans have crusaded against the elite: "Professionalism is always at risk of appearing elitist and undemocratic" (attributed to Bruce Robbins)2.
Democrats do not see the world in quite the same way as Republicans.
According to a new study by professors at the Harvard Business School and Tufts, the average white American has subscribed to the fantasy that antiwhite bias is a more serious problem in the United States than antiblack bias.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
But most scary is the Republicans' tenuous grasp of the facts:
Why did half of Republicans—and two-thirds of Trump’s primary voters—remain convinced that Obama is a Muslim?
In 2011 Trump became chief spokesperson for the fantasy that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, a fringe idea that he brought into the mainstream. [...] A dozen House Republicans cosponsored a federal bill that would require presidential candidates to submit a birth certificate and other proof that he or she isn’t a secret foreigner. [...] Finally, in the fall of 2016, he grudgingly admitted the president was indeed a native-born American—at the same moment that an Economist/YouGov survey found a majority of Republicans still believed Obama probably or definitely was born in Kenya.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
It's debatable whether this fear that Obama is Muslim is racist or not.
[Sharia law] was a specific fantasy—not I hate Muslims or I hate Arabs but rather I don’t want to live under Taliban law, and therefore it could pass as not racist but anti-tyranny.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Trump's rise to power exemplifies of this broader trend.
[In 2015, a] New York Times editorial [wrote:] “It felt at times as if the speakers were no longer living in a fact-based world where actions have consequences, programs take money and money has to come from somewhere. Where basic laws—like physics and the Constitution—constrain wishes. Where Congress and the public, allies and enemies, markets and militaries don’t just do what you want them to, just because you say they will.” [...] After his election, another Times editorial granted that “Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody,” that the “breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.” [Trump] doesn’t like experts because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend that fictions are facts, to feel the truth. [Trump even] hired actors to play enthusiastic supporters at the kickoff of his candidacy.
Who but a preternaturally honest man would say in his announcement speech that Mexican immigrants are “rapists”? Or, as he said a few months later, that Muslims should be prohibited from entering the United States? [Or] the fantasy that on 9/11 “thousands and thousands of people” in New Jersey from “the heavy Arab population…were cheering as the buildings came down,” and the fantasy that Mexico will pay for building a high concrete wall along the border.
The inauguration crowd estimate was at least 75 percent smaller than the president wished it to be. [So the] press secretary [...] “gave alternative facts to that.” When his public approval declined during his first months in office, Trump simply refused to believe it: “Any negative polls” the president tweeted [...] “are fake news.”
What connects a Muslim-mausoleum-themed casino in New Jersey to a short-lived sham professional football league to an autobiography he didn’t write to hotels and buildings he didn’t build to a mail-order meat business to a beauty pageant to an airline that lasted three years to a sham “university” to repeatedly welshing on giant loans to selling deodorant and mattresses and a vodka and toilet waters called Empire and Success to a board game named after himself to a TV show about pretending to fire people?
[Consider] the fantasy of a new healthcare system that will be “something terrific, “something great.” “We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump guaranteed. [...] “I am going to take care of everybody. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better,” and the new system will appear “Immediately! Fast! Quick!”
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Conspiracies serve a political purpose at times.
At the Brown & Williamson cigarette company in 1969, an internal memo was explicit. “Doubt is our product,” it declared, “the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Sources
Sources
1: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
2: Cary Nelson. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom. United States, NYU Press, 2010. [x]
Part #2: The Republican Party's Case
Part #2: The Republican Party's Case
Immigration & Race
Immigration & Race
The Great Replacement Theory might be racist, but the underlying demographic changes that scare people into believing this conspiracy are actually very real. So is it racist to want to remain in the majority? Depends on who you ask!
Source: New York Times Infographic (based on the book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann).
Source: Vice On Showtime (S03E13, Segment: The Replacement)
You can't just accuse almost half the country of being racist without alienating at least a few of them!
In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s.
Source: Kurt Andersen. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2018. [x]
Yet, the rhetoric regarding this long-term demographic shift has reached a fever pitch, appealing to the majority's sense of fear on losing this numbers game:
In the late 1980s conservative commentators began warning of what they described as “the greatest threat to the First Amendment in our history” (Rush Limbaugh), “the equivalent of the Nazi brownshirt thought-control movement” (Walter Williams), and “an ideological virus as deadly as AIDS” (David Horowitz). [Supposedly people] “live in terror of being politically incorrect”. [Or] “the delegitimization, even demonization, of the white male has reached extreme lengths” [...] “comparable to [...] the denunciation of Jewry by anti-Semites” as Paul Craig Roberts of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, put it in an op-ed in the San Francisco Examiner in 1996. [...] The [National Association of Scholars] continually collected reports of political correctness gone amiss, packaged the best, and peddled them to the media. [Like:] “Totalitarianism didn’t disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s alive and well on many American college campuses today,” wrote Linda Chavez in a column in USA Today.
Source: Barry Glassner. The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things: Crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutants. Hachette UK, 2010. [B139]
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