How can anybody who has witnessed these last decades of increasingly ferocious partisanship by Republicans ever more crazed with hate talk about a return to political civility, cooperation, and mutual respect that have been utterly destroyed over that same period?
How can anybody who understands how the right really feels about America, today, about nonwhites, non-Christians, non-heteros, working class Americans, and the homeless and desperate not react with horror and anger?
How can anyone who sees how far they are willing to go, even attacking the foundations of democracy and the basic structures of the republic, to make the legal environment as bitterly inhospitable to consumers, borrowers, workers, nonwhites, the poor, and the elderly and as empowering as possible for the 1%, for corporations, for the moneyed elites as they can not loathe them utterly?
Silly questions, I know.
In politics as in all else, we are who we are, we feel what we feel.
Some of us, paid or not, with or against the grain of our interests, publicly and unashamedly side with the most powerful in their most unscrupulous and damaging assaults on the less.
Casting the rest of us into the more or less radical, or more or less moderate, but in any case more or less self-conscious and committed resistance.
Even in the event much to be hoped for, a Biden victory, the Democrats will be able to mitigate and undo the damage done so far by these bastards only if they can override the most bitter opposition from the now constantly enraged and mouth-frothing right.
Is Biden up for that?
Are the likely Democratic leaders in the house and the senate?
Will they pack the Supreme Court, as they must to secure the future of a century of progressive achievements of all kinds and not only those based on the right to privacy?
Will they trample to dust all remnants of the senate filibuster, a change without which what needs to be done in that body will certainly not be done?
Both those moves would be entirely constitutional and yet furiously protested in the right wing media as revolutionary, a coup d’état, dictatorship, and so on in their usual, hoarse-throat shouting style.
Could our Dems withstand all that pressure?
Or are they, figuratively speaking, just so many hapless Social Democrats or other republican losers in Germany or Italy between the wars?
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