Why the Democrats are Evil

This post was inspired by a Facebook comment I saw once. The poster remarked that Democrats are “evil.” The idea that anything or anyone can be truly evil is an extreme idea. We throw the word casually around but the reality is that evil things are beyond normal and even beyond immoral. Evil denotes intent to do something so terrible and so awful that it harms others and is intended to do so. It’s as far away from the grace of god as you can get.

So why do people think that “democrats” (leaders and voters) are evil?

Is it the embrace of diversity?

Is it the desire to use the power of government to ease human suffering?

Or is it something more sinister?

I’ve pondered this question. What would motivate someone to call an entire political party and millions of people who vote for them “evil?” I’m not quite sure why that word sticks out to me. But it does stick out to me. It speaks of something beyond a mere political disagree. It invokes the sacred to describe political ideas and opinions. This is particularly salient when you have an entire conspiracy around how democrats are trafficking children and using them for satanic rituals. It has no basis in truth but such an idea is truly evil.

I think the more sinister thing is that Democrats are, as I put it in What The Hell is Going on? attacking the American myth. We see this in various debates but especially in the recent hubbub about Critical Race Theory. If you don’t teach the horrors of slavery in the classroom and the roots of racism then it can be safely kept out of the American mythos that we are an essentially good and exceptional country. CRT breaks apart the big lie at the heart of the American story. And for those to whom the American myth is as sacred as the Christian Bible, attacking that myth is a kind of evil.

The other aspect of this is the propaganda put out by Fox News. Right-wing outlets have elevated a certain kind of person, usually white, working class, and republican voting as a “real american” and that people who live on the coasts can’t possibly understand working people and aren’t real “americans” because they don’t do any work and they only want to crush the American spirit and ruin the American story while Republican want to restore a country that they have lost. I suppose this is the point at which we have to look at the root cause of that idea. Of course the root there is that the “lost country” is an economic, social order, and racial order that has been slowly collapsing for years. The Republican party since 1972 has stood against it while the Democratic party since 1976 has embraced that change. Fast forward 45 years and you have a changed America. Millions of people tune into Fox News to see how the democrats are destroying America today. Day after day of that might lead someone to say that the democrats are evil. They aren’t allowing the America of old to come back, they are moving to a new world that seems frightening to people who aren’t interested in sharing the American dream with people that don’t look like them.

What can we conclude from all of this? That I’m not quite sure. Perhaps I only offer these thoughts as a way to process an observation that I’ve made on this. This all started with a Facebook post that stuck out in my mind. Politically, it is very hard to negotiate and compromise with people who think that you’re evil. How do we bring America together when people think that the people opposite of them are evil? I don’t know how to you bring a country back from that.