Strange at the Bulwark

 

Despite the claims of being committed to defending liberal democracy without tribal loyalties or partisan prejudices, for a long time the work of the Bulwark mainly has been shilling for the Democrats. Lately its writers have gone well beyond that to something pretty nearly Manichean.

Today there was a silly piece on the site condemning libertarians for the sin of “bothsideism” (that is, accurately recognizing that there are threats to liberty from both Republicans and Democrats) and not automatically throwing in with the Dems as all right thinking people should.

Other writers at the Bulwark have been equating voting for Trump to favoring authoritarianism, fascism or, lately, actual Hitlerism, and seeing it as evidence of something frightening and “dark” in the people who will do it. This of course is nuts. Millions of people will vote for Trump despite not liking him or even disliking him, because they see him as less bad than the leftist alternative. And among the ones who do like him, I would guess that the number of them wanting a right wing authoritarian state is smaller than the number of Democrat voters wanting a Marxist one.

It is all a little strange. It’s a political campaign, for gosh sake, not Armageddon. Maybe part of what is going on at the Bulwark is just panic over the increasing likelihood that Trump will win. It surely is not good for the country. I think either Trump or Harris would be a bad president, but I do not plan to anathematize people who vote for either of them. We are all still Americans, and the partisan fanatics and tribalists at the Bulwark should stop seeing half of us as children of darkness. Besides, it makes them sound a whole lot like Trump at his craziest and nastiest.