Live-and-let-live political types are stuck between cultists and totalitarians.
President Joe Biden frequently calls out his political opponents as dangers to democracy. It’s an easy charge to make, given former President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept a loss at the polls, his followers’ rioting at the Capitol, and subsequent snipe hunts for election fraud and efforts to erect barriers to voting. But the current president’s opponents credibly riposte that Biden and company seek control of the economy and suppression of dissent. Those who want to be left alone are stuck between a deluded Republican cult of personality and the smug, creeping totalitarianism of Democrats.
“There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today — an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are — who we are as Americans,” Biden insisted last week in Philadelphia. “We’re are [sic] facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War … The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th.”
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“The Trump campaign delivered a blueprint for losing candidates to undermine support for the winner or even steal the election,” Eggers, Garro, and Grimmer added. “It seems unlikely that he will be the last to try these tactics.”
Actually, Trump is still trying these tactics, insisting just this week, “The Voter Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election was monumental, and the facts are coming out daily!”
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Much of the information tagged as misinformation by Psaki is, in fact, bullshit—but so is a lot of what the government itself says. It’s not always possible to separate truth from falsity right out of the gate, as demonstrated by officialdom’s about-face on speculation that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab. Once a forbidden conspiracy theory, it’s now a credible possibility. Disagreement, it seems, is pretty valuable.