Now, if you would please not pollute my argument with partisanship, please allow me to reiterate. What we're seeing here is absolutely disgraceful, and the end result of echo chambers causing segments of the population to see each other as the enemy, causing not only segmentation and a broken country, but guaranteeing that there will be no solutions to real problems as everyone is at each other's throats. Were this not the case, I expect it would have not gotten this far and gotten considerably more condemnation over at the republican side.
An argument like this relies on the assumption that both sides are debating in good faith with fair points drawn from a consistent ideology. They are not. The Republicans have been subsumed by corrupt lapdogs whose one goal is power and money, and they will deploy any tactic whatsoever to achieve it with no regard for coherency. They are enabled by their voting base that they have bombarded for decades with propaganda that causes insane mental gymnastics to go off without a hitch.
Exhibit A: Obama proposed cruise missile strikes against Syria in 2013 that did not occur due to public backlash against the idea. In 2017, Trump executed missile strikes against Syria. Both times, those polled who identified as Democrats were consistent: 38% approved of Obama's theoretical strikes, and 37% approved of Trump's actual strikes, within the margin of error.
Only 22% of Republicans approved of Obama's theoretical strikes, but a whopping 86% supported Trump's strikes.
Exhibit B: Kentucky voters were asked about healthcare in 2014. 57% disapproved of "Obamacare", 22% disapproved of "kynect". They're the same damn thing; "kynect" is the state healthcare exchange Kentucky set up due to the ACA.
Break out the
data by party registration or political lean and it gets worse: Republicans, conservatives, and Tea Party support goes
up when you call Obamacare something else, while D/liberal reduction in approval is taken up by "Never heard", a simple messaging failure.
The Republican party catered to idiots to try and create a perpetual vote farm for themselves, and it blew up in everyone's faces with Trump. Make no mistake, Trump supporters are enemies of the state. They have no platform, no coherent set of beliefs aside from "my guy good your guy bad". They react very well to propaganda and fearmongering with no regard for the actual content behind the scare, as seen with Exhibit B. They will tear apart this country and its beliefs given the chance, if they merely believe they'd "win" against whomever their opponent happens to be at the time. Republicans did not hold hearings on Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court, citing that it was an election year and the issue should be put to the voters. Republicans also pushed through Amy Barrett's nomination in an election year. Garland was nominated in March, almost a month after Scalia died. Barrett was nominated in September, 11 days after RBG died. The issue was not "put to the voters" as it was in 2016.
You can try and argue the Republicans paid an electoral cost for their ratfuckery since they've lost both chambers and the Presidency, but that is glossing over the data. The Dems
lost seats in the House even though they retained their majority, and until the Georgia runoffs were decided to a close margin the Republicans stood a chance at retaining the Senate. Trump lost but garnered more votes than in 2016.
This is
insane. Republican voters looked at all the ratfuckery of Trump, the naked hypocrisy of Congressional Republicans,
and they were ok with it. The Rs then took this as approval for more ratfuckery and so now we find ourselves with lunatic and white nationalist mobs descending on the Capitol in acts of domestic terrorism.
Democrats do not do anything like that to influence party decisions the way the Republicans are influenced by the batshit Trump supporters. Refer back to Exhibit A: Democrats opposed missile strikes on Syria regardless of which party was in power, Republicans only opposed it when it was "the other guys" who would push the button.
They've only gotten worse since then. The mob that stormed the Capitol today was chanting
"Hang Mike Pence" because he correctly and constitutionally stated the VP was not kingmaker and he would not intervene to throw out electors and install Trump for a 2nd term like the crazy, legally-unfounded "theory" circulating among the Trumpsters said he should to support "their man".
This is
not a "both sides" bullshit. What we are seeing is the
paradox of tolerance in action. Trump supporters have gone off the deep end; they cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be negotiated back, and they have shown they would gladly toss aside every single law and norm of democracy to install a dictator. You do not reach across the aisle to people like that, you slap them down. Destroy them first, and then you can reach across the aisle to the level-headed conservatives who fill the seats. Failure to do so is poison for democracies.