Everyone alive right now knows how passionately liberal hatred for President Trump burns. But a good portion of those people likely remembers how it was more or less the same hatred that liberals had for President George W. Bush. And for President Ronald Reagan.
And yet, it’s always conservatives, Trump supporters, and right-leaning voters who are portrayed by the news media as close-minded troglodytes only reacting by basic instincts and with no higher brain function for critical thinking.
Thomas Edsall, the New York Times’s smartest liberal (if that says anything about him), perpetuated that tendency this week in a column analyzing “political sectarianism,” the phenomenon wherein voters are more and more likely to associate exclusively with fellow partisans and to resent political opposition deeply. It’s essentially the same as political “tribalism” but on steroids.
A casual observer of politics would probably say something like, “That sounds interesting because I’ve noticed that family and friends have grown angrier over politics. I don’t like it, and it seems like a problem.” I would agree.
But the blame for the trend is always laid at the feet of right-leaners, and Edsall does nothing different. Here are problem zones identified by Edsall on Thursday: “white extremists,” “right wing pro-Trump websites,” and “a denialist GOP faction.”
And here are some words that are nowhere to be found in Edsall’s column: “Black Lives Matter riots,” “antifa,” and “James Hodgkinson.”
The entire summer was marked by widespread violence, looting, vandalism, and arson in every major city, all of it committed by Black Lives Matter mobs or fellow travelers who call anyone racist who doesn’t want to “defund the police.” Antifa is a network of vigilantes that exists solely to attack, sometimes physically, Trump supporters and their allies. And James Hodgkinson is the liberal Bernie Sanders fan who hunted down Republicans practicing at a baseball field, shooting and critically wounding GOP Whip Steve Scalise with a shotgun.
Does none of that fit into the “political sectarianism” that Edsall explored? Of course, it does. But it’s only the Right that ever gets the blame.
