RFK Jr. and MTG are using the same dismissive term for major-party differences. I took at look at this phenomenon at New York:
Partisan polarization has been steadily growing in the U.S. since roughly the 1960s. Ironically, during this time, the complaint that the two parties are actually too alike has become increasingly prevalent. For years, right-wing Republicans have called people in the GOP who don’t share their exact degree of ideological extremism RINOs, or “Republicans in name only,” suggesting they’re basically Democrats. Left-wing Democrats occasionally echo these epithets by calling (relative) moderates “DINOs,” “ConservaDems,” or — back when maximum resistance to George W. Bush was de rigueur — “Vichy Democrats.”
Today the term “Uniparty” has come to denote the idea that Democrats and Republicans are actually working for the same evil Establishment enterprise, their loudly proclaimed differences being a mere sham. This contention was the culmination of a five-page letter Marjorie Taylor Greene recently sent her Republican colleagues calling for House Speaker Mike Johnson’s removal, unless he changes his ways instantly. She wrote:
“With so much at stake for our future and the future of our children, I will not tolerate this type of ‘leadership.’ This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority …
“If these actions by the leaders of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican party – we are a Uniparty that is hell-bent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction.”
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also leaned heavily into the Uniparty idea in his recent speech introducing running-mate Nicole Shanahan:
“Our independent run for the presidency is finally going to bring down the Democrat and Republican duopoly that gave us ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship. This is the same Trump/Biden Uniparty that has captured and appropriated our democracy and turned it over to Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and their other corporate donors. Nicole Shanahan will help me rally support for our revolution against Uniparty rule from both ends of the traditional Right vs. Left political spectrum.”
The Uniparty claim is ridiculous, of course, as FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley demonstrates:
“[O]ur current political moment is arguably farther away from having anything resembling a uniparty than at any other time in modern U.S. history. Based on their voting records, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have become increasingly polarized, and both the more moderate and more conservative wings of the congressional GOP have moved to the right at similar rates. Meanwhile, polling suggests that Americans now are more likely to view the parties as distinct from one another than in the past, an indication that the public broadly doesn’t see a uniparty in Washington. Although there are areas where the parties are less divided, the broader uniparty claim is at odds with our highly polarized and divided political era.”
Kennedy’s subscription to the Uniparty notion is understandable on two points. The first is that his candidacy is vastly more likely to tilt the 2024 presidential campaign in the direction of one of the two major-party candidates (likely Donald Trump, according to most of the polling) than to actually succeed in winning the presidency. Maintaining that it really doesn’t matter whether it’s Biden or Trump running the country is essential to maintaining RFK’s appeal as November approaches and the futility of his bid becomes clearer. Second, Kennedy’s pervasive conspiracy-theory approach to contemporary life lends itself to the argument that the apparent gulf between the two major parties is a ruse disguising a sinister common purpose.
MTG’s Uniparty contention also reflects dual motives. In part she is simply echoing Trump’s weird but useful contention that he’s an “outsider” battling a Deep-State Establishment that secretly controls both parties, which is pretty rich since he dominates the GOP like Genghis Khan dominated the Golden Horde. But there is a marginally more legitimate sense in which key elements of the two parties really are in line with each other on isolated issues that happen to obsess Greene, such as aid to Ukraine. If you are a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail.
The same is true of other implicit Uniparty claims, particularly those made by progressive pro-Palestinian protesters who adamantly argue that the need to smite “Genocide Joe” Biden for his pro-Israel policies outweighs all the reasons it might be a bad idea to help Trump return to the White House (including the fact that Trump is palpably indifferent to Palestinian suffering). If the two parties do not appear to differ on your overriding issue, then the fundamental reality of polarization can fade into irrelevance.
So we’re likely to hear more Uniparty talk even as Democrats and Republicans head toward another highly fractious election with very high stakes attributable to their differences.
Thanks. I’d never have known about this fracas if you hadn’t so helpfully charted it for me.
Thanks. I’d never have known about this fracas if you hadn’t so helpfully charted it for me.
ducdebrabant:
Thanks for this perceptive comment. It helped remind me that Gerson wasn’t complaining about extremist web sites (which, as you note, really are worrisome), but about anonymity and the alleged “infection” of respectable sites by anti-semites on the comment threads.
In my own experience with high-comment-volume sites, those that “ban” crazy people do a reasonably good job, and on those that don’t ban crazy people, peer ostracism usually gets the job done. As you say, anonymity is largely irrelevant. Serious crazies don’t mind identifying themselves. Poseurs and agents provocateurs (along with a lot of folks with legitimate reasons for failing to disclose their identities) may use pseudonyms, but they are not the problem.
Gerson’s barking up the wrong tree, aside from his huge blind spot about radio, cable and right-wing opinion generally.
Ed Kilgore
Gerson’s original argument has some merit — message boards are indeed polluted with racist screeds. I myself worry more about more subtle screeds — disinformation with links to WorldNet Daily, etc. Not all of the bad actors in our culture are so helpful about flagging themselves with racist slurs and the use of the caps lock.
But still, the basic argument is that comments sections and message boards matter. On this point I agree with Gerson more than Klein. Lies proliferate on Twitter, and if you try and respond to them all (I know this from personal experience) they’ll suspend your account for spamming. I’m not as sanguine about Gerson’s own suggested solutions, though.
One solution he offers is more monitoring, but there are problems with aggressive monitoring too. The lag in posting time prevents conversation (you might spend half the day waiting for your reply to appear), and the poorly paid grunts that do it get a power complex.
For example, (another thing I know from personal experience) you can’t suggest Roland Martin’s support for Roland Burris may have been influenced by his race and expect your comment to be posted in Martin’s CNN message board. And if you point out to Jack Cafferty on his Cafferty File board that right wing craziness is mouthed on CNN itself — by guests on Lou Dobb’s show, AND by Lou Dobbs — the administrator will delete all references to Dobbs before he posts your edited comment.
Yet another thing I know from personal experience: if you happened to notice that Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire was bullet no news about the Prop 8 fight in California, and asked him to, he not only didn’t do it, not only deleted your posts when you tried to discuss the matter under any other topic, but banned you from posting at all.
The second solution Gerson suggests is that nobody should be allowed to post under a username — you should have to sign everything with your own identity. That idea chills me to the bone. Maybe Sicilians should have to do that before they criticize the Mafia on message boards; I wonder how that would work out.
If your next door neighbor believes abortion doctors should be shot on sight, and you do not, you can express it anyplace now on the internet without your neighbor finding out and leaving cow’s blood on your stoop at night. I’m not sure at all that making people own up publicly to all their own comments is the way to avoid intimidating behavior in society.
What I’m most worried about regarding anti-Semites and the Internet isn’t so much the anti-Semitic railing on regular websites but the use of specifically anti-Semitic blogs and boards to cluster and organize. It’s not that anti-Semites are going to convert everybody on the message boards of respectable news organizations, but that lonely anti-Semites in Oregon will meet lonely anti-Semites in Utah, and they’ll organize retreats and get-togethers, and uh, activities….
And although that may be a drop in the ocean of the Internet, I don’t think such sites should be dismissed too easily. Also, factually speaking, when Gerson brings up the Holocaust Museum shooter (in what he thinks is his aha moment) he’s bringing up an individual whose blogging on the Internet WAS under his own name, and who WAS therefore known by name to law enforcement organizations and the Southern Poverty Law Center. We don’t have preventive detention in this country (well, we’re not supposed to), but thanks to the Internet, the guy was at least on the radar.
Finally, yes, I agree with Klein in taking hate radio more seriously than I take the Father Coughlins of the Net. Limbaugh and Savage and Liddy are often just as bad as all but the worst neo-Nazis and Klansmen on the web, and their audience is much larger. When you look at polls, and at how many Americans now think Obama is foreign born or a secret Muslim, it’s shocking. These things may circulate on message boards, but they circulate on right wing radio and TV too, to bigger effect. Gerson may not want to talk about that, and may want to whitewash his compatriots, but it’s still true. If he condemns it one place, why so ostentatiously refuse to condemn it everywhere?
And don’t tell me more people don’t believe what they hear on Rush Limbaugh’s show more readily than what they read an anonymous poster screaming on the Net. Limbaugh addresses great big Republican groups, who cheer him to the rafters. The Washington tea party protesters kept saying they were there because of Glenn Beck. Why is Gerson defending as free speech from Beck or Limbaugh what he wants an administrator to delete when Joe Anybody says it?
Glenn Beck isn’t a racist because Klein disagrees with him. Glenn Beck is a racist because he claims the white race is being victimized and targeted by Barack Obama’s concealed hatred of the white race. He’s not a Nazi because he disagrees with us; we disagree with him because he’s a Nazi. It’s a bit like telling Jesse Owens his only problem with Hitler is that he insists on being Jesse Owens.
Hate speech is a seamless robe worn now by far too much of the right, and it’s harder than ever to tell the mainstream on the right from the fringe. Gerson can’t obscure that by making artificial distinctions between the hate speech of syndicated speakers and the hate speech that appears at the sufferance of privately owned message boards. It doesn’t smell any better just because somebody’s getting paid for it.