One ‘fringe’ is more dangerous than other

Both the Editor’s Notes and guest commentary in the E-R’s Sunday October 30 issue dealt with this NBC News poll finding: “81% of Democrats say the Republican Party will destroy America, and 79% of Republicans say the same of the Democratic Party.” The title of the guest commentary by Douglas Schoen was “The two-way dangers of extremism.” In his commentary, Schoen pointed out the ‘false equivalence’ of those percentages.

Here are some poll results and numbers over the course of Biden’s first year in office that demonstrated the extent to which the extreme wing of the Republican Party has “infiltrated its mainstream” (i.e., these are not just ‘fringe’ players): 33% backed the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol; 51% don’t support the work (and therefore, findings) of the January 6th panel; 61-70% didn’t see Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 Presidential election; 66% believed “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump”; 30-40% believed that violence might be warranted if their party doesn’t gain the election results they expect; and after the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol (which was the first time the Capitol had been breached since the War of 1812), 139 Republican representatives (including Doug LaMalfa) and eight Republican senators still insisted on trying to officially de-certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The ‘Squad,’ Bernie Sanders, and other true ‘fringe’ members of the Democratic Party are small potatoes when compared to the pervasive extreme wing of the Republican Party.

— Mark S. Gailey, Chico