Before agenda-driven, partisan-fueled talking heads dictated what to believe, it was possible to have an intelligent political discussion without animus-incited division. But no more. For paradoxically, with mounting information to support well-reasoned discourse, many voters have become increasingly partial, gullibly believing their views are always right and competing perspectives are always wrong.
However, while such blind faith bias is bad enough, many have taken a step further, alienating friends and family by further degrading such an inflexibly absolute mindset into a good-versus-evil, relationally destructive conviction.
But when seeking explanations for why thoughtfully balanced and conflict-free political discourse has gone the way of dinosaurs and hula hoops, one factor stands out. Namely, by demonizing our current president and his supporters, progressive politicians and their media sycophants have become the primary architects of our ever-more fractured house divided.
Clearly, all but the most progressive true believers could fail to see how one-sided the legacy media’s political coverage has become. For in claiming the moral high ground as the self-righteous protectors of our democracy, the news they claim as fit to print no longer even approaches that objective standard.
In fact, according to the Media Research Center, the fawning legacy network coverage for the 2024 Democrat presidential ticket was calculated as 84 percent positive for Harris, 89 percent negative for Trump, 62 percent positive for Walz, and 92 percent negative for Vance.
Moreover, this lack of impartiality before the election has continued to provoke political discord well into Trump’s second term. This should not be surprising. For when hearing daily claims labeling the president as an existential threat to democracy, a racist, a fascist, and a criminal, many on the left have lost their objectivity and have become hate-filled vessels consumed by any and all things Trump.
And it is this hostility-reinforcing, ad hominem echo chamber, powered by the mainstream media and like-minded others, that has tarred Trump supporters with several of those same charges and more.
A small sampling of those stigmatizing attacks would have to include Hillary Clinton, who double-downed on an “important truth” in 2016 that half of Trump’s backers were “irredeemable” and, as racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamophobes, could fit into a “basket of deplorables.”
And after losing the presidential election, she further suggested that white women were spineless handmaidens in voting for Trump solely at the direction of their husbands.
Additionally, while still president in 2024, Joe Biden claimed Trump “has no character” and his guilty-by-association boosters are “garbage.” That same year, self-proclaimed “knucklehead” and soon-to-be anointed Democratic vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, described Republicans as “weird people … that want to take your books away.”
And far more recently, Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett suggested that support for the president indicates a “mental health crisis” and that his supporters are “sick.”
Yet perhaps the most outrageous attack of all occurred shortly before the presidential election when a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden was likened to a Nazi gathering. As MSNBC commented, “In that place, it’s particularly chilling because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the Garden … [which is] once again turning … into a staging ground for extremism.”
Thus, armed with such generalized over-the-top smears aimed not solely at Trump but at his backers, Democrats have undermined respectful political discussion at least and divided our citizens at most.
The reason for this should be obvious. By sanctimoniously attacking voters for their support of Trump, the clear implication is that Democrats are good and Republicans are not. Such a suggestion breeds blind-to-truth self-righteousness in the former group and aggressive push-back resentment in the latter. And anyone with even the slightest understanding of human nature could have easily predicted that divisive result and its underlying cause.
People innately benchmark their adequacy not so much by any objective standard as by their self-assessment compared to others. So, slandering rivals is a zero-sum game that temporarily raises one’s self-worth by simultaneously lowering the value of those believing otherwise.
But the price paid for such value-enhancing attacks is great. This is so because verbally assaulting opponents is fool’s gold in that no one fundamentally gains in value by diminishing others. And more importantly, to maintain their self-esteem, Republicans unfairly condemned, resentfully push back, albeit far less negatively, against liberal detractors with critical labels of their own, further escalating the division between us.
Thus, as an understandable response to woke criticisms, MAGA tit-for-tat portrayals of Democrats as misguided, naïve, holier-than-thou gaslighters pale in comparison to far more hateful progressive descriptions of Republicans.
So, on both sides of the aisle, the end result of this ongoing, rigidly held name-calling feeding frenzy is that families and friendships have been torn apart, constructive debate has all but vanished, and bipartisan agreement has become nearly impossible.
But worst of all, we all know former President Abraham Lincoln’s prediction for a house divided. And if such expectation becomes a reality, our right and wrong obsessions will no longer matter, for if so, we all will lose.
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