Political demonization is older than the College of the Holy Cross and even the Cross itself. During the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens over 2,400 years ago, the violent demagogue Cleon asserted in the Athenian democratic assembly that public speakers (politicians) use tricks to deceive voters. Cleon conveniently labeled any dissenting opinion as aimed for self-gain. In short, “don’t listen to what my disingenuous opponents say!” However, Cleon likely wouldn’t be airing such dangerous, anti-democratic labels if those speaking in the assembly supported his desired policy: to take as slaves the women and children of the rebellious region of Lesbos while slaughtering the men. Cleon hypocritically strove to deceive his audience to prevent others from acting mercifully, which he considered a base deception against the proper enactment of revenge and gaining the fear of other cities through the shedding of blood.
In 2019, we can find a relative of Cleon’s opportunistic cynicism in the language used in American public debate between the Democrats and the Republicans. Some Democrats like to categorize those who support socially conservative policies as fascists and/or Nazis, while some Republicans attempt to label the Democratic Party as uniformly socialist, especially regarding its healthcare and educational policies, with the connotation that Democrats are destructive communists. However, the use of the loaded labels of fascist and communist sinisterly shields party voters from listening to what the other side has to say. In other words, “We (insert party) don’t have to and must not talk to the evil enemy.” Implicit in this attitude lies the fear that one’s ideology does not contain all the answers and, if undermined, can no longer provide surety of moral righteousness. Convenient.
Notwithstanding, Democrats and Republicans likely have more in common than they like to admit. Although divergent in ideological tenets and political solutions, both communism and fascism in the twentieth century reacted against certain aspects of modernization. These included the loss of tradition, meaning, and order amidst the whirlwind of technological change—ushered in by the advent of new theological, philosophical, and scientific understandings. Likewise, although not to the totalitarian extent of the Nazis and Soviets and their genocidal nature within concentration camps and gulags, America’s parties both strive ideally to achieve the common good within the spirit of the Constitution, weighing material and spiritual needs within an ever-escalating modernization.
However, taking these labels at face value, is the Democratic Party the party of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Brezhnev? Is the current Republican party an illiberal party of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s racist political descendants? Or in admiration of Spain’s authoritarian Generalissimo Franco? Such large claims require evidence.
Compared with Russia in 1917 after its near annihilation on the eastern front against Germany in World War I, the morale of the current-day United States is not equivalent to a society racked by massive defeat that would bring an American Lenin to power. If otherwise, one would have to argue that the political situation that led to the election of Trump rivals a world war costing millions of lives. Do Democrats make such a dramatic claim that Trump is a manifestation of the failure of capitalism (aligning Trump’s election with the Marxist concept of the “crisis of capitalism,” foreboding international revolution) and that one can no longer work with Republicans, requiring a more totalitarian mindset to prevent psychological assaults upon people’s identities? Some Democrats make this claim, but it is a strange claim amidst so much material prosperity in the United States. Further, do large paramilitary armies with members in the millions waltz through the streets creating chaos, like the situation that Hitler manipulated to bring his Nazi Party to power in the early 1930s amidst the Great Depression? No. If yes, one would be forced to make the wild claim that United States law enforcement and ICE parallel the Nazi Storm Troopers and exterminatory SS.
Today’s opposing polemicists who label Democrats and Republicans respectively communists and fascists/Nazis, the historical embodiments of absolute evil on the left and right, reveals that they view the world in pseudo-religious terms. Americans take pride in their freedom from theocracy, but American political parties have filled the void produced by post-Enlightenment secularism. Humanity is intrinsically religious, and one cannot escape from dogmatisms that provide a structure to one’s lived experience. Within their dualist “good and evil” visions of the world, today’s American parties now offer new articles of belief, including identity politics, healthcare, immigration, environmental policies, guns, and economic equity. When former Democrat presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke maintains that religious organizations that do not toe the line regarding LGBTQ+ issues ought to lose their tax exemption status and receives an applause at a Democratic town hall, laid bare is the reality that today’s political elites do not respect alternative visions of the world and will not tolerate heretics or anything that runs contrary to their version of reality.
What is more extensive than propagandist Josef Goebbels’s mass media in Nazi Germany and the local party offices of Soviet Russia is the vast reach of American political advocates acquired through the millions of smartphones and computers into every American home. Hoping to get people off their coaches to cast a vote and shame the opposition, political demagogues and media outlets present each election as an existential threat. However, they offer no final peace free from suffering. Compared with the parties’ presentation of utopian, futuristic visions, where the articles of belief are perfectly codified into law and believed by all citizens, all progress and achievement in the present seems disappointing when held up to the ideals of the articles. Unfortunately, justice for all humanity cannot be perfectly achieved nor comprehended by the limited human intellect. Additionally, technology only offers material solutions, not ultimate spiritual fulfillment and happiness. Nonetheless, America’s political parties have urged us to cease rest until the world is set aright and humanity lives eternally, like gods. This worldview inevitably necessitates a group to be blamed for the world’s continued woes.