So, I know that Bill Maher is a little problematic, but when he’s right, he’s right, so I’ll pass on this brilliant takedown of both Howard Schultz and the both-siderism that he’s selling. I wish I could embed the video, but try as I might, I can’t make the embed code work.
I’m sure Maher has pointed this out before, but I think we may be seeing a bit of movement in the media to start rejecting the both sides meme. Trump is horrible, but he may have accomplished that. It’s getting harder and harder for the punditry to claim that both sides are equivalent in light of his criminality, ignorance, and incompetence.
On a related subject, I want to pass on something I just read in Jill Lepore’s These Truths, a book I highly recommend. It’s a history of the US, which shines a light on a lot of dark corners of American history.
Anyway, Lepore relates that in the late forties and early fifties political scientists bemoaned the fact that the political parties had become so similar that it was often hard to tell the difference between the two. They warned, believe it or not, that democracy was in trouble unless the parties became more polarized. Well, we all know how that worked out, but get a load of what Thomas Dewey had to say at the time, both remarkably prescient and remarkably wrong:
[The political scientists] want to drive all moderates and liberals out of the Republican Party and then have the remainder join forces with conservative groups of the South. Then they would have everything neatly arranged, indeed. The Democratic Party would be the liberal-to-radical-party. The Republican Party would be the conservative-to-reactionary party. The results would be neatly arranged, too. The Democrats would win every election.
Regrettably, the latter prediction hasn’t proven true, and the radical part of the Democratic Party appears to be missing in action, as is, when you come right down to it, the “conservative”, wing of the Republican Party, if we harken back to the meaning of the term as Dewey understood it.
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