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Extremism
15 years ago
General
It really fucking scares me, especially given how commonplace it has become nowadays, not just in politics, but amongst everyday people. Whatever happened to moderation? Now everything is some overblown conspiracy theory "The left is trying to do this!" or "The right is trying to do that!"
"The right is stripping away your constitutional rights!"
"The church is undermining the government and imposing it's rules on you!"
"The left is promoting communism and socialism in the US!"
I miss the 90s, our nation wasn't so scary divided back then.
"The right is stripping away your constitutional rights!"
"The church is undermining the government and imposing it's rules on you!"
"The left is promoting communism and socialism in the US!"
I miss the 90s, our nation wasn't so scary divided back then.
The differences we have now is the tea party movement, which is dying a horrible death in the near future, and Clinton was much more liked by the right than Obama is now due to him being more of a moderate. Even then, as soon as the Monica Lewinsky case came along... And that's what they did to a president they liked.
The real problem is that our socialist party has no spine, so while there's radicals of both parties the right wing ones stand unopposed, and that when being nominated the nomination is voted on by the party and not the general public, meaning a public figure has to have the support of the Moderate to Extremist of their side alone before being nominated, resulting in a less moderate and more extreme nomination than most people would like.
This is actually what killed McCain in the last election. Going into the nomination McCain had good policies and a very moderate stance on everything and voter turnout for him was like nothing the republicans had seen before, which scared the extreme right, so instead of pairing him with Lieberman like he wanted to be (A moderate democrat and friend of his, which would likely have secured his presidency), the extreme right threatened to not support him unless he changed all his policies from what he ran for the nomination on and completely bullied him around until the man who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, the man who had fought to end torture of US-Held prisoners was then in support of torturing our own prisoners of war. Then, because of his moderate background they felt that this wasn't enough, so they made Sarah Palin his vice president. All the right wing lingo and empty words of Bush but with none of his good nature standing in the way of more extreme policies.
I got into an argument with a guy over extremism, because he had this radical conspiracy theory that religion essentially behaves how you describe the extreme right, and kept labeling me as one of them whenever I made a religious remark. but he did say that "Extremists don't listen to reason, and will warp anything to suit their needs." so that sounds about right. I'll add that extremists are like crazy people, they don't realize they're crazy, the probably thought that Sarah Palin was actually a good idea. -.-
Folks on the other side are just as bad, but I and many others tend to talk more about the right wing ones as they are often much louder and aggressive when it comes to the politics themselves than the left wing ones, who sometimes don't even vote as an idiotic way to protest the system.