The issue is ever so much more complex than slandering “radical nincompoops,” whoever those are supposed to be.
I grew up in suburban Detroit. My father was a union member who worked for General Motors and he was a staunch New Dealer. He despised Nixon. He despised Reagan. He even jubilated when Reagan was shot.
But things changed. By the late 80s he was listening to, and was enamored of … Rush Limbaugh.
My father was staunchly pro-union and anti-Republican, but in truth he was also a racist.
By the late 80s the Great Right-Wing Hate machine was aborning, and it was figuring out how to play upon the bigotries and fears of white blue-collar workers. It was figuring out and slowly perfecting a strategy to move such people away from economic issues and toward social and cultural issues instead. This trend accelerated greatly with the rise of Fox News and the internet, with its endless legions of grifters, charlatans, bigots, buffoons, boneheads and con artists who could suddenly obtain a platform before the whole world to spew their venom and hate. And gain followers and likes.
My own view is that the real mistake the Democrats made was to abandon the New Deal and go in for the “New Democrats” or “Third-Way Democrats” philosophy of Clinton and his ilk. When it became evident that the Democrats were economically selling out working-class people in favor of ever greater corporate profit and control, the field became ripe to do the reaping for right-wing turds pushing the “culture wars.”
No one should ever apologize for defending the human rights of all. Those who oppose those rights are the ones who owe an apology.
As Lincoln said at the Cooper Union in 1860, those appeasing the slaveocracy were "reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance.”
I do not like bigotry. I do not like discrimination. I do not like separating people by race, gender, class, caste, sexual orientation, or what have you. As Henry Miller said, I consider myself a citizen of the world. I do not like national frontiers or flags, those “colored rags,” as Krishnamurti called them. It is worth quoting Krishnamurti again:
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
