I see your point, and would agree liberals should own their share of the gridlocked political and social culture we now see. I think all sides suffer from a failure to embrace ideas and people different from them combined with a selective eye for media outlets and content that only affirms their worldview. We’ve gone from confirmation bias to confirmation fetish.

A few years ago there was quite a bit of talk about “partyism” and how Americans align themselves ideologically moreso than they do along religious or racial lines. Not to get all “No Labels” about it, but we do seem trapped in our own worlds — and I would own that of myself as well.

For years my homepage was The Drudge Report. I was not a conservative by any definition, but I appreciated his addiction to narrative and his love of bombast and spectacle. It was a worthwhile experience — to be surrounded by Obama love yet not forget the cost of the drone war, mass surveillance, or the people Obamacare had failed. Getting your news from someone so abjectly biased helped me remind myself of my own biases.

I stopped over the last few years — I think around the time of Ferguson. It wasn’t just his love of Trump, but the sheer affection and adoration he gave towards white nationalist theories, straight out lies, and the stoking of racial fears. Drudge had always done this, to some extent, but he moved from Willie Horton-esque dog whistling to a warm embrace of hateful and dangerous ideologies.

I imagine, as a conservative, it’s hard watching a strong belief system fall to crazies and loonies. There are conservative solutions this country needs that are being lost to delusional xenophobes, and the proud intellectual history of conservatism is now threatened by a dark age.

Slate ran an article recently imagining if the coin were flipped — if someone like Sean Penn were the Democratic candidate. Imagine a Democratic candidate endorsing the fairness doctrine, or supporting abortion in the name of eugenics, or embracing the idea that George W. Bush was behind 9/11. I would be horrified. Democrats can be pulled into strange directions just like Republicans.

I was once in a meeting between a Democratic congressman and a group of local supporters. One gentleman began to argue the gas tax should be raised until gas couldn’t go lower than $10 per gallon because “then everyone would be forced to buy a hybrid!”

Over half a century of fear of communism has forced the left to rid itself — mostly — of its hardliners. The right went through a similar process since the Civil Rights era, but has not been as thorough or as honest. There is a straight line from Lee Atwater — who, lest we forget, was chairman of the GOP — to Pat Buchanan to Fox News to Karl Rove to Donald Trump and Breitbart.

Blaming the left for the newly-resurgent far right ignores this. The GOP has attempted to have it both ways, dipping its toes in without wanting to get soaked. But Trump and his followers are the culmination of fifty years of playing with racial tensions for political benefit.

It’s like the GOP adopted a tiger when it was a cub who could fit into a cage, but now that tiger is grown. Conservative Nationalism (the term “alt-right” is starting to get way too buzzwordy for me) is creating its own media outlets and establishing its own institutions. I don’t blame the tiger — it’s a giant beast with irrational goals and no logic. I blame the foolish owner who thought he could keep a violent, raging animal as a pet.