I can see multiple issues on which comparing the harmful impact of each party does come down to personal priorities, and those are the issues where I think rhetoric like "basket of deplorables" is most narrow-minded and unproductive.
Economic policy is a solid example, although it seems to me that in the last several years, the GOP has also entirely dropped the ball on that well beyond the Democrats, which says something considering that the latter haven't exactly been prioritizing the concerns of the working class.
I think what drove the point home was when both parties supported NAFTA and the basic concept of the "global economy." The GOP was fully behind NAFTA, while the Democrats were deeply divided, though Clinton was able to flex the party muscle and bring over enough hardheads to get NAFTA passed. Only a Democrat could have done that. There were those on both the right and left who still opposed NAFTA, but when they were shunned as "kooks," it pretty much told me everything I needed to know about both parties.
What's more, now that we have 30+ years of hindsight to see the results, America is worse off now than we ever were. All the supposed benefits we were supposed to get from free trade never materialized, so it was all a bunch of empty promises and shallow rhetoric. The Democrats could have offered a real alternative if they wanted to, but their actions would indicate that they really didn't want to.
Heck, they couldn't even do something as simple as legalizing marijuana on the federal level, even though the Clintons were supposedly pot smokers (although they didn't exhale). Even conservatives like William F. Buckley supported legalization, yet the Clintons (and Obama) never did.
Foreign policy is a trickier one. Before Biden's presidency, I would have agreed that both parties were quite similarly damaging in terms of their hawkish, interventionist policies. Biden himself voted for the Iraq War, although he has acknowledged that as a mistake. Hillary Clinton was even more hawkish, and so was Obama, who had ostensibly peaceful campaign promises but ended up becoming part of the exact same status quo. It also doesn't help that Michelle Obama is
bosom buddies with George W. Bush, a bona fide war criminal.
On the other hand, Trump almost pulled the US into a war with Iran, and he continually antagonized China carelessly and unnecessarily. Ever since a wing of the GOP became fixated on following Trump and his politics, they have become unpredictable, volatile, and unstable. I wouldn't trust Trump or anyone with similar politics and a similar attitude with the red button, nor would I trust them not to recklessly start another avoidable and useless war.
Most Presidents since WW2 have basically fallen in line with the status quo established by the Cold War interventionists who advocated for a policy of containment. Even after the supposed end of the Cold War, the same basic policy was continued, in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. It seems the US military presence around the globe expanded after the Cold War, when most reasonable people expected it to contract after the fall of the Berlin Wall. People even expected there to be a "peace dividend" with the end of the Cold War, though that turned out to be a joke.
Trump continued with the same basic status quo as well, which also includes antagonizing China, viewing Iran and North Korea as intractable enemies, continued membership in NATO and the UN, etc. If Trump really wanted the US in a war with Iran, then he would have just...gone to war - just as Reagan did in Grenada and Bush did in Panama. Iran is one of the few countries in the world where much of the American public actually supported going to war, at least back in 1979-80, and they've continued to be seen as an enemy ever since. Regardless of however people might have felt about Trump's presidency, he inherited much of our foreign policy, just as Biden's Administration continues to carry out that policy to this day. Iran is still an enemy, and China is probably even more antagonized and angry at us than they ever were under Trump.
The Doomsday Clock is now closer to midnight. There was once a time when more Americans took foreign policy more seriously. Now, they really don't.
But all of this also brings up another question: if both parties are similar in terms of foreign and economic policy, isn't that even more reason to compare them on the basis of other issues, where they differ more significantly? There's a solid case to be made that even on those two fronts, the GOP's platform has slid back into being the more dangerous one in recent years.
Well, yes, that's exactly what both parties have been doing for decades now. That's why public debate and political rhetoric focuses more on those issues than on other issues.
And yes, you could make a solid case that the GOP's platform has slid back into being more dangerous - although one could also argue that that would have happened one way or the other anyway. This is largely because of the long-term neglect of the other issues mentioned above, namely the economy and the stagnation and malaise it's brought about among the masses. I see it more as a consequence and a symptom of a deeper problem. Trump was always a symptom of a more a deep-seated problem. That's what so many people could never understand, since a lot of people focused on Trump and only Trump as being the source of the problem.
The Democrats could have read the American public a bit better and sought out a platform which could have repelled whatever danger the Republicans might have caused - although that might have been "dangerous" to certain other factions, particularly if the Democrats veered further left. I think the party's rejection of Sanders and the so-called "Bernie Bros." was a clear indication that they had no intention of doing that. Though I see that as also to their discredit, since it makes the Democrats look like nothing more than toadies for Corporate America.
Even if many average worker bees won't feel an economic difference between the two, there are numerous other issues that could affect many in the working and middle classes—such as treatment of undocumented immigrants, access to reproductive health care, and health insurance policies. This is without touching on their management of the pandemic, where Republican policies have led to large-scale loss of life and illness.
One thing to keep in mind is that politics is largely a numbers game, and even if there are issues which people feel very strongly about, one should also look at the impact on street level. Sadly, a lot of the general public tends to not care about anyone except themselves and their immediate circle of family and friends. This is, again, a product of our culture, "me first and screw everybody else." As a result, large segments of the population are in a daily struggle to try to survive and feed their families. If anything, it's gotten more difficult in recent years - even though the resources and technologies exist to make life better for people. Nevertheless, it puts people in a daily grind where they're just too exhausted and have no time to care about things like the treatment of undocumented immigrants, reproductive health care, etc. They wouldn't have to worry about health insurance policies if we had a nationalized healthcare system like every other industrialized country in the world.
In theory, a lot of people
do care about these things, so I don't think apathy is as widespread as the last paragraph might make it appear. But it's still a question of whether the common people are willing to expend what little political currency they have on issues that may not affect them directly or their daily lives.
A lot of the arguments I have seen in various outlets arguing that "both sides are terrible" or invoking the horseshoe theory have come from purported "centrists" or other commentators who don't oppose capitalism and don't criticize both parties on that basis. If anything, they sometimes do quite the opposite: they demonize socialism by equating all forms thereof to those enacted in the USSR and Maoist China while extolling the perceived virtues of capitalism or repeating American nationalistic rhetoric that glorifies capitalist countries and demonizes allegedly communist or socialist ones—the same kind of discourse that underpinned a lot of support for the Vietnam War.
In my opinion, pushing back against this is useful because it denies proponents of a troubling status quo the opportunity to use legitimate issues as a springboard to advance problematic politics. Populists tend to use talking points that may seem relatable to the average person, but their actions and actual policies usually end up going in the diametrically opposite direction or, at the very least, harming and scapegoating certain minorities for purely ideological and religious reasons.
I see it more as an attempt at misdirection in order to avoid any unfavorable attention upon political factions or political ideals which many people ostensibly consider to be sacrosanct.
The thing is, all of these issues which have been raised in the political sphere have a history behind them. We've been down this road before, and we can draw upon and look to historical examples as to how we resolved many of the problems we've faced. I can't help but think that if we all just take the chips off our shoulders, take a deep breath, and think this through like rational adults, we can come up with rational and workable solutions for whatever dilemmas we might face.
But to be honest, I'm not really seeing this. For the most part, I see a lot more posturing from fixed, intransigent positions more than anything else. And some of this seems to come from people who aren't even living in the United States. It's one thing to comment on things from afar, but when one is living in neighborhoods and communities where there are both conservatives and liberals, both right and left, one has to take a more level-headed approach to things.
