Focusing on the individual means dropping the notion of “sides”. Identifying people (or even arguments) by their alleged “side”, instead of taking them on their own merit, is where things go wrong.
Where things go wrong is that the "extremists on both sides" is used to distract from what people on one side do. It is just a shield designed to prevent analysis.
There is actual political program and actual laws being pushed on. That is the reality. And yes, that political program belongs to that side.
It is OK to blame republicans as such for what Trump or JD Vance does, because they made them big. It is ok to blame them for the for the supreme court politics too, because they knowingly put exactly those people there, knowing they will remove protection for abortion and lied about it.
It is OK to blame democrats for what Biden does.
For the both sides thing however, you need to attribute acts of people who Democratic party actively pushes away to that party ... and to pretend that people voting for republicans have zero to do with what that party does.
For politicians (as opposed to people in other professions), they are obviously responsible for the policies their parties support, to the extent that they support their parties. Given not every politician votes in lockstep with their party.
BUT for individuals in the US, their personal positions are often more complex than the binary reductions the two-party system affords us.
Consequently, there are many (most?) dissenters on one issue or another in both parties.
If a person has thoughts on matters, it's therefore more interesting to me to discuss those thoughts, than to derive my interactions with them solely by their D or R label.
I would argue it's currently en vogue to incessantly repeat the argument that "Both Sides" have bad actors, thus commenting on the bad actors of one side is an incomplete argument.
It's tiring and non sequitur to hear such arguments however, as what the opposition to a position does is wholly unrelated to the arguments related to that position.
Haha trying to get around pattern matching by lopping off the word “both” doesn’t really strengthen your argument.
The problem is that you’re pretending like the sides don’t exist now, yet they do.
In reality, the individuals that compose one side are different from the individuals that compose the other side in predictable and problematic ways. Yes, individuals matter, but so too does the trend those individuals embody.
> In reality, the individuals that compose one side are different from the individuals that compose the other side in predictable and problematic ways.
Predictable is where we disagree strongly.
I think there's more diversity than unanimity at the individual level in both parties.
In the sense of what people say they believe around a dinner table, not what they passively nod their heads to at a rally or while watching partisan news.
Which is ironic, given it's increasingly a trope on both sides that the other is sadly monolithic and all marching in lockstop to their leader's tune.
Republicans complain about Democrats being like this; Democrats complain about Republicans being like this.
PS: "Problematic" is a terrible non-word. Surely there's a more descriptive adjective to be used?
