New York Times: Why Political Sectarianism Is a Growing Threat to American Democracy

Nate Cohn has an interesting new article on the rise of “sectarianism” in America. It is the Republicans who are radicalizing. “Democracy” is at risk of dying at the hands of populist authoritarians!

New York Times:

“American democracy faces many challenges: New limits on voting rights. The corrosive effect of misinformation. The rise of domestic terrorism. Foreign interference in elections. Efforts to subvert the peaceful transition of power. And making matters worse on all of these issues is a fundamental truth: The two political parties see the other as an enemy.

It’s an outlook that makes compromise impossible and encourages elected officials to violate norms in pursuit of an agenda or an electoral victory. It turns debates over changing voting laws into existential showdowns. And it undermines the willingness of the loser to accept defeat — an essential requirement of a democracy.

This threat to democracy has a name: sectarianism. It’s not a term usually used in discussions about American politics. It’s better known in the context of religious sectarianism — like the hostility between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. Yet a growing number of eminent political scientists contend that political sectarianism is on the rise in America. …”

There are a lot of things missing in this article:

• Hillary Clinton and Democrats never accepted the legitimacy of the 2016 election and famously scapegoated Russia over it
• The corporate media was obsessed with the Russia hoax for years
• The intelligence agencies were weaponized against Trump’s inner circle
• The Democrats impeached Donald Trump twice while in office
• The Democrats used the filibuster and lawsuits from state AGs to obstruct the Trump presidency. Now, they say the filibuster is a racist relic of the Jim Crow era and want to get rid of it
• The intelligence agencies and the corporate media spent years undermining the Trump presidency with fake news and misinformation
• Antifa rioted at Donald Trump’s inauguration and the street violence that began during the Trump campaign at rallies has gone on for five straight years
• “Journalists” use their mass media platforms to dox private citizens and made a sport of hunting them down and getting them fired from their jobs
• Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioted for six months all over country last year and were lavishly praised and rewarded for it
• The elite cabal confessed in Time to Molly Ball to conspiring against Trump and organizing the riots which went on last summer
• Progressives explicitly embraced political violence in 2017 after the “Punch a Nazi” meme went viral and celebrated and toasted the most violent elements of the Far Left
• These people banned Donald Trump and millions of his supporters from the internet and cut them off from payment processors and had Google steal their websites and they complain about “authoritarianism” because Trump said mean things about them on Twitter
• Progressives boast about how immigration is changing racial and cultural demographics in states like California and Virginia and Georgia and how it is working to their advantage and scream “racism” when you notice what they are saying on their own websites
• The Democrats have embraced the systematic racism conspiracy theory which defines all White people as racist oppressors of People of Color who benefit from unearned white privilege which is BY FAR more racist than anything we were ever saying
• The Democrats are explicitly trying to push the square peg of whatever is going on in the news cycle into the round hole of their “white supremacy” narrative
• The Democrats have finally come out of the closet as anti-White
• The Democrats have embraced the Big Lie that men can be women and women can be men and little boys can be little girls and that society should go along with this and that it is “science.” There isn’t a Bigger Lie that has ever been told in American politics

The “fascist” and “authoritarian” Donald Trump never played hardball like this. While he was an enormous disappointment for us, Donald Trump was treated like he really was all of those things!

Now, it is undoubtedly true that “unity” and “bipartisanship” is difficult to find these days after all of this happened. It is true that there has been a sweeping change in public opinion. The tactics that were used to narrowly put Joe Biden and the Democrats in power – violence, censorship, doxxing – came with a high price. In retrospect, will Democrats look back on it and think it was worth it to pass one bill?

What exactly would be the argument against populist authoritarianism now? The establishment has used violence and intimidation against us, censored us, trampled on our civil liberties, used economic coercion against us and the intelligence agencies against us. The establishment has explicitly demonized us on racial grounds. The establishment has digitally burned books and suppressed our political speech. All the things which we are accused of doing and have not done have been done to us.

We’re not out there shooting the National Guard! We’re not the ones censoring the internet! We’re not the ones who burned down Minneapolis or who had a fit and impeached the president!

Note: The smart play was to chill. Joe Biden and the Democrats have made our case more effectively for us than we ever could ourselves. We were right about everything. They hate White people. We spent decades warning conservatives and libertarians that it would come to this.