I was chatting with my cousin recently and he has lived his entire life in a liberal cocoon. Dad’s a liberal. Mom and sister have both worked for the Democratic Party. CNN is the only trusted news network. And I heard him make some off-hand comments about Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis and I wanted to say something, but I wanted to be careful to say it correctly.
If you believe that Joe Biden is generally a decent human being who is doing the best he can and Ron DeSantis is immoral and power-hungry, you’re crazy. Both are perfectly reasonable things to believe. But you have to be consistent.
Biden and DeSantis are politicians on a national stage. Every single politician on the national stage is the same. One on one, they are each generally decent human beings who got into politics to try to make the world a better place. And every single one of them has sacrificed their morality time and time again in order to succeed on the national stage. And every single one of them has taken advantage of their success for personal gain. Because, with very few exceptions, that’s what humans do.
People are complex. If you are going to judge people you’ve never met, you need to use a consistent metric.
The existential threat of the other side is 100% a self-fulfilling prophesy. The more dangerous people believe the other side to be, the more evil they will excuse on their own side in order to win. And the more evil people excuse on their own side in order to win, the more justified the other side is in believing that they are dangerous.
The miracle of the United States, for its all-to-short existence, has been the ability of its citizenry to hold political power while believing that unity is more important than getting their way.
