I'm not naive enough to believe that there was a golden age of discourse in which all Americans behaved with cheerfulness toward their opponents. Lincoln was vilified. Roosevelt castigated as a dangerous Red. Al Smith lambasted as an agent of the Pope. It goes on and on.
But a person would have to be really naive to believe that things haven't been particularly weird recently, but which we can go pack, I think, to President Obama's first Presidential race, after which discourse started in a new and dangerous direction (and not due to him, I might add).
On a local highway some brave soul has put up a Biden/Harris banner. Biden isn't going to win here, and the person displaying it has to either be truly brave or extraordinarily naive. Not too surprisingly, counter banners have appeared across the highway for Trump. It's not that, but what they say, which is:
Trump
2020
Stop the Bullshit
and
Trump
2020
Fuck Your Feelings
First of all, putting up a Trump banner seeking to "Stop the Bullshit" really opens up the person putting it up to the charge of being naive as one of the primary claims of his opponents is that he's full of just that. Indeed, while we haven't put it up yet, there's a remarkable dichotomy in the Trump Administration between public declarations and very quiet conservative actions. It makes a person wonder exactly how the administration functions and its relationship to the Oval Office.
We'll get to that later and this isn't a critique or criticism of his administration in any sense. Some people, and I've certainly met at least one, really like the way he addresses the public. Rather, this is to point out that much like the use of H. L. Mencken's quote about Americans inevitably getting the President they deserve, a person needs to be careful to ponder whether their use of a slogan is easily subject to counter use. Things like that don't advance any discourse.
The point of this post, however, is to show how crude we've become. That we've reached the point where political posters, even aftermarket ones as these surely must be, are so crude means we've reached a new low in modern American political history.
Breakin' Through at the University of Wyoming, which is not occupied by leftists.
Along the same lines, sort of, a foundation that supports the local university posted on the recent anniversary of the university's foundings.
That's nice, and worth noting. Also worth noting is the weird controversy that happened a couple of years ago when the university adopted the "The World Needs More Cowboys" slogan, which did provoke some hypersensitive woke faculty to wring their hands over what that meant.
That must have opened things up as when the foundation noted the anniversary it provoked a couple of comments of a negative nature, including:
Cool. Sad to see UW now being controlled by the extremist left agenda to destroy our country.
and
back when it was full of Americans. not the liberal toads that haunt it's halls today.
Now, now, most of the faculty at UW doesn't even teach anything remotely political. There's no evidence that the university is "controlled" by "the extremist left", even if there are individual professors far to the left of the average Wyomingite, something that's been the case for a very long time. And I'm not even sure what to make of it once being "full of Americans. not the liberal toads".
Indeed, that last comment seems to presuppose that if you are a political liberal, you must be 1) a toad, and 2) not an American. The thought that should scare people who make comments of that type is that the "liberal toads" are almost certainly about to maintain their position in the U.S. House and take the Oval Office and that, moreover, they're as American as anyone else. Nobody really has the right to declare their opponents to not be Americans due to their political views, let alone to declare that they're an amphibian.
Indeed, an old very conservative friend of mine once pointed out that one of the real hallmarks of the American Communists of the 1930s and 1940s was, by and large, how deeply patriotic they were. They weren't anti American, they were just extremely radical left wing Americans.
I'm pretty conservative myself, which leads me in part to make this comment. We're truly about to get the most liberal political administration since the 1930s. That's in part due to a massive left wing reaction to Donald Trump having been elected in the first place. Part, but not all, of why he was elected was due to a real visceral reaction in some quarter to Barack Obama having been elected. Declarations about people's background and origin, and their Americaness or lack of it, have become common. So too has it become common to call somebody a Marxist, a Socialist or a Fascist, when lots of people don't even really seem to know what those things mean.
Enough is enough, really.
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