Thursday, September 06, 2012

Why we get called Nazis

This is an excellent article by actor Michael Knowles about why Democrats call us Nazis:

The answer lies in the intellectual heterogeneity, or lack thereof, within the two major parties. Since the Reagan Revolution, the Republican Party has counted in its ranks at least four distinct political groups: traditionalists, neoconservatives, libertarians, and the religious right. In his excellent piece “Four Heads and One Heart,” political scientist James Ceaser observes that these four major factions of the Republican Party often approach politics from fundamentally different points of view. In order for libertarians to share a “big tent” with the religious right, they must force themselves to consider an opposing point of view, understand the merits of its arguments, make ideological concessions, and compromise.
The Democratic Party has no such philosophical disagreements and therefore no such reason to compromise, at least in the years since Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama brought the party back from the brink of practicality. Conservative “Blue Dog Democrats” and Clintonian “New Democrats” have almost entirely abandoned ship: all that remain are ideologically pure progressives. Devoid of any internal challenges to their ideas, the so-called progressives are left in a Democratic echo chamber, finally free to, well, progress.
 Read the whole thing.