Arthur Brooks, the former president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has made a post-AEI career out of softening today's hyperpartisanship, with an emphasis on how respectable and understanding today's hyperconservatives actually are:
"[D]o you ever stop and ask how much you really know about the other side? Or whether the outrage industry in politics and media is telling you the truth about your fellow Americans who disagree with you politically? These questions are worth asking, because it turns out most of what we 'know' about the other side is wrong."
So true, Mr. Brooks, as realized in Jeremy Peter's analysis of the right's latest nationalistic fever:
"Led by Mr. Trump, Republicans have used … four congresswomen, known as 'the squad' … as a visual aid for the nationalist, us-versus-them message he seems eager to pursue for the 2020 election. Their attacks on the congresswomen, with only a handful of dissenters, show how broadly accepted Mr. Trump’s racial and cultural instigations have become in the Republican Party….
"[T]he attacks have metastasized. [Trump's] Twitter harangue that the women should 'go back' to where they came from … turned into chants of 'send her back' at a recent Trump rally. Those kinds of sentiments have multiplied on social media, which has exploded with memes in recent days calling the four everything from terrorists to harpies to cancer….
"These portrayals have filtered down to the average pro-Trump, anti-liberal voter and activist ... [emphasis mine]. Trump is convinced it will help him, said people who have spoken to him in recent days. And he rejected those who have told him otherwise, responding with certitude, 'You’re wrong.'"
And they are wrong, because the GOP has morphed into a white-nationalist, Blut-und-Boden (blood-and-soil) American Bund party that will brook no dissent nor anything else separated from Trump's diseased, racist movement. In the beginning, Trumpism was seen as merely the ravings of an ignorant madman — not as a race-based "ideology" so inimical to the American tradition: fascism. But today's Trumpists have arrived at just that.
Somewhere, Dwight Eisenhower is weeping.