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The West Wing is one of my all-time favorite shows. There are so many scenes that hit me right in the feels, but of all those scenes one never fails to make me misty-eyed:

The interesting thing about West Wing was that it ran from 1999-2006, during the George W. Bush era. It imagined a Democratic president getting the same kind of hate from the other side of the aisle that Bush got. Ainsley, a Republican, refuses to give into that kind of vitriol. She engages with the other side at the level of politics and ideas, not ad hominem attacks or gross over-generalizations.

Those days appear to be over. The Nation just ran a piece about the despicable actions of the Wisconsin state government. But here’s the thing, they used the actions of that state’s Republicans to write off all Republicans. What’s scarier to me is the backlash that I’m going to get simply for saying that all Republicans are not evil. 

The hatred goes beyond simple party affiliation. It spread to entire political ideologies. According to one opinion piece in GQ:

 All the bad of the Republican Party today is the clear fruit of these principles: the blithe disinterest in progress, the complete lack of recognition of injustice, the lionization of intractability, the hatred of working government, the hilarious lack of creativity, and the Pence-ian lust to control everyone’s “passions.” There are blind spots within these principles that you could drive a truck through. They’re not unlike the same blind spots to the oppressed that the Founding Fathers had when they drafted the Constitution, so no wonder conservatives are so eager to adhere to that document literally.

This point here is not that you have to agree or even like Republican political ideals––I don’t. But I also don’t write them off as evil, etc.

More politics.