i think i actually do end up offending people by always formulating in terms of 'you'. i don't mean you. join me in attacking you. the mainstream left has really gone hysterically partisan: really kind of hyper-partisan tizzy where you can't even understand your opponents as human. here are some slices from a typical piece in salon:
our government is under attack from a band of domestic anarchists—presumably everyone can see that
The victory already claimed by those out to drive the American government to its knees will simply embolden the infidels to mount another attack once they’ve licked their wounds
the Tea Party jihadists leading the crusade against a functional federal government
it’s the same old obstructionist strategy that’s been pursued by traitorous Southerners
the vituperative Confederate agenda of anti-Americanism has managed to spread its irresistible redneck poison
But to deny that the current attack on the federal government isn’t part of the hidebound Confederate agenda is to ignore the people who have engineered it and whose sedition will be rewarded with reelection
[nice piece of writing]
ignoble menagerie of clampdown Clampetts
a pathology sadly worthy of Calhoun and his whole sorry legacy of tantrum-throwing quack parliamentarians
he finishes by calling for 'an end to the division.' probably he thinks his opponents are irrational and listening to wacky propaganda. really, self-knowledge is difficult. for its audience, this sort of material is completely non-controversial, just obvious. the point is just to make your opponents incomprehensible so that you can pretend to be the only decent sort of person. this, the routine rhetoric of the mainstream american left, is further out by a way than cruz or even glen beck. it's similar to beck, really, but less constrained, just a non-stop accusation of racism, treason, insanity, and so on.
the whole idea is to make it impossible to examine their position rationally, or to make all disagreement pathological, a strategy we might call soviet. but if you think that it would be impossible rationally to disagree with the direction of the country toward an ever-larger welfare/security state, you are tripping. indeed, i propose that it is precisely because you know your position to be fearsomely dangerous and without rational justification that you resort to these paroxysms of vituperation.
