One side's edge is comprised of armed militias, QAnon believers, white nationalists, folks who don't believe in science, and eager viewers of propaganda news channels; the other side's edge is a multi-racial coalition fighting for racial justice & an FDR-esque welfare state. 🤷‍♂️ https://twitter.com/conor64/status/1302416978167042049
The American habit of thinking of the political spectrum as an evenly weighted scale is going to be the death of us. The American Right has spent the past 80 years fighting phantom communists who were supposedly abroad in the land but were not in any significant numbers.
Meanwhile, any historically-informed observer can see in Trump a recrudescence of the far right energies of groups like the John Birch Society and the segregationist obstructionists of the 1960s and 70s. These groups all had close ties to "respectable" conservatives like Buckley.
When most American pundits have looked to their right, they've tended to just see super-patriots who perhaps occasionally get a bit too enthusiastic. When they look to their left they see Maoists who if given any influence will destroy everything we hold dear.
Part of the problem here is that what got defined as “center right” in the 70s and 80s was actually quite far right—as in segregationist, openly racist, and fascism-friendly right. https://twitter.com/sethcotlar/status/1291368787887849473
The far left is posting handmade signs in their windows that say "black trans lives matter" and generally dislike the Democratic Party, meanwhile the avidly Pro-Trump far right is wearing T-shirts that celebrate Latin American dictators and right wing death squads (RWDS). 🤷‍♂️
It's nuts that we live in a political culture where people can get paid by the Atlantic to equate folks advocating for universal health care and the basic civil rights of black people on one hand, and AR-15 wielding advocates of a white ethno-state purged of Muslims on the other.
What Ben says. https://twitter.com/Ben_Alpers/status/1302629142001840134?s=20
A centrism that sees Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump as just two, equal extremes--two different flavors of ideological ice cream to choose from--is not centrism, it is ahistorical idiocy. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1172884870978080769?s=20
The effect of such idiotic centrism is to turn politics into theater, rather than treating it like a serious conversation about really serious issues that f-ing matter in the lives of our fellow citizens. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1172886746490523651?s=20
And it's worth noting that Joey Gibs0n, the leader of the movement this guy's is in--the Pinochet loving guy fantasizing about tossing people out of helicopters--has been a guest on Fox News multiple times and has been written up sympathetically in many mainstream news outlets.
In the 1980s many white Americans in the perceived center (including Ronald Reagan) thought MLK was a Communist who wanted to destroy America, and thought Pat Buchanan (who Charles Krauthammer called "a fascist") was a reasonable fellow. It's time for such madness to end.
You can follow @SethCotlar.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: