By Mackenzie Grizzard | Staff Writer
American politics are messy. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy when you combine that much money, power and influence. But now, Americans are looking down the barrel of a completely different monster, and it’s not liberal versus conservative — it’s much more extreme than that.
We’re living in a world where a figure involved with the new administration does a Nazi salute at the presidential inauguration, books about government censorship are being banned by the government and cities are destroyed during “peaceful” protests. We’ve seen this unfold before. Make no mistake, political extremism is alive and and well, feeding off strategically placed propaganda running rampant through our media.
Although there are several political parties in America other than Democrat and Republican, the resilience of the two-party system and the general failure of minor parties like the Libertarian and the Green Party simply rests in the voter base.
Britannica says the definition of centrism is a “political ideology that advocates for a balanced approach to maximize electoral support.”
While I agree that political centrism is primarily used to garner electoral support from a voter base that’s not 100% sold on a particular ideology, the most dangerous misconception about centrism is that it is a “happy medium” between the right and the left.
Centrism completely rejects the extreme ideas presented by the right and the left.
On the right, fascism, neo-Nazi movements and white supremacy are the ideologies classified as “extreme,” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In recent years, the CSIS reports that far-right wing extremist attacks have more than quadrupled from the 2010s, reaching the precipice with the infamous Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol.
You can believe in whatever you want to. I’m not here to tell you any different. But if you pull back the political party label and look at the facts, an armed mob storming the Capitol building should ring alarm bells.
Even though it might come across as such, this column isn’t an attack on the Republicans of America. The intolerance the left has for the right and vice-versa is concerning and frankly unproductive. The beautiful part of America is that we can believe, worship and live how we want. However, I don’t extend that same courtesy to extremism.
Democrat versus Republican is fine. Fascism versus Communism, white supremacy versus Socialism, etc. is not. When it’s at a point where we cannot agree on a single issue and resort to violence to prove a point, it’s time to reevaluate what we believe is right.
Far-left ideologies are just as concerning as far-right ones are. When I see on social media that people my age and younger are promoting socialist and communist ideologies for America’s government, I sincerely wonder if propaganda awareness is still being taught in schools.
The millions that have died under communist, socialist, fascist and Nazi regimes would be horrified to learn that those ideologies are being practiced — and worse — promoted. As someone whose family immigrated to America to escape the persecution of those ideologies, it doesn’t matter if those ideas are packaged with a bow to make it more palatable; we should be increasingly weary that the roots of extremism are dragging down our country.
As a collective, we’re rightfully concerned with threats from other nations. From Middle-eastern terrorist groups, Russian nuclear stockpiles and even a Chinese-owned video app, we’ve done a lot to protect America from dangerous outside influences. But if we continue to ignore the ticking ideological time bomb from within our walls, we are going to be a much more vulnerable and divided nation.
The National Institute of Justice 2024 Domestic Terrorism Report details the concerning nature of extremism within our country, highlighting the number of far-right extremist attacks that have outpaced the far-left and even radical Islamic extremists for ideologically-motivated homicides since the 1990s. In this same period, far-left extremists have also committed an alarming number of ideologically motivated attacks.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security labeled domestic violent extremists as an “acute threat” in the NIJ’s report and highlighted “long-standing ideological grievances” as how these attacks are justified in the minds of extremists.
Our ideological disputes run deeper than a simple “agree to disagree.” We are so polarized in both directions that our inability to compromise is being used as justification for domestic terrorism.
It’s OK to meet in the middle sometimes. Democrats, you don’t have to believe everything your Republican counterpart says, and conservatives don’t need to be altering their values to fit a liberal viewpoint. You don’t have to be best friends, you don’t even have to like each other most of the time.
But you have to understand what lurks in the corners of our ideological spectrum. Fear-mongering aside, as we stray further from political centrism, we start looking eerily similar to the governments we’ve fought to overturn.
