General Discussion

for their political adversaries to be regarded as wrong or misguided, but still people they can negotiate with and maybe find common ground with on some issues. In order to get people to support your authoritarian regime the adversary has to be an actual mortal enemy who threatens everything you believe in, and the way you create that enemy is by dehumanizing them and portraying them as completely evil. Pay attention to the language used by Trump et al. For example, they describe Democrats as actually encouraging dangerous criminal immigrants - rapists and murderers! - to swarm our "open" borders just so they can vote for Democratic candidates. This, of course, is insane on its face for multiple reasons: We don't have open borders in the first place; we don't want dangerous criminal immigrants any more than the GOP does and favor excluding or deporting them; and noncitizens can't vote anyhow. But the facts aren't important when you want people to believe your adversary is a dire threat to society. Fear is powerful. So Democrats will be described as depraved, vicious, destructive and inhuman, not just wrong. Majority Democratic cities are portrayed as crime-ridden hellholes terrorized by dangerous non-white foreigners and equally dangerous non-white native-born people. People who aren't quite human who must be hated and eliminated. It's scary shit right out of the Nazi playbook. Just trying to explain that Democrats are ordinary people who have jobs, pick up litter, donate to charities, respect their communities, and want a government that supports all of its people won't make a dent in all that carefully-constructed fear.