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“Of course the Republicans would be worse. What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. Suddenly, an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“Among the more troubling trends of twenty-first-century American politics is the normalization of every election as the existential one, the one upon whose results rests the very survival of American democracy. In one way or another, there is some truth to this claim. Almost without fail, whatever deranged position sat on the periphery of the Republican Party a decade ago now resides in the center. Does anyone truly believe the same party, in another decade's time, will be more moderate and reasonable?”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“There's immense persuasive power to the notion that the only alternative to mainstream Democratic politics is fascistic Republicanism. Who are Muslim Americans going to turn to? The Arab authoritarians from whom so many of them escaped? China, where Muslims are regularly thrown into concentration camps? Russia, where political opponents are assassinated as a matter of course? It’s a kind of thinking predicated on the implicit belief that, for certain people, the only choice is between negations of varying severity. The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“In a perfect world, politics is boring, informed by debate but assured of a mutual understanding that the civic good matters. It’s tree-cutting permits and public transport levies and people who go to school for years and years to learn how to best pass a thoroughfare through a residential area. Republicanism, in its current form, proposes the exact opposite—treason trials for political opponents, the stripping away of any societal covenant, a war on expertise. In the right-wing vision of America, every societal interaction is an organ harvest, something vital snatched from the civic body, sold for one kind of profit or another. It’s a vision that produces an almost unmatched clarity in the base, an unmatched loyalty: Which side of this operation do you want to be on?”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“The main event sees a CNN moderator lob questions at nine Republican hopefuls, all of whom take turns doing the sort of thing Republicans have been doing for most of the twenty-first century, painting the United States as simultaneously the greatest country on Earth and a nightmare place. An enormously powerful, God-chosen nation in which families are too scared to leave their homes at night.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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