I used to live in Venice, California. In fact, I lived there when we invaded Panama for no discernible reason and killed a bunch of people for no obvious principle. To this day, I don’t think 99% of Americans know why Manuel Noreiga suddenly became unacceptable to our foreign policy elites after decades of doing their bidding. But I digress.
Living in Venice can give you the comfortable impression that everyone is to the left of our two established political parties and that no one with any integrity would get in bed with either of them. That’s what living in Venice seems to have done to Conor Friedersdorf, but he needs to wake up. I am tired of the purity trolls. If you can accurately identify the pathologies of the modern GOP and expound on them at length, then you’ve lost the right to be above it all. It really is that simple.
I can forgive people who do not recognize the unprecedented danger the modern GOP poses to our country and the world, but I cannot forgive people who are totally cognizant of that danger and nonetheless say “to hell with both parties.” Those people are worse than ostriches. They are enablers.
You want to know what can go to hell? Godwin’s Law.
Anyone who looked honestly at the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and then said “to hell with the Weimar Republic” was guilty of the same kind of purity trolling. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing not because the modern GOP is about to round up all the homosexuals or gypsies or mental incompetents and blast them with Zyklon B. It’s because the modern GOP is xenophobic, hyper-nationalistic, in constant search of scapegoats, and intent on embroiling us in ill-considered wars. They are a party that is obsessed with fecundity, that is obsessed with the racial purity of the country, that is completely in bed with the corporate industrialists that fund them. They have spent the last two years working on two projects with unremitting tenacity: forcing unwanted probes up women’s vaginas and disenfranchising blacks and Latinos.
At this point, I don’t care if it is supposed to be impermissible to talk about Nazis in American politics. Mitt Romney’s campaign is built around nothing if not the Big Lie. The president ended the work requirement for welfare, cut Medicare benefits to pay for Obamacare, and went on a global Apology Tour in 2009. Half the country is on the government dole, and minorities are sucking the lifeblood out of the nation’s economy. Homosexuals caused 9/11 and Katrina and undermined the battle-readiness of our troops. Climate change doesn’t exist and evolution is a myth. Man once co-existed with dinosaurs.
At some point, you have to stop pretending that the modern GOP isn’t using about 95% of Josef Goebbel’s playbook and take a stand. You don’t just stand above it all and say, “but what about the drones?” You don’t get to do that. This is an extremely dangerous ideology that we are dealing with that is daily doing everything it can to make Americans hate each other and everyone in the world who isn’t an American. It spreads ignorance and intolerance and anti-intellectualism and militarism and violence. It no longer has any redeeming qualities. If you can identify all these problems and tendencies, you forfeit the right to adopt an indifferent attitude about the elections. If you say “to hell with both sides” then to hell with you.
