DBT: I guess from your location, that you're somewhat distanced from American politics, so it's quite understandable that you have a totally wrong view.
I know nothing of Australian politics, but I guess there's a Left and a Right. Does one side do NOTHING but foment hatreds, obstruct, and lie?
It's easy to assume that both sides exaggerate. But when you pursue details you find that the GOP really is as bad as its detractors say. The GOP is now 100% behind an agenda to prevent likely Democratic voters from even voting, or to ignore their votes if they do manage to vote! Is that happening in Australia?
Are you sure that you understood what I meant? Which was; that both extremes in politics, left and right tend to react to each others policies, thereby go too far down the path to extremism?
This doesn't mean that they go too far in the same way...it doesn't mean that I deny that the ultra right, the GOP, are not as bad as its detractors say. No doubt it is, there are plenty of examples.
Which does not mean the far left speak from a position of purity and good will to human kind, freedom from oppression ....and, just perhaps, it is the middle path that holds the answers:
The Answer to Extremism Isn’t More Extremism
America’s left and right are radicalizing each other, and the precedents from overseas are deeply unsettling.
''Dangerous intellectual fashions are sweeping through some American universities—the humanities departments of the elite ones in particular. Some radical students and professors do try to restrict what others can teach, think, and say. Left-wing Twitter mobs do attack people who have deviated from their party line, trying not just to silence them but to get them fired. A few months ago, I signed a group letter deploring the growing censoriousness in our culture: “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” A part of the left—admittedly the part most addicted to social media—reacted to this letter with what can only be described as censoriousness, intolerance, and a determination to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.
''Radicalism of all kinds will spread, on the right as well as the left, because America will find itself deeply enmeshed in the same kind of death spiral that the country experienced in the 1850s, a form of negative politics that the British political scientist Roger Eatwell has called “cumulative extremism.” Eatwell described this phenomenon in an article about northern England in 2001, a moment when groups of radicalized white British men physically clashed with groups of radicalized British Muslims. At that time, there were deep economic, religious, and sociological sources for the violence. People in the far right felt themselves to be outside of politics, alienated from the Labour Party that most had once supported. The neighborhoods where both groups lived were poor and getting poorer.''
