"Both sides do it"

I really do reject the whole notion that both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of the same degree of extremism and irrationality in exactly the same ways. They're just not. This line of nonsense would have us believe that the Democratic Party champions left-leaning values with the same tribalist zeal and fanaticism that highly partisan Republicans do right-leaning values. When you look at what's really going on, you see that the Democratic Party establishment has been backing away from defending left-leaning values while its supporters concoct increasingly absurd justifications why liberals should keep supporting them anyway.

But to deny that the Democratic Party has been playing a serious enabling role in the encroaching plutocratic and imperialistic realities of our age is to indulge a partisan Manicheism that is both self-deceiving and codependent. This sort of willful cognitive dissonance, however, is to be expected when people cling with a white-knuckled death-grip to defending the increasingly indefensible. In playing increasingly twisted mind-games with themselves to pretend that they are supporting something worth unconditional support, they are in fact supporting the very "Long March to the Right", as I call it, the countering of which is their supposed justification for this support.

I have to admit that the thing that is problematic about my own view of things is that I don't really have any alternative solutions to offer simply because I doubt that there are any to be had by way of conventional politics or perhaps any politics. We are entering an age of decline and contraction, and this reality is why the context in which our media and politics exist are irreparably sick and broken. Wishful thinking and codependent fantasies are not going to make it otherwise, and I feel sorry for those who insist on thinking that it will. If there is anything to be done, it lies in making specific preparations for dealing with an age of decline and collapse and attempting to bond with one's neighbors (difficult to do in a society as profoundly socially atomized as ours, I will readily admit) as we will need one another in order to deal with the coming difficult times. But as dubious and vague as this course of action sounds, one really must admit that it makes a lot more sense than expending one's time and energy supporting any of our dying society's decaying institutions.