The right doesn't talk that way about its base, but they absolutely match and even surpass that vitriol when it comes to their own betes noir-- whether it's "cities", university campuses, the entire state of California. And unlike the invective you mentioned against rural Americans, the right's vitriol isn't primarily the domain of people online: party leaders, people in Congress, strategists, etc dabble in it. In addition, of course, to the legions on Twitter and Facebook who are convinced that every big city (that is, every city that votes for Democrats) is a crime-ridden hellhole full of rude globalists who are no longer real Americans. I have hardly ever heard actual Dem party players use the kinds of terms you're referring to and when they do they always get set straight for it, if for no other reason than it's bad politics.

I think they both suck. America is a big, diverse, beautiful place. Its cities are beautiful. Its rural areas are beautiful. And as for the people, America without the farmers and truck drivers and construction workers and blue collar folks is nothing, and America without the doctors and tech workers and policy wonks and architects and various other white collar jobs is nothing. I don't think you get to claim you love America if you're willing to trash half (roughly) of it for no reason. I don't know how we get to that place of mutual respect, though, and to be frank, while it's a problem to some extent on both sides, the right does abuse the mingled resentment and superiority complex of its voters for political benefit far more than the left does. Right-wing strategists have made a living off telling their voters that Democrats (read: people who live in cities) hate America and want it to fail, that they lack American values, that they're mentally ill, that they're deliberately engineering the destruction of the country. That's not a hypothetical, this is the playbook of Republican political strategy, and it's been the playbook since 1994 when Newt Gingrich fundamentally changed American politics by making it more venomous and partisan than ever before.

Just sucks that somehow the right just gets more partisan, more vicious, more polarizing, more willing to insult and denigrate people who disagree with it, but the left is always told it needs to do some "serious work and self-reflection." Not casting an aspersion on you, it's not like you invented this line of thinking, just venting some frustration with the perennial lack of responsibility put on the American right.

I don't believe we can get to a place of mutual respect with the current system. The whole thing needs to be redone or have some kind of massive change and I'm not talking about candidates.

Hating the "other team" is now so baked into all this bullshit that I don't see any possible way people will ever come to this mutual respect when there are only two sides and one is called Democrat and the other Republican.

This is a generally accepted maxim of political fundraising by copywriters and creative teams on the Right: beat the Left at their own game by forcing them to live up to their own high standards.

how many of the protestors are actually students at these schools?

it's one thing to protest, but quite another to accost other students. stopping students from attending class by roadblocking their path. even tazing them? again, are these fellow students, or are these people from the general public or people who have traveled/been shipped in to reek havoc? wiping dog shit on posters for kidnapped babies? what kind of screw loose/danger to other people/mentally ill/mentally challenged people are involved in these things? how much of this is the power of tiktok and suggestion? We sure do seem to be raising a generation of kids who like to put their hands on other people and who think they have the right to do so.

I'd like to see someone Jay Leno Jaywalking these protests. I have a strong hunch most of them have no idea about any of this, and they couldn't answer even basic questions, let alone any semblance of understanding of the history of the region etc.

You're overlooking the name calling & demonizing of the left that's been carried out by the Right for many years now. A few that are top of mind:

"The Woke mob"
"Snowflakes"
"Libtards"
"SJW"

Or, the myriad books written by popular right-wing 'read meat' authors. Anne Coulter's made a fortune demonizing those she disagrees with.
Anne Coulter's "Demonic - How Liberals are Destroying the Nation"

And there is far worse. In the recent years, they've started calling LGBTQ "groomers", as in, they're grooming kids for sex acts. And calling the same of everyone who opposed their absolutely bonkers measures meant to protect the kids from these so-called "groomers", like banning books pertaining to LGBTQ from schools, burning books, etc.

Or the whole panic about trans people in women's bathroom - panic that actually led to assaults, murders, harrassment of both trans AND cisgender women (because unlike what they claim, they can't always tell).

Then, there are the classics: calling undocumented immigrants "rapists, gangsters, murderers, terrorists", calling Muslims "terrorists", and all the not-so-subtle dogwhistles about black people ("inner city crime!" "53/17!").

And more recently, people who oppose Israel (mostly left-wing) are called terrorists or terror apologists.

The right does not have a monopoly on racism, but there certainly appear to be some sort of symbiotic relationship there.

Ooh yeah, and let's not forget the right's new propensity for literally calling Democrats/liberals/anyone to the left of them pedophiles. I was focused more on the geographic element of rhetoric against rural/working folks vs city folks, but if you broaden that to include general political invective, the right has absolutely no, uh, right (no pun intended) to complain about being mistreated. Like, tell me what is more insulting, offensive, despicable than essentially calling someone a child-rapist because they disagree with you politically. Calling someone a redneck or making jokes about southern incest, while stupid and inappropriate, isn't nearly as rancid.

I had a moment a while back when I was trolling Newsmax for fun. I was literally called a terrorist sympathizer for pointing out the things the American Military Industrial Complex had done to create the hatred of America, from the blind and unapologetic support of Israel to other historical facts of the covert things we had done like the Iranian Coup in the 50s. The sad fact is that they have a dangerously flawed idea that anyone anti Trump is a far left radical who supports perverts and pedophiles. Funny how they accuse the left of grooming and they call for banning books but they want the Bible in schools. Let's examine some of those wholesome Bible stories.....like the time Lot's two daughters got him loaded and banged him. Nice wholesome story, right?

Spot on.

As for the bible, let's conveniently overlook its stance on slavery. LOL The Bible has long been the greatest catalyst for atheism mankind has ever invented.

Most Christians don't even know the Bible in any meaningful capacity anyways. They tend to cherry pick, or interpret things to say whatever fits their particular worldview.

Anyways, religion is the main root cause of everything wrong with the right, and conservatives in general. Now, obviously, not everyone who identifies as a conservative and/or votes Republican is a religious nut. People tend to be complicated and have a variety of reasons why they vote the way they do. In many folks' view, they're just voting to prevent a worse outcome. Whether or not their belief is valid is another discussion.

But, my point is, if we eliminate religion from the equation...many of the views that the right expresses would evaporate.

Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, trying to regulate women's reproductive rights, anti-education and anti-intellectualism...

All of it

All of it is influenced by religion to varying degrees. There's no way around it, and I believe religious moderates are enablers.

No need to overlook that for these Confederate apologists. If anything, it only adds to the authoritative nature of the book in their eyes. I'm reminded of Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens and his inaugural Cornerstone Address/Speech...

As George Carlin said, "God has been the leading cause of death for the last two thousand or so years!"

Look, the people that colonized North America believed the nature worshipping natives were savages. The indigenous Americans had deeply held beliefs that the Europeans could not begin to fathom. They became "civilized" once they were baptized. Religion has been used to justify genocide throughout the centuries and that is no conspiracy.....the written history attests to it.

Frank Zappa said back in the 80s that when you make religion the litmus test for patriotism, you are headed towards a fascist theocracy. Those people in the Newsmax page would act all appalled at the "morality police" if Iran arrested a woman for showing their wrist in public or something. I'm like, "What the fuck you think the Christian Taliban here in America is trying to do??" They don't get it. They don't even understand that they all worship THE SAME GOD!

What scares me the most is that Donald Trump will take his marching orders from the true owners of the Republican Party, the religious right (I like to call the Christian Taliban), and they will let him play president as long as he does their bidding. He already has with his SCOTUS picks. The game was afoot when Moscow Mitch gave Obama the royal screw job on Merrick Garland for SCOTUS. Stack the court and accuse the other side of wanting to stack the court. Having a majority of judges on one of the country's branch of government designed to make sure that the other two follow the rule of law using their religious beliefs as part of their Constiutionalilty decision making sets an extremely dangerous precedent.

No it's not. Religious extremism is a huge problem on the right, but calling it (much less religion in general) the root cause of everything wrong is overly simplistic and at odds with the facts. Barry Goldwater imbued American conservatism with the kind of conspiracy-mongering, purism, and violent rejection of disagreement that led directly to Jan 6 and Trump-- religion played little to no role in his platform and he actually wound up being one of the religious right's most trenchant critics. The John Birch Society basically spawned the idea of the deep state and injected mainstream conservatism with a delusional sense of victimization and extremism-- their founding principles were small government and an insane conviction that communists had infiltrated the government, no mention of religion. Even William Buckley and National Review, which arguably laid the foundation for conservatism in the latter half of the 20th century and made religion a key part of it, saw the Christian right as just one facet of conservatism, not the root of it.

The modern right emerged out of a synthesis of religious extremism and political extremism; religious extremism was a conjoined element, not the foundation. If you take the religious element out, you still end up with a rage-fueled, conspiracy-ridden movement that distrusts (even hates) democracy and is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. This is the logical progression of American conservatism and if you follow that progression back it doesn't start with religion.

I think that's absolutely the big thing that's wrong with the right: the violence, the hysterical distrust of government, the hatred of democracy, all rocket-fueled by minoritarian political institutions like the Electoral College and gerrymandering. If you pretend that religion is the root of it and accuse "religious moderates" of enabling it, a. you're just going to annoy, offend, and turn off people who otherwise are probably receptive to your arguments, and b. you're going to miss the actual root problem. Conspiracy, anti-democracy, and anti-majoritarianism started taking over the Republican Party in the 50s and 60s, and religion was not the driving force behind that, so what was? That's the question we need to answer if we're gonna figure out how to move forward from here.

They don't actually. There are quite a few differences between the Islamic God and the Christian God - and within both religions there's a large diversity of ideas about God between sects, and also within them.

In fact, I doubt that you could even find two people in the world who worship the same God. Each person has their own idea of God and the attributes of God, since that's what God is - an idea.

So I guess what you are ultimately saying is, the rejection of any and all political dissention, and radical anti-establishment rhetoric are the true root causes (or are at least major factors) for why the right turned out the way it did, religious fundamentalism was simply another bad ingredient added to the mix, ultimately becoming yet another toxic part of the shit cake that is the radical right? Or am I misunderstanding?

As far as religion playing a small role in Tump's platform, that's a very interesting point. From what I've seen, Trump never really spoke about Christianity very much during his presidency, and only recently began trying to make appeals to the religious right...kind of. Dude is selling Bibles now to pay off his legal fees lol, and Christians are stupid enough to buy into it. He really has these people by the balls, eating out of his hand.

But you can't deny that, even IF religion isn't a true root cause, it's a major and significant reason behind a lot of their viewpoints. I mean why else would they believe the things they do about women's reproductive rights, the LGBTQ+ community, education, etc? If you remove religion from the equation, there simply wouldn't be any basis for a very huge portion of their worldview.

I think there's something to this in many, perhaps most, cases. It's hard to be sure. Not all homophobic, transphobic, anti-choice, etc. individuals strike me as the sort of people who'd simply drop those positions if they dropped their religion.

It's hard (and deeply unpleasant) to try to imagine what non-religious factors lie behind those positions, but what comes to mind would be prudishness or disgust - the "ick" factor, aversion to the "weird and different" in human sexuality - coupled with a sort of mindless authoritarianism that finds oneself entitled to dictate other people's sexuality. One sometimes hears of self-hating closet cases. There's also sexism/misogyny, and a peculiarly ignorant and uncompromising notion of fetal rights (which is often just window-dressing to rationalize the former). These sorts of things are reinforced by certain popular, widely practiced religions (which isn't the same as religion in general), but they also have lives of their own to some extent, ISTM.

I see where you're coming from, but I also think there should be a better word than simply "religion" here. It's too broad IMO; plenty of religious people are perfectly fine and forward-thinking with regard to these issues, and couldn't reasonably be lumped into the "complicit with Westboro Baptist" category.

Actually there are differences in dogma....period. They all claim to worship THE God of Abraham.

I haven't been terribly concerned about Trump winning, but watching the discussion with four twenty-somethings on PBS last night now has me a bit worried. Things like "I can't support the person writing the checks for this war..." It reminds me of how stupid I was when I was younger. They'll hand Trump the presidency...and the checks will keep on writing. Is it that participation trophy that makes them think that if they throw a big enough tantrum that they'll change the world? And yeah, it's a tantrum. From being woefully ill-informed and manipulated by social media as their news outlet to the laughable lists of demands coming out of the protest encampments to just being idiots like all of us were, they're going to cut off their nose to spite their face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rHmyNJwdkw

spot on.

Some of my closest friends are openly gay...

I always make a point to remind them when they try to give religious people the benefit of the doubt. They may "love" you and treat you with respect to your face, but make no mistake, many of them would have you hanged simply for loving and/or sleeping with another male. These aren't good people, just simply maintain the facade of being so.

Obviously there are a lot of forward thinking people who are also religious, I'm not saying everyone who has religious faith is an ignorant bigot. Be that as it may; it is, in fact, the explaining factor behind almost all of those nastier, terribly regressive and bigoted viewpoints that the right espouses.

It's only religion. I don't think there exists any other logical explanation behind why they believe those things.

I think religious fundamentalism undergirds some of the policy issues, the problem is those policy issues are married to an extreme unwillingness to accept the democratic policymaking process, and that unwillingness doesn't go back to religion. Conservatives have believed since the 50s that the policymaking process is corrupt, that it can no longer be trusted to lead to the right outcomes, that the deck is stacked against them and against the "real" America they represent. I think the evidence is pretty conclusive that the origins of this mindset, which is fundamentally responsible for the anti-democratic, violent character of American conservatism, had really very little to do with religion or with the marriage of the Christian right and the far right.

I think things like anti-abortion or anti-LGBT stances are morally repugnant-- along with less religiously-influenced conservative positions like tax cuts and small government-- but the foundation of a democratic society is the promise of a stage where ideas can compete for the people's preferences. The most fundamental problem in my opinion is not that they have those opinions, but that they can no longer tolerate disagreement with those opinions. They can no longer tolerate the possibility that those opinions don't win in a democratic society. To be clear, that doesn't mean I think those opinions are good or even acceptable, but ideally, the way we marginalize them is by persuading voters that our way is better. Conservatives are no longer willing to do that. They don't want to persuade. They want to impose. And the structure of our politics-- the existence of minoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate-- means they don't have to persuade. Think about the fact that, without the Electoral College, the Republicans would not have won a single presidential election in nearly forty years. They would have been forced to retreat from their increasingly far-right bent because it would have proven politically infeasible. They have the luxury of continuing to radicalize because our institutions empower minority demands over majority will.

Okay, I'm rambling a bit, but my point boils down to this: conservative extremism derives from a rejection of the democratic process out of a delusion that it is inherently corrupt or opposed to the interests of the people. Because of minoritarian institutions that enable conservatives to essentially circumvent the democratic process and impose their will on an unwilling populace, deeply unpopular Christian right policies get implemented. But the fundamental issue is not those Christian right policies; it's that the people implementing them have, for the past few decades, been less and less willing to let their policies be subject to democratic policymaking. Essentially, the problem of Christian fascism is not the Christian half of the equation, it's the fascist half, and the fascist half came first.

So what? Abraham is just a name. One religion says God incarnated as Jesus and worships that manifestation, another denies that. And that's just one of many disagreements. When both see the other narrative as wrong why expect them to agree on anything?

And heck, when we've seen wars being waged over the interpretation of single verses of religious texts, why expect anyone to agree? That should tell us everything we need to know about the root causes of political disagreement. It would take a huge, fundamental shift in our thinking and in our attitudes towards each other to change that.

I'm pretty sure I said this many pages back, and it is like stating the sky is blue, but liberalism is lucky a lot of conservatives are racist and xenophobic, because Muslims and Catholic Latinos are the future of the Republican party. It's looking like an open embrace isn't going to matter anyway (I foolishly thought that acceptance was going to play into it), but if so, I get the feeling it would be right quick that Democrats wouldn't stand a chance anymore. The young Palestinian woman in that PBS discussion doesn't care about human rights or women's rights or abortion or any of that jazz. They come here for jobs and the freedom to make money, and all their traditional conservative values remain in full force. The Republican party is where they're mostly going to go. They're tired of being economically oppressed, but they don't have any issues with cultural oppression.

Forgive me. That's terribly worded, but I hope the gist isn't lost in that.

I was listening to an interview with Frank Bruni last night, and he said something interesting about woke language. The young extreme left is hyper sensitive about language, but they haven't seemed to mind at all that their language since October 7th has become incredibly sloppy. Is that antisemitism? What is it? I don't know, but it is difficult to square that this outrage has been absent in all the other world conflicts and wars we've watched the past decade+.

Yes and no. The Muslim-American community does tend to be more conservative than the broader public-- in some cases, depending on any number of factors (sect, country of family origin, etc), much, much more conservative. But Muslims didn't only gravitate towards the Democratic Party out of disgust with perceived Islamophobia from the Republican Party and its association with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many Muslims aren't into the Republican rhetoric around small government; they think the government does have an obligation to provide safety nets and support systems, and they aren't too receptive to calls for lower taxes and less spending. And young Muslim-Americans especially, the ones who have entered the electorate since 2016, are more progressive on both social and economic issues, more likely to be active in social justice circles (which older Muslims, particularly immigrants, have tended to be wary of), more likely to absolutely take issue with "cultural oppression" as you put it. Even the general Muslim population's conservatism, I think, tends to be overblown-- look at surveys of public opinion on different social issues and Muslims tend to be about the same, even a little more liberal, as overall male respondents. In other words, your average Muslim is probably just a little more liberal/a little less conservative than your average man in America.

As for Muslims "coming here" for various reasons, that was true during the period in which Muslim immigration to the US really took off in the 60s through the 90s, but more and more Muslim Americans today were born and raised in the US, and they look very different in many ways. They're not as sectarian (more likely to be pretty ecumenical, or even to self-describe as non-denominational), more likely to have synthesized their religious and national/political identities (wearing a hijab has often been caricatured as a symptom of conservatism, and yet younger Muslims are both more likely to wear a hijab and be progressive), they've grown up in a country that is much, much more friendly to Muslims and non-Christian Middle Easterners than their parents and grandparents who immigrated and faced alienation.

I can only speak out of personal experience to the political trajectory of Muslim Americans, but I think this can be said for Catholic Latinos too: it's not that there's going to be a sea change and they're going to become the base of the Republican Party, or start voting by a wide majority for them. More likely, they're just going to become a more competitive demographic. That hardly spells the demise of the Democratic Party, especially considering for Latinos, this is just a reversion to the way it used to be. I think part of the hysteria over shifts in Latino voting patterns is people mistaking Democrats' comparative advantage with Latino voters in recent elections for something that has been long-standing, and the Republicans' advances with those voters as a massive change that will doom the Democrats. Really, Democrats' advantage with Latinos nationally was a product of Obama's unique electoral coalition and then of Trump's ascent in the party. As Obama ceased to be the dominant figure in Democratic politics and Republicans figured out how to package Trumpism in a way that wasn't immediately revolting to Latino voters, there was always going to be a reversion to the mean, which is Latino voters being fairly competitive. And it's not like Democrats were utterly electorally incapacitated before 2008.

Thanks for taking the time to write another quality, thoughtful response. I hope you're right.

Sorry but Abraham is not just a name. All three faiths revere him to be the progeniture of the Israeli people as well as the Arab people. It's mostly the American Christian Taliban that disagrees with Allah being the same as the Christian God.

Some American voters: Joe Biden's old and senile, I'm gonna vote for RFK Jr!

RFK Jr: "I have cognitive problems, clearly."

Kneel before your god, Americans!

Well, we know why the brain worm died: it starved to death.

How are the protests in Georgia (Easter Europe) not being covered in US news?

Because Georgia isn't really Europe and US media tends not to care a whole lot about protests when they're south of Russia and east of Turkey.

Plus, this isn't the first time these kinds of protests have happened lately. I imagine a lot of journalists and observers in the west expect very little to actually change or happen as a result of the protests, just like very little actually changed or happened as a result of the last protest against the exact same law that's being protested now.

PBS ran a 5-minute piece on the Georgian protests last night.