View from K Street: The disappearing middle

Democratic Socialists to the left, MAGA Republicans to the right—on we plunge, like Tennyson’s Light Brigade, toward to political calamity. 

Those of us who toil in the fields of work, know that, one way or another, we’ve got to make it ‘til Friday, keep a cranky workforce in place, meet the payroll, try to make a living. However much lofty political maneuverings may affect our work, we still have to find a way to survive and prosper. As we are now deep into political primaries, it’s becoming ever more difficult to find candidates or parties that commit to the basic notion we have all learned in the employment sphere: Opponents are not enemies; differing views are not a form of casuistry; and we have a common purpose. 

One of the strangest but most predictable aspects of the current political melee is that the rhetoric of extremists on both sides of the political spectrum is all but interchangeable. Take recent comments of Hasan Piker and Ken Paxton as examples. Swap out Zionists for Muslims or CAIR for AIPAC, and each could offer the others’ stump speeches without much more editing. Some words may differ, but the technique is the same: Find an enemy (usually an allegedly “foreign” group), then accuse, demean, and exaggerate. Whether it’s “America deserved 9/11” or the Muslims will replace the Constitution with “Sharia law,” the appeal is to fear, and the solution is exclusion.