From guns to climate, conservatives play Chicken Little

It’s a question we ask again and again: Why do Americans stare at each other across an abyss that too often seems unbridgeable? Part of the explanation, certainly, is the politically apocalyptic nature of rightwing rhetoric. To listen to some of today’s conservatives, the sky is forever about to fall. We are always about to lose America as we know it.

Even as communism steadily consigns itself communism was one of the justifications cited by Trump’s MAGA mob when it overran the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to stop Congress from counting the Electoral College votes that would officially seal his defeat.

After that shocking day, one might have thought Trump would rein in his ridiculous rhetoric. He has not. “Democrats want to turn America into communist Cuba or socialist Venezuela,” he charged just three in America, often as the first step for extinguishing American liberties.

Now, one presumes that professional polemicists who traffic in that sort of claptrap do so knowing full well that it’s balderdash. But some who hear it clearly don’t.

So how should citizens of the rational world combat today’s Chicken Little-ism? Several ways leap to mind.

First, by stressing that wild-eyed conservatives have been warning that America is slipping into communism since the days of the New Deal — and that, of course, has never happened. And by observing that the American public now venerates several of the programs right-wingers once warned were the collectivist camel’s nose pushing craftily into the American tent.

Second, by noting that in the post-World War II period, the economy has done significantly better under Democrats than it has under Republicans. Uncomfortable as that is for the Democrats-are-Marxists crowd, the facts are incontrovertible on that point — so much so that even Trump himself once acknowledged that was the case. “I’ve been around a long time. And it just seems the economy does better under the Democrats than under Republicans,” he said back in 2004.

Third, by reminding people that even during periods of strong Democratic control, the federal government did not embark on sweeping gun-confiscation campaigns.

Fourth, by pointing out that America is the one country in the Western world where the conservative party regularly dismisses the scientific consensus on climate change.

Those counterarguments are hardly curealls, of course. Still, offering them is an effort worth making. As we’ve seen again and again in American politics, it’s best not to let invidious arguments go unanswered — no matter how silly they are.