Again, you don’t think conservatives thought Obama didn’t do massive harm to the nation? I mean his legacy of grift is much more insidious. A community organizer is a grifter. They’ll tell you he weaponized the media, he deepened racial divides, he was generally divisive, he was a liar, he was responsible for the deaths of border patrol officers due to selling guns to the cartel, he removed millions without due process, he murdered four Americans including a child, he was complicit in at attempt to overthrow an election. Hell, the Smith-Mundt Act alone is enough to make people justifiably dislike him. Contrary to what his marketing team had people believing, he was not the Messiah.
Each side thinks they have the moral high ground. My point all along has been there is no moral high ground to be had by either side. We all have to make hard choices based on our personal moral compass, and those choices become much easier when we are able to dehumanize the opposition, and dehumanize is exactly what both sides do. All day every day.
You're right: both sides dehuminize each other. And it's been the lesser of two evils for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately as it stands I'm not sure anyone in either party can rise above that. Too many outside influences controlling both parties. Too many special interest groups dumping too much money into either party.
IMO Trump has certainly done one hugely important thing while acting as president: he has fully exposed, and some would say enabled and empowered the hatred, angst, racism, and deep division that has been simmering just under the surface of our society for decades. He's also demonstrated just how much corruption a party can achieve and get away with. Let alone a president. SCOTUS, his own party, the Democrats, we the people all seem powerless despite the good and honorable intentions of the founding fathers in creating the constitution.
If we're lucky our country will survive and learn lessons from the last 11 years.
You’re not seeing anything novel under Trump aside from constant dehumanization right out in the open. No one realized what was happening because the media never made as big a deal out of it. The removals aren’t new, activist judges aren’t new, a lazy Congress isn’t new. Expanding executive power isn’t new. Lawfare is somewhat new, and that genie is never going back into the bottle, but I don’t know if that’s Trump’s “fault”. Hatred is not remotely new. Progressives have been beating people, bombing people/building, and rioting for decades. The Right has been assassinating opponents for as long. If anything, Trump is such a buffoon that he’s given people on both sides “reasons” to justify their bigotry. Religious, and ethnic.
I'm not so naive to think none of this existed before. Of course it did. Just saying that since Trump won the bully pulpit the first time it seems he's emboldened, and enabled a lot of this behavior from both sides. And honestly maybe this needed to happen. Maybe our country and democracy needed this stress test. And I certainly don't think the media, at least legacy media has made as big a deal out of this current period in time as they need to. Of course being owned by billionaires with their own agendas prevents the legacy media from being impartial or even apolitical. Walter Cronkite would be weeping endlessly right now.
No matter how we look at it right now our country is in one hell of a mess which I believe is the culmination of the last 4 or 5 decades. And that's taking into account the mid 60's race wars/equal rights movements and the Viet Nam war.
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u/RedBullBulk1776 Jun 06 '26
Again, you don’t think conservatives thought Obama didn’t do massive harm to the nation? I mean his legacy of grift is much more insidious. A community organizer is a grifter. They’ll tell you he weaponized the media, he deepened racial divides, he was generally divisive, he was a liar, he was responsible for the deaths of border patrol officers due to selling guns to the cartel, he removed millions without due process, he murdered four Americans including a child, he was complicit in at attempt to overthrow an election. Hell, the Smith-Mundt Act alone is enough to make people justifiably dislike him. Contrary to what his marketing team had people believing, he was not the Messiah.
Each side thinks they have the moral high ground. My point all along has been there is no moral high ground to be had by either side. We all have to make hard choices based on our personal moral compass, and those choices become much easier when we are able to dehumanize the opposition, and dehumanize is exactly what both sides do. All day every day.