A partisan is a person who puts allegiance to a political faction above principle, prudence, and perception. It is a form of tribalism, but translated to the activist realm.
Parties are inevitable in a “democracy,” and so is partisanship. But the ugliness of it proves itself irresistable when folks take it to the extreme of “double standards everywhere,” when they forgive (or, worse yet, do not even notice) the sins of their own faction but go into panic and protest about the flipside sins of the other.
And that is where we are in America, now.
It is a commonplace to comment on how inexplicable, how crazy, current politics is. I am almost dumbfounded by this puzzlement, for this is precisely where America has been heading all my life. It is the result of the wild dialectic of action/reaction/overreaction in the context of being trapped by the internal contradictions (thanks, Proudhon!) of Late Stage Churning State Capitalism, where those who have any leverage on power (members of factions) find themselves stuck, unable to even speak the truth about their situation for fear of losing power.
Clinton+Gore (and the Supremes) gave us GWB; GWB+McCain gave us Obama: Obama+Hillary gave us Trump: each desperation move is an insult to the opposite side, which then ups the ante of idiocy.
The funny part is how neither side sees its own choices as reactions to the insults of the other, and how both sides tend to conform ever-more to negative stereotypes. Both sides ineluctably become the straw man version of themselves.
H. L. Mencken would have loved this age.
from Discriminations.info.
