I’ve spent the last few years observing how politicians, pundits, and “reporters” frame their questions to people they like and don’t like. Based on my entirely partisan bias, I have to say that the Left is treated significantly differently from the Right. There are far fewer aggressive approaches toward left-wing people and policies than toward the Right.
Not really a surprise, right?
Americans are so comfortable with politicians lying to us (actually, we have come to expect and even excuse it) that some don’t know the difference between truth and rhetoric.
They are not the same.
Truth is about whether a claim corresponds to reality. Rhetoric is about how effectively a claim is presented to an audience, and they operate on different axes. A statement can therefore be true and rhetorically powerful, true and rhetorically weak, false and rhetorically powerful, or false and rhetorically weak.
Truth asks, “Is this actually so?” Rhetoric asks, “Can I persuade you that this is so?”
I know the social media world isn’t the real world, but there sure seems to be a convergence happening. Ideas once unthinkable, over time and under enough pressure, can become radical, then mainstream, far more so on the Left than the Right. It is truly amazing — and disheartening — to see so many people post manufactured or unfalsifiable information as if it were fact.
It appears people out there will believe just about anything if the right source gives it to them.
We could easily believe that a cabal knows the truth but manufactures narratives to control the political battle space. But it is worse: many people have absorbed rhetorical lies for so long that they truly no longer know what is true. As a result, they base their judgement on how strongly they feel about an issue.
Once a claim is treated as a test of belonging rather than a proposition about the world, rhetoric crowds out correspondence. That happens wherever a coalition has enough cohesion and enemy-focus to punish dissent more than it punishes being wrong.
I can’t deny that this has happened to both sides of the aisle. The Right is less right than we were 10, 20, or 50 years ago. We moved left along the rhetorical axis. But in my estimation, that is true only if you consider direction and distance between the parties along that axis.
For example, let’s say two trains leave stations 100 miles apart and travel toward each other, one leaving the station 30 minutes ago going 50 miles per hour and the other leaving 10 minutes ago going 75 miles per hour. Where along the track will they meet?
Sorry, couldn’t resist throwing a little math word problem in there.
But here is the point.
The GOP and the Democrats are 50 miles apart, both 25 miles from the center, and 25 miles from their extremes. If both move 25 miles left, at the end of the trip, both are still 50 miles apart, but one has reached extremism.
The Republican Party has undoubtedly moved leftward to become less traditionally conservative and more populist and centrist, but Holy Guacamole, Batman. While President Donald Trump has touched the third rail of Austrian School economics with the implementation of tariffs and is proposing federal aid for single parents, the Dems have gone full ape excrement, calling for abolishing the Constitution, eradicating the Senate, banning private property, confiscating both property and wealth, taking control of industry, and helping Hamas end Israel — all while claiming the Republicans are the extremists.
While the DSA is driving the Democrat Party, the conservatives in the GOP are just along for the ride right now.
The argument can be made that it isn’t “all” Democrats or “all” Republicans. But any honest assessment shows the Dem leadership fears the radical DSA communist faction in their party, and the GOP openly fights and frustrates its conservative wing.
And I find the rhetoric interesting because the Democrats use propaganda and agitprop to claim the GOP is filled with “far-right extremists” and “white supremacists,” when really they are closer to the middle than ever. The Democrats are now having to hide their Marxist-Leninist tendencies from their more moderate constituencies.
In the process of the propaganda onslaught, they have driven their members barking mad through decades of telling them not to believe their lying eyes and ears and just let the leadership tell them what to believe.
