Sethbag wrote:I've heard, personally, from people the most bizarre, hateful stuff about Obama. He is literally "the enemy" to a lot of these Republicans, just like Bill Clinton was back in the 90s. I remember what that felt like, because I was an anti-Clintonite back then, and I certainly considered him illegitimate and the enemy. I shudder to think about some of the stuff I took seriously back then. It wasn't just the church.
What you say here brings back a lot of memories from my childhood up through my time as an undergraduate at BYU. I grew up in a conservative household. The parents and grandparents weren't knee-jerk, unthinking conservatives. Instead, they had lots of actively cultivated crazy ideas about how the world worked, which evil conspiracies were hatched by certain unscrupulous Democrats in the past, and so forth.
But, honestly, my parents didn't talk about it all that much, and when they did, what they said sounded reasonable enough, mostly because it was all I knew. At some point, though, a lot of it stopped adding up. The more I learned about things, the worse their take on things held up. What really brought it all to a head for me, however, was going to BYU. There I heard students whispering about how Martin Luther King had been a communist. There I saw a rabid apocalyptic frenzy in response to Clinton's presidency that bore very little rational connection to any evidence presented.
In short, when I saw what it was like to live in a sea of Republicans who felt like they had the freedom to say pretty much whatever crazy thing they wanted without anyone challenging it, that is where I started to feel the kool aid buzz wearing off. I made the mistake of voting for W the first time around, but, after that, I was done. My view is that the Republican Party went off the rails sometime in the 80s and it has gotten continually worse. The Democratic Party is almost as bad, but I don't get the same sense of being lost in a nightmarish funhouse of horror when I watch them in action.
