The Great American Political Divide Is Just Going to Get Bigger Now
Top O' the Briefing
Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Cleredon liked to sit down to a breakfast of Jiffy Pop and Tabasco while visualizing victory in the county full-contact Pachinko tournament.
Political acrimony in the United States of America has seen quite the resurgence in the last eight years, largely fueled by the Left's chronic Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
I like to explain to the younger people in my family that things weren't always like this. There was a time when Americans could vote for different people and still be friends. No, really! I have spent most of my adult life as a conservative in the entertainment industry, where I was always in "one of these things is not like the others" mode. That never caused any problems until the aforementioned TDS hit the coastal lefties.
The very notion of ending long friendships over political disagreements was pretty much unheard of in my social and professional circles. I'm not saying it never happened before 2016, I'm just saying that it didn't in my life. That all changed in recent years, especially after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Apparently, the Supreme Court of the United States operates under my direction. People who I had been close to for decades stopped speaking to me. It bothered me for a long time because I cherish my close friendships.
After two-and-a-half years of trying to mend fences that I didn't break, I'm over it.
Robert wrote a column yesterday that explored some of the leftist-inspired incivility:
As Donald Trump’s second inauguration approaches, an acrimonious controversy is splitting his defeated but still quite insane leftist opposition: should they behave civilly toward Trump and his supporters or continue to pretend that the incoming president and those who voted for him are fascists and insurrectionists who pose an imminent threat to what they unctuously and counterfactually insist upon calling “our democracy”?
The two sides are squaring off against each other now. Disgraced former CNN talking head Don Lemon has lined up loudly and unequivocally with the latter camp and is taking aim at MSNBC’s farther-than-far-left Joe Scarborough for daring to suggest that maybe everyone should just calm down and stop acting as if a Trump presidency meant the end of the world as we know it.
A few years ago, I would have dismissed this because Don Lemon is emotionally unwell and not representative of people on the other side of the aisle. Lemon is still an unstable loon, but he is now sadly very representative of the other side, especially on the coasts.
Democrats who believe that their politics make them permanent residents of the moral high ground are particularly galling. While I truly would like to get along better, I can't muster any patience to indulge delusions like that. Political beliefs don't make one a good person; being a good person makes one a good person.
Related: It's OK to Call Your Political Opponents Insane If They're, You Know, Insane
I want to be very clear that I don't think that everyone on the Left is interested in widening the political divide. I have relatives all over the country and neighbors back in Tucson who didn't vote for Trump but don't think that I'm secretly organizing Nazi socials. In fact, we all get along very well. None of them has ever called me a "racist."
As far as I know, anyway.
That being said, or rather written, the worst of the TDS people are going to make sure that no unity candle gets lit anytime soon. The mere sight of President-elect Donald Trump becoming President Donald Trump next week is going to introduce a mutant strain of TDS into the national political "conversation." I won't be expecting any calls from the friends who've already been super not talking to me for a couple of years.
Times change and people change — this too could pass. Hey, if Donald Trump and Barack Obama can crack each other up at a funeral, there's hope for everyone.
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