In the continuing argument over ideology and violent extremism in America, conservatives are making some very odd assertions. Check out this statement by conservative San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders:

I reject the idea that James W. von Brunn, the alleged Holocaust museum gunman and known white supremacist and anti-Semite, is right wing — as well as the implication that racism and conservatism somehow are connected. The KKK is not welcome at any conservative event I’ve ever attended.

Look at what is going on here – the term “right-wing” and “conservative” are being treated as interchangeable and both terms are being counterposed to “white supremacists” and “anti-Semites” – who are no longer part of “right-wing” ideology. In effect, not only the term “conservative” but also the term “right-wing” is being rescued from any associations with racism and anti-Semitism.
And it’s not just Saunders. There’s actually a whole cottage industry over in the right blogosphere arguing this same notion – that white supremacy is not really a part of any known and recognized “right-wing” ideology. Instead, it is in some utterly unique category all its own or is actually a left-wing idea (please don’t ask for details on this second notion. It goes something along the lines of “racist=Hitler=vegetarian=feminist=Hillary Clinton=liberal”)
But, wait a minute. Wasn’t the whole heroic start of the Bill Buckley/National Review initiative designed to “rescue” true, Burkean conservatism from the nutty and disreputable “right-wingers” of the 50s– the John Birchers, southern racists, anti-Semites, anti-fluoridation paranoiacs and so on? Wasn’t this clean break with the racist, anti-Semitic “right-wing extremists” central to the entire ethos of the new breed of Goldwater-Reagan- conservatives who then rose to the leadership of the Republican Party?

Read more…

There’s an old joke about a narcissist being someone who goes to a football game and thinks the team is talking about them in the huddle. There’s a dangerous element of that attitude in some U.S. reactions to unfolding events in Iran.
Already the chattering classes are falling into the habit of handicapping the twists and turns of the Iranian election crisis in terms of a “win” or “loss” for President Obama (viz, Martin Peretz’s post on Saturday entitled: “Ahmadinejad: 1; Obama: 0”). While international events do often affect the standing of the chief executive of the world’s most powerful nation, it’s a really bad idea to begin thinking that the rest of the world calibrates every action in reaction to U.S. policies. Believe it or not, foreigners have their own fish to fry.
Today Matt Yglesias tries to make this simple point in reacting to some hysterical tweeting by the man who might well have been in charge of the United States right now, John McCain (“If we are steadfast eventually the Iranian people will prevail,” said the Arizona senator’s thumbs):

That’s right. Whether or not the Iranian people prevail depends on how steadfast we are. How steadfast we are in what? In wishing them well? In tweeting mean things about the Iranian security services? Of course what Americans do isn’t totally irrelevant, but it’s unquestionably a peripheral factor in this drama. Iran is a country populated by Iranians, and their fate is primarily in their own hands.

Some of what Yglesias calls “neocon egomania on Iran” is coming, of course, from people who have favored military action against Iran for years, and who will treat every development in Tehran as reflecting the degree to which America or Israel is or isn’t conveying a credible threat of force. Worse yet, others think of Iran as part of an undifferentiated “Islamofascism” that is bent primarily on the destruction of The West, and believe Iranian repression should be viewed as a mocking reaction to Barack Obama’s “appeasement” of Islam in his Cairo speech. Check out this characteristic take from the Washington Times‘ Wes Pruden:

If Iranian voters had thrown Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into the street, the American president would have assumed that he was the One who did it, and the American press would have led the hosannas for the messiah from the south side of Chicago.Just a few more speeches, a few more respectful bows toward Mecca, and all the rough places would be made smooth and plain. But now even Mr. Obama must wake up and smell the tear gas.

Lest it be objected that Pruden is a marginal, extremist figure, his argument was pretty much the same one made Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” by Mitt Romney, the early frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination:

The comments by the president last week, that there was a robust debate going on in Iran, was obviously entirely wrong-headed. What has occurred is the election is a fraud, the results are inaccurate, and you’re seeing a brutal repression of the people as they protest. … It’s very clear that the president’s policies of going around the world and apologizing for America aren’t working. … Look, just sweet talk and criticizing America is not going to enhance freedom in the world.

One of the most destructive tendencies of contemporary conservatism has been its determination to conflate recognition of the limits of American power with “weakness” or “appeasement.” With that comes a strong tendency to overrate the global impact of every word uttered in Washington, to the point that we Americans are expected to sacrifice our own freedom of action and self-interest in submission to our awful responsibilities as a world power.
The delusions associated with narcissism should be rejected if and when Iran’s crisis subsides, and we get around to considering what happens next in U.S.-Iranian relations. To quote Yglesias again:

[Whatever] the outcome of Iran’s domestic political struggles, the fundamental strategic calculus remains the same. Airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities will not accomplish the goal of maintaining a verifiably non-nuclear Iranian military, and an agreement on nuclear issues between the U.S. and Iran would still serve the interests of both countries. Under the circumstances, no matter what the outcome, pursuit of such an arrangement should continue to be a priority.

Recogning that basic reality will be easier if conservatives would stop talking as though Iranians are backward children whose every act is dictated by their reaction to “rewards” and “punishments” meted out by the United States.
UPDATE: John Judis of TNR has published a very good post about the cautious approach to a situation like Iran’s that a “prudent idealism” would suggest.

As a total political history junkie, I love strolling down memory lanes for precedents that might offer insights as to how contemporary political developments might unfold. But for that very reason, one of my pet peeves is the use of half-baked or outdated “lessons of political history” that get cited in the chattering classes as though they came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets.
Over at fivethirtyeight.com a couple weeks ago, I challenged one of the most settled “lessons of political history,” that the party controlling the White House might as well forget about winning the governorships of New Jersey or Virginia. And yesterday I took on a much-cited “rule” in my home state of Georgia suggesting that former governors can’t win “comebacks.”
I’m always on the lookout for such “lessons of political history” to examine, so any readers with some examples, either national in nature or from your own neck of the woods, please feel free to post them as a comment.

As part of the endless efforts of conservatives to treat the last two election debacles as aberrations in a “center-right nation” (or as somehow-conservative reactions to that godless freespending liberal George W. Bush), you can expect some reaction to the latest Gallup survey of the ideological self-identifications of Americans. It shows a slight uptick in “conservative” self-identification during 2009, up to 40% from 37% last year. But it’s basically the same findings almost always found in recent decades when voters are offered the three choices of “conservative,” “liberal” and “moderate.” Self-identified “conservatives” have been bumping around 40% since 1992, with “liberals” around 20% and “moderates” holding the balance. Moreover, Gallup confirms the very old news that Republicans are heavily conservative (73% “conservative,” 24% “moderate” and 3% “liberal”), while Democrats are more ideologically diverse (40% “moderate,” 38% “liberal” and 22% “conservative”).
There’s no real evidence here that anything’s changed since November of 2008.
And as always, the C-M-L choice doesn’t seem to tell us as much as more nuanced measurements of ideology. The big recent Center for American Progress study released in March, State of Political Ideology, 2009, added “libertarian” and “progressive” to the usual menu of self-identification options, and after pushing leaners, found that 47% of Americans think of themselves as progressive or liberal, while 48% self-identify as conservative or libertarian. The CAP survey also found that when you probe deeper in terms of more specific statements of values and beliefs, there’s a reasonably solid progressive majority when it comes to most matters of international and domestic policy. The conservative “brand” may still be relatively strong, but it doesn’t always translate into issue positions, much less voting behavior.
Virtually everyone agrees that the long-stable C-M-L findings disguise generational trends that are worth watching closely. The new Gallup survey finds that “liberals” outnumber “conservatives” by a 31%-30% margin among voters under 30. And a May analysis by CAP on “millennials” shows 44% self-identifying as progressive or liberal, and just 28% as conservative or libertarian.
None of this, of course, will deter “center-right nation” fans from claiming the latest Gallup survey as evidence that Americans were misled during the last two election cycles, or were offered insufficiently stark ideological choices, or were simply tired of George W. Bush and will return to the Republican Party almost automatically in 2010 or 2012. This argument is essential to the conservative project of keeping the GOP firmly on the Right, or driving it even further Right. When you are a hammer, everything–and certainly every poll–looks like a nail.

In The Hill today, Aaron Blake has a story about an important but little-discussed phenomenon that’s shaping the landscape for U.S. House campaigns in 2010: candidate calculations about the impact of redistricting after 2010:

As they enter a key decision-making phase of the 2010 election cycle, the chance that they will encounter a very different map in 2012 could serve as both a deterrent and motivation to go for it.
For some, 2010 might be their last best hope to win a given district before it is shored up by redistricting, while others might want to wait for the post-redistricting election, when the grass could be greener thanks to a friendly reapportionment process.

The go-for-broke temptation that Blake mentions refers to the strong tendency of legislatures to protect congressional incumbents, sometimes including those from the opposite party (often voters from the same party of a strong incumbent are “packed” into his or her district to make neighboring districts friendlier to the other party). Incubment-protection is a particularly strong impulse in those many situations where neither party completely controls redistricting.
But sometimes circumstances cut in the opposite direction:

Since redistricting often aims to shore up incumbents, it’s rare that it leads to better takeover opportunities. But that could be the case with members like Reps. Dennis Moore (D-Kan.), Peter King (R-N.Y.) or any number of vulnerable Illinois Republicans.
King and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who are weighing Senate runs, could actually be encouraged to run for statewide office because of the upcoming changes to their tenuous districts, which are likely to be handled by Democrats.

All in all, the wait-and-see tendency is naturally strong, since incumbents tend to settle into their districts between redistricting cycles. Moreover, among challengers, no one wants to risk an entire career to win a House seat and then see the district become unwinnable after just one term. Here’s Blake’s bottom line for 2010:

Overall, history shows that the number of quality challengers who emerge to run for Congress declines as redistricting maps become more entrenched, with the final election before redistricting – 2010, in this case – having the fewest quality challengers.
Vanderbilt political science professor Marc Hetherington, who has also studied redistricting’s effect on candidates, said the upcoming election cycle could be something of an exception, given the number of Republican seats that have flipped Democratic the last two elections.

It’s worth remembering that state legislatures are also redistricting themselves even as they draw congressional district lines. And that can have strange and interesting impllications, as Blake explains:

In perhaps the weirdest redistricting conundrum in the country, state Sen. Darrel Aubertine is a Democratic favorite to run in the upcoming special election for Army Secretary-designate Rep. John McHugh’s (R) upstate seat. But Aubertine could be risking his party’s control over redistricting by giving up his state Senate seat to run for Congress.
The Democratic majority in the Empire State’s upper chamber was always tenuous, but Monday’s coup by 30 Republicans and two Democrats put everything in focus. The 30 remaining Democrats will be fighting hard to regain their majority status and, provided Democrats retain the governor’s mansion, control congressional redistricting.
Aubertine’s district is one of the most difficult they hold. So, in effect, he could actually help his party win more congressional seats by staying in the state Senate.

As is often the case with redistricting cycles, candidate calculations going into 2010 may well involve many games of three-dimensional chess around the country. That complicates the national picture significantly.

Most Democrats understand the downside of winning elections and then being held accountable for conditions in the country they did not produce. Consider the endless talk about the federal budget deficits in the Obama administration’s first budget. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times explained yesterday, Obama inherited most of the red ink from Bush policies and from the recession (indeed, as Jonathan Chait argues, Leonhardt may have actually underestimated that inheritance). But it’s considered poor form for Democrats to keep “blaming Bush,” doncha know.
One often underestimated benefit of holding the White House, though, is the extraordinary power and visibility of the Bully Pulpit. And that factor is nicely illustrated by a new Gallup survey that shows Americans clearly think of Barack Obama as the leader of the Democratic Party, while having little idea whom to treat as the leader of the opposition.
Worse yet, the three people most often cited by Gallup respondents in an open-ended question about the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today” are Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich; 29% named one of these three gents (as did 29% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats). These are precisely the three “spokesmen” most Democrats would wish on the GOP. But that may overstate their prominence: a remarkable 46% of Republicans and GOP-leaners in the poll either couldn’t name a party leader or asserted there wasn’t one.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is considered the main Democratic spokesman by two-thirds of Democrats and 58% of Americans generally. The latter number is as low as it is because fully 20% of Republicans (but only 6% of Democrats) named Nancy Pelosi as the main Democratic voice, reflecting the obsession of conservative media with the House Speaker.
This situation obviously helps the president serve as a messenger and agenda-setter for the Democratic Party. But it also helps explain the hyper-partisan and ideologically rigid atmosphere among would-be Republican “spokesmen,” who are competing for attention by focusing on the hard-core conservative base. It’s enough to drive a party crazy.

For liberals and progressives, one of the most baffling — and indeed also infuriating — aspects of the response of conservatives like Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin to the recent murders by right wing extremists is the way that — in the space of just a few paragraphs — they manage to shift the discussion away from the events themselves back into an attack on liberals and progressives for “exploiting” the situation.
Rather than interpreting the actions of violent extremists as requiring a reconsideration of their own rhetoric and positions, for many conservative commentators the violent acts become instead the basis for renewed descriptions of conservatives as the innocent and aggrieved victims of liberal injustice and slander.
It is worth taking a moment to dissect the internal structure of this particular rhetorical and psychological line of argument because it leads to a somewhat counterintuitive strategy for responding to it.
Here, in outline, is the way the argument above is developed by conservative commentators:

1. We conservatives know perfectly well that we are not all homicidal maniacs. Murder is a terrible act that no sane person approves. Therefore, to suggest that the acts of isolated, mentally ill criminals should somehow reflect on all of us conservatives is deeply unfair.
2. The truth is that the acts of deranged extremist individuals do not further the conservative cause. On the contrary, they inflict catastrophic damage on it by allowing our opponents to paint all of us as mentally unstable. No sane conservative – in fact, not even the majority of white supremacists – really believe that lurid murders actually help the larger cause.
3. As a result, for liberals and progressives to attack conservatives as somehow responsible for the acts of one or two isolated maniacs is utterly unfair. It is, in fact, a transparently cynical attempt to exploit the tragedy. That liberals actually stoop to use such tactics is thus vile and unforgivable.

By this train of logic it becomes possible for the commentator to end up – often only 30 or 45 seconds after beginning – delivering an angry attack on liberals and an impassioned depiction of conservatives as the innocent victims of unjust persecution. The sheer audacity of the strategy leaves liberals aghast and fuming.
In fact, to liberals and progressives, this line of argument appears so obviously like a cynical debater’s trick aimed at misdirecting the attention of the audience that the immediate reaction is to adamantly reassert the original accusations.
But note what happens psychologically when this is done:

1. The audience of an O’Reilly or Malkin knows with absolute certainty that they personally as individuals absolutely do not approve of murder. They therefore find the remaining steps in the conservative argument logical and convincing.
2. In contrast, liberal arguments that begin with the premise that there is a relationship between the acts of violent extremists and the opinions expressed by O’Reilly and Malkin are not only rejected – they actually become proof of the conservative charge that liberal critics are unfair and unjust. Thus, paradoxically, instead of refuting the conservative narrative, arguments of this type are absorbed into it and actually validate and become evidence for it.

The alternative, more effective strategy is to appeal to what Drew Westen calls people’s “better angels.” In talking to the audiences of commentators like O’Reilly and Malkin, liberals and progressives should begin by immediately reassuring these audiences that liberals and progressives emphatically do not believe that the audience in any way actually condones violent acts. Quite the contrary, it is precisely because they do not approve of violence that they should want to show their rejection of violent acts by joining together with all reasonable Americans in supporting President Obama’s call for a new tolerance and civility in political discourse. The acts of violent madmen should make all decent Americans want to commit themselves even more firmly to seeking common ground with, and rejecting demonization of, other Americans with whom they may disagree.
Notice what this does:

1. It deprives the conservative narrative of the “we are being unfairly smeared” argument and keeps the focus on the evil of the violent acts themselves. (This, it should be noted, is most emphatically not the topic upon which the conservative commentators wish to linger).
2. It places the O’Reilly’s and Malkins’ of the world in the position of having to either directly endorse or reject Obama’s call for greater civility and tolerance (This, it should be noted, is most emphatically not the question they want to debate).

It requires a certain degree of discipline to argue along these lines when, on an emotional level, many people’s primary desire at times like these is to express outrage and assign blame.
The main purpose of political debate, however, is not to provide therapeutic outlet for the debater, but to win the struggle to convince other Americans. For this purpose, the strategy of “appealing to people’s better angels” will invariably prove far more productive than the more viscerally satisfying alternative.

Conservatives hoping to get traction from the “Obama’s government activism is bad” meme are not going to like Alan I. Abramowitz’s latest column at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In his column “Who’s Afraid of Big Government? Not Us,” Abramowitz explains:

Do Americans, despite the current economic crisis, continue to oppose governmental activism and prefer reliance on the free market to solve the country’s problems as the President’s conservative critics argue? Some of these critics have selectively cited results from recent media polls to support this claim. However, this conclusion is not supported by the best available evidence about attitudes toward the role of government in the American public-evidence that comes from the 2008 American National Election Study.
The 2008 ANES is the most recent in a series of election surveys that have been conducted in every presidential election year and most midterm election years since 1948. These surveys have provided much of the data used by political scientists to study elections and voting behavior in the United States. The 2008 survey involved in-depth personal interviews with a representative sample of more than 2000 eligible voters touching on a wide variety of issues and other election-related topics. Among the questions included in the survey were three that dealt directly with the role of government. Each question asked respondents to choose between a pair of statements about the proper role of government in dealing with the nation’s problems.

Among the findings of the survey, Abramowitz notes,

…A majority of Americans came down on the side of governmental activism. Fifty-six percent said that government had gotten bigger because the country’s problems had gotten bigger, 68 percent said that we need a strong government to handle complex economic problems, and 59 percent said that there were more things government should be doing.
…64 percent of eligible voters came down on the activist side of the scale and almost 40 percent were consistent supporters of activist government. In contrast, less than 20 percent of eligible voters were consistent opponents of activist government. These findings clearly contradict the claims of conservative pundits that Americans today have more faith in the free market than in government programs for dealing with the country’s problems. They indicate that support for activist government is alive and well in the American public.

Interestingly, most of the respondents made a distinction between government activism in addressing economic issues and “intrusion into the personal lives of Americans,” as Abramowitz explains:

…According to the data from the 2008 ANES, support for government regulation of personal conduct was associated with opposition to government intervention in the economic sphere. For example, 80 percent of respondents who consistently opposed governmental activism wanted to maintain a government ban on same sex marriage while only 53 percent of respondents who consistently supported governmental activism wanted to maintain the ban.

Abramowitz concludes that President Obama is in synch with the views of a majority of voters on the topic of ‘government activism.”

…Fully 80 percent of Obama voters came down on the pro-government side of the governmental activism scale and over 50 percent consistently took the pro-government side. It remains to be seen whether the President will succeed in convincing Congress to enact his policy agenda and whether those policies will actually work. However, in proposing to use the power of the federal government to address the nation’s problems, Mr. Obama is clearly doing what a majority of Americans voted for in 2008.

Clearly, after 8 years of impotent government and corporate looting of taxpayers financial assets, “activist government” to serve the interests of working people, for a change, doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to most voters.

Perhaps this is a dog-bites-man story these days, but remarks by putative 2012 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in Iowa yesterday really do illustrate the delusional belief of Republican conservatives that they are struggling against high odds to keep their party from completely endorsing Barack Obama’s agenda:

“I hear people who give advice that the Republicans need to moderate. They need to be a little more to the left,” Huckabee said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It sounds like advice that Democrats would give to us so that we’d never win another election ever.”
Some argue that Republicans have lost Congress and the White House because they’ve turned the party over to social and religious conservatives, driving away moderates and independents. Huckabee made precisely the opposite argument.
“It’s when they move to the mushy middle and get squishy that they get beat,” he said….
“Historically, the way we’ve found our way back to winning, having clear convictions that are conservative and then when elected, act like it,” he said. “In every election, when Republicans have had clarity of convictions and those convictions were conservative, they win.”
He warned that many Republicans have gone astray by buying into President Barack Obama’s big-spending effort to stimulate the economy, a move he called “a big, colossal, utterly disastrous mistake.”

It’s hard to know where to begin in mocking this nonsense. Let’s start with Huckabee’s understanding of what’s true “historically.” As I recall, Republicans had a “clarity of convictions and those convictions were conservative” in 1964, and they lost in a very big landslide. Four years later, Richard Nixon ran as a sort of center-right “unity” figure, and won in a narrow plurality. In 1972, Nixon got his landslide after instituting wage and price controls, recognizing China, pumping up the economy with his own version of “stimulus,” cutting a major arms deal with the Soviet Union that led conservatives to “suspend” their support for him, and supporting clean air and clean water legislation (he also lied about the war, demonized “liberal elites” and bugged and harrassed his “enemies,” but he was nothing if not inconsistent on every ideological issue). Yes, Reagan won a bare majority in 1980, and then won his own landslide after approving two taxes increases and “caving” to “liberals” on major cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Bush gained office in 2000 with the help of the Supreme Court after promising to be a “uniter, not a divider,” who would make conservatism “compassionate,” and then was narrowly re-elected after promoting all those things (No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Rx Drug Benefit, immigration reform) that are now being denounced by conservatives as a “betrayal” of principle.
Huckabee’s peddling revisionist history of the rankest kind.
But even more ridiculous is the claim that lots of Republicans are clamoring to move to the “mushy middle.” Since the last presidential campaign got underway, Republicans have abandoned their long-time support for the earned income tax credit (now called “redistribution” or “socialism”) and their reluctant acceptance of global climate change as real (now denounced once again as a hoax), and have thoroughly exterminated any GOP interest in comprehensive immigration reform. They have adopted a partisan rhetoric that makes Karl Rove look temperate, punctuated by an actual debate by their national committee of the idea of demanding that Democrats start calling themselves the “Democrat Socialist Party.” As for the stimulus package, no House Republicans voted for it; one of the three Senate Republicans who voted for it after securing major concessions has since left the GOP. Two GOP governors, routinely denounced as RINOs, endorsed it (Ah-nold and Charlie Crist). For Huckabee, these tiny signs of dissent are a terrible threat. To use an old southern expression, he and other conservatives are goosing a ghost.
I don’t know why conservatives persist in this delusion, and just acknowlege that they are totally calling the shots in the Republican Party today. But the fiction of a major ideological battle is getting pretty old.

The murder yesterday at the Holocaust Museum, following so soon after the murder of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller, is rightly making people wonder what’s going on in our country. Are two politically motivated homicides in so short a period a coincidence? And if not, how do we avoid falling into paranoid states of mind that lead us to unfairly associate non-violence Americans with violent acts?
As it happens, James Vega did a prescient and useful piece on this subject for TDS back in April, entitled: “What is ‘right-wing extremism,'” motivated by the now-famous Department of Homeland Security study that had conservatives howling in outrage. Here was his most fundamental point about the distinction between “extremist” and “non-extremist” politics.

Underlying all extremist political ideologies is one central idea – the vision of “politics as warfare”. While this phrase is widely used as a metaphor, political extremists mean it in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.

In terms of right-wing extremism, says Vega, there are separate but mutually reinforcing military and religious world-views that can lead to this treatment of opponents as “enemies” who merit annihilation, the first adopting the rules of engagement of warfare, and the second involving a literal demonization of opponents. And this process of legitimizing violence can begin with the sort of violent rhetoric heard so often on the airwaves and across the internet.
It’s important, as Vega reminds us, to separate the sheep from the goats and not blame conservatives for right-wing violence. But no matter how respectable the voices involved, when people adopt the language of warfare, they need to be called out:

Many conservative groups object to being lumped together with violent extremists, and argue that even their most intense and radical opposition to Obama does not make them violent political extremists.
In fact, they are entirely correct. What distinguishes “political extremism” from other concepts like “the radical right” or “hard-right conservatism” is the following:
1. The two ideological pillars on which genuine political extremism rests are the notions of “politics as warfare” and of political opponents as “enemies”. Groups which reject these notions are not political extremists,
2. Political extremism becomes dangerous and violent whenever and wherever these two notions are taken literally.
What should Democrats do? Basically, there needs to be clear and resolute pushback against these two notions. When politicians or others use the notions of “politics as war,” and “liberals and Democrats as enemies”, Democrats have to clearly and forcefully object. They have to stop the discussion dead in its tracks and say.
“No, you are profoundly wrong. Politics is not warfare and Americans with whom we disagree are not “enemies”. We totally reject these ideas. In fact, that’s one of the most fundamental differences between you and us and we think it is a major reason why most Americans now support Obama. You actually believe that you are literally at war with every single American who does not agree with you. We don’t think that way, and most Americans don’t either.

Let’s hope this way of stopping the incitement of violence in politics catches on before tragedies and outrages become all too common-place.