Focus on Anti-Liberty, Not Left v. Right
What if we were able to drop tribal partisan blinders and instead focus on attacks on our liberty?
A partisan lens, focused on the left-right, Democrat-Republican divide, often obscures the fundamental and more important conflict between authoritarianism and liberty. Instead of focusing on adherence to democratic principles, partisan loyalists frequently defend their preferred side while condemning the opposition, leading to the justification of actions that contradict those principles. They rely on information filtered through a tribal lens by partisan media, dismissing opposing viewpoints with labels like 'fake,' 'fascist,' 'woke,' 'racist,' 'RINO,' or 'Trump Derangement Syndrome.' The underlying assumption is that if you're criticizing their side, you must be from the other side.
Examples of encroachments on liberty:
The left: The Biden administration's COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns, executive actions on student loan forgiveness, and Title IX reinterpretations that affect due process and civil rights.
The right: Trump’s legal attacks on free speech and the press, shakedowns of law firms, judges, and universities aiming to purge "anti-American ideology", forgoing due process rights, undermining our elections with propaganda, and extreme executive overreach with executive actions and claims that he can do whatever he wants b/c of Article 2 as he pushes out a firehose of propaganda that distorts and confuses reality.
The anti-liberty left has exerted authority over our education and cultural institutions for some time now, and as a reaction, the extremely anti-liberty Trump and MAGA movement now has serious political and governmental power that places our democracy at high risk.
How do we move partisan tribalists from that mindset and into one that is more clear-eyed about the illiberal authoritarianism from both left and right?