I did not have the courage to put on the post title exactly what I wanted to write about, which is: the attitude of 'Liberals' towards 'Conservatives', or more specifically, the attitudes of Democrats towards Republicans. Remember that within 50 years or so, not only will we all be pushing up the daisies, the characters of the two parties may be totally transformed, so this post should be deleted by me very soon.
Many of us despise the Republicans, and with some justification. (In the Bible, we read that Jonah despised the people of Niniveh in much the same way, but evidently God advised him to be moderate. We atheists do not believe that God does this kind of thing; if there had been such a person as Jonah, he must have taken time to reconsider, but written, in his autobiography, that God spoke to him. The voices of their consciences were, to these people, the voice of God.)
Despising Republicans--or conservatives, generally--is a losing strategy. Those people are what they are for numerous, numerous quite different reasons; in this era, in particular, they are a highly diverse and philosophically fragmented lot.
The Republican leadership, I concede, are an opportunistic and amoral bunch. At the best of times, politicians are obsessed with being re-elected. These days, the Republican leadership lives in fear that Donald Trump may turn against them, leading to lost elections. We see these people playing all sorts of verbal games, on Fox TV, and on other conservative media, trying to walk back their criticism of Donald Trump. It is rather pathetic, but not all of them are wealthy enough to be able to handle being out of a job, so the poorer ones act like MAGA monkeys, while those who have been in politics long enough to have saved up for a rainy day are able to act the statesman, and be firm about disapproving of Trump. Liz Cheyney strikes me as one of the latter, and so does Mitch McConnell. (McConnell has to be careful, because Trump and his family must be watching him closely; if he influences too many senators and congressmen and women away from Trump, there could be a vicious backlash. There was one, in fact; Trump called McConnel all sorts of names.)
The rank-and-file Republicans, as I have written about before, are Republicans for various reasons: religion, abortion, guns, racism, taxes, fossil fuels, hatred of Hillary Clinton, fear of Socialism, feeble-mindedness, etc, etc. But not all of them may be concerned with all of these issues. (In the same way, not all Democrats are concerned with government help in emergencies, fighting COVID, marriage equality, minority rights, gender equality, poverty, the environment and pollution, native rights, and so on.) Moderate Republicans are--effectively-- being abused by their leaders, to go along with silly principles like saying that the election was stolen, or that the vaccines are unsafe, etc, etc.
Once we stop shooting from the hip when we see a Republican, we can begin to adjust our own mental stances, because we need Republicans in government. Left to itself, there is the danger that the Democratic Party will take on so many social programs with so much enthusiasm that we could be up to our necks in taxes. How much foreign aid is too much? Is it possible to open up the Mexican border too much? Is the volume of immigration proportional to how much support the poor get from Federal social programs? Republicans keep a close eye on these issues, whereas Democrats are eager to create enormous safety-nets for everyone. Arguably these safety-nets are good things, but if they imply very heavy taxation, in a year or two Democrats will lose heavily at the polls.
The New York Times opinion columns seem to think that Biden might be among the best Democrat presidents since Roosevelt. It has been hardly four months since Biden took office, but so far things are going well. News of these blood-clots is worrying, but the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines do not have any side-effects that are cause for anxiety. Many states have opened up the vaccine for everybody, and we can only hope that soon everyone will try to get one. So far, 40% of the US population has gotten at least one shot, and that includes 75% of seniors, who are, as we know, most likely to get a bad case of COVID. Once they were protected, those who caught the virus are less likely to be badly sick, and less likely to die. So COVID deaths are on a seriously downward trend.
Unfortunately, a larger proportion of more affluent (rich) people have gotten shots, and a larger proportion of Republicans are refusing to get shots, and Blacks are said to be understandably less comfortable about getting shots, because historically they have been used as test populations for medical trials.
Watching the antics of the most ludicrous members of the Republicans in government can easily lead us to be more convinced of our stance of despising the whole party. I do not watch the details of the Matt Gaetz affair, nor do I pay attention to what Marjorie Greene says, nor the various strange people who consider that their forced entrance into the chambers of Congress gives them a media platform for personal aggrandizement. But many things are moving in the right direction.
My home state, Pennsylvania, is indicated as having unchecked community spread. Not a good thing. A.S. American Samoa has less than 1 person per 100,000 getting infected.
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