The moral panics of the right and left in contemporary American politics

OK let’s do this thing:

Let’s compare the paranoid visions of the left and the right in American politics today.

If the standard right-wing beliefs about the true intentions and agenda of the Democratic party were reality-based, the following would be the case:

(1) Joe Biden would be pushing to make it illegal for anyone in America to accept Jesus Christ as his/her/their personal lord and savior.

(2) The top legislative agenda item for Democrats would be an omnibus bill that would prohibit parents from gendering their children before the age of ten, that would authorize the immediate dynamiting of Mt. Rushmore, and that would require every white person in America to turn over 10% of his/her/their personal wealth to black people as partial reparations for slavery.

(3) Another bill would make gas-driven cars illegal by 2025.

(4) Black Lives Matters would replace E Pluribus Unum on our currency by 2027 at the latest.

If the standard left-wing beliefs about the true intentions and agenda of the Republican party were reality-based, the following would be the case:

(1) The unquestioned leader of the Republican party would be an openly fascistic authoritarian, who would be trying to rig the 2024 election ahead of time, at the very same time that he was continuing to make obviously paranoid accusations about how the 2020 election had been rigged against him.

(2) National and state Republican party leaders would be constructing the electoral basis for a one-party state, by making it increasingly difficult for anything like majority rule to remove Republicans from office, via systematic voter repression, and proposed legislation that would allow state legislatures to simply ignore inconvenient presidential election results.

(3) The GOP would have stacked the the federal judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular with cadres of fanatical radical reactionaries, who automatically stuck down progressive legislation and overturned a whole century of judicial precedent, because they had been brainwashed to do so by some nefarious right wing propaganda organization that had been inserted into our law schools to produce this very result.

(4) More generally, Republicans would be trying to purge both the public education system and the nation’s universities of deviationist elements, to make sure the children who are the future were not being corrupted by a cabal of child molesting cultural Marxist groomers.

What I’m saying here is that everybody on both sides needs to calm down, and stop giving themselves over to obviously paranoid fantasies about their political opponents.