there’s a huge amount of increasing extremism on the left... I'm not convinced this is really what's going on. At least, not precisely. The United States has

there’s a huge amount of increasing extremism on the left... I'm not convinced this is really what's going on. At least, not precisely. The United States has become more progressively politically polarized over the last two or three decades: the left has gotten more left and the right has gotten more right. But the polarization hasn't been symmetrical over that period; the right has moved much farther to the right overall. https://www.google.com/search?q=asymmetrical+political+polarization https://www.google.com/search?q=asymmetrical+political+polar... I think what's happening now may be the left catching up, so to speak. The lesson of the modern Conservative Movement, for better or worse (I would say worse), is that polarization works. Demonizing your opponents--not merely disagreeing with their policy positions--well, it works. The enemy isn't a political philosophy. It isn't even an ideology. It's your fellow countrymen. And there will be no peace unless they are driven out or utterly disenfranchised. And, as much as I'd like to blame my fellow travelers on the Left, I can't. A lot of the folks who get real shrill about the (so far largely theoretical) threat of Antifa are curiously silent about how Trump has emboldened some of the absolute worst tendencies in far-right American politics. Antifa is, arguably, a reaction to that. I don't think resistance to fascism is a bad thing, either. (That's not to say that I advocate "punching Nazis," per se, but I think conservatives are correct in finding a right to self-defense that extends, if necessary, to violence.) But we're definitely seeing a much greater polarization happening on the left, a movement akin to the Tea Party. I don't know where this ends, but it doesn't seem like a positive thing to me. I don't think anyone should take away a diversity of political thought. But I think taking away polarization and demonization would be terrific for the country. And I admit that, right now, having the President himself spending more time encouraging that polarization and demonization than he does running the country strikes me as a grave problem. I wouldn't explicitly encourage Twitter to replace Trump's login with a placeholder page reading "Don't you think you could spend a bit more time healing rifts than creating them, Mr. President?"...but you know what? I wouldn't censure them for it, either.