And must either be confronted, or yielded to.

Elections in America have always been contentious things, as the point of them is to get all sides as agitated as possible. If you wanted to find the point at which our elections turned ugly it would be when the concept of turnout became the focus. The surest way to get your guys motivated to vote is to convince them that the alternative is pure evil, the worst thing imaginable. Since one side will always lose, it means something close to half the country is always angry at the result.

The thing is though, it was always a game and most people got it. The candidates would say the vilest things about one another, but then carry on like old pals during a debate, showing the world they did not really mean those things. In fact, this is why the Left has controlled the country. Everyone else has always been sure the Left was not really serious about what they were saying. Despite it all, many people remain convinced that the Left today is just putting on a show.

That may be one of the factors creating the current crisis. The eruption of mass media over the last couple of decades puts the Left in our face all the time. There is no escaping politics today, which means there is no escaping the Left. Watch a sporting event and there will be lefty political preaching. Check the weather for your trip to the beach and you get a lecture on global warming. Go outside and you see people wearing three masks in their car, letting you know they are in that cult.

Of course, social media is like standing in front of a firehose. Even if you only want to follow something banal like entertainment news, you will be drenched in political commentary, almost entirely from the Left. The carnies all fashion themselves as philosophers now. The athletes have made politics a feature of their act. These are the dumbest, crudest people in our society, but they are sure you need to know what they have to say about current events.

There is another part to this. Along with not being able to escape the left-wing crazies, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is no living with them. Politics, regardless of the system, is about compromise. The opposing sides find some middle ground that they can accept or some combination of their proposals that prevent either side from feeling cheated by the other. In a democracy, compromise is based on the understanding that both sides want what is best.

How do you reach a compromise with someone who thinks invisible men from a faraway land used mind control to change an election? On top of that, they were perfectly willing to destroy the country over it. If one side is sure the other side is evil, there can never be a compromise. The best you can get is a truce in the hostilities, but eventually one side will attack again. After all, any compromise with evil is immoral on its face, so the only more thing to do is confront it.

The larger issue isn’t that one side believes the other is evil. The most pressing issue is that one side is, in fact, EVIL. When one identifies the Left as capital-E Evil, one is neither exaggerating for effect nor issuing an unfounded charge.

The problem is redoubled—nay, retripled, reFOURPLED, even—by the fact that the non-evil side is extremely reluctant to acknowledge that the Evil side is, in fact, EVIL. Then redouble it again owing to the Not-Evils’ dread of being thought of as—GASP!!—impolitic, overwrought, or just goshdarnit RUDE should they dare to conduct themselves according to the acknowledgement that they didn’t want to own up to in the first damned place, and…well, it won’t be long before everybody throws up their hands in despair, says to hell with it all, and heads on back home for a nice, frazzled-nerve-soothing nap on the couch.

Some of our Non-Evils really need to ask themselves a few things, and should not be allowed any dessert until they’re able to provide a satisfactory answer:

• Do you truly believe that Leftists—Progressivists, liberals, Democrat-Socialists, whatever—are in fact Marxists/Statists/Commies/totalitarians/whatever?
• Do you truly believe that Marxism/Socialism/Communism/totalitarianism/collectivism/whatever is in fact an evil ideology?
• Can you explain why, exactly, having just admitted to truly believing both those things, you find it so difficult to just say so right out loud?

This, in turn, brings to boil a whole kettle of other most pertinent fish, a standout among which is the cognitive dissonance created by recognizing Evil and at the same time denying yourself any effective means to combat it. Some of the others I’ll likely be going into in a later post.