Trump’s America vs. Clinton’s America

After slogging her way through the three 2016 Republican presidential debates so far, and also last night’s more substantive Democratic face-off, Heather Digby Parton--who writes the political blog Hullabaloo--sums up the radically different ways that Republicans and Democrats look at our modern world in this piece for Salon:

Republican America is a dystopian hellscape in which evil, violent foreigners are trying to kill us in our beds while rapacious jackbooted government thugs try to wrestle our guns from our cold, dead fingers and Planned Parenthood sociopaths are committing mayhem on children and selling the body parts. And that’s just for starters.

Democratic America is a very powerful nation struggling with a declining middle class and economic insecurity at the hands of the ultra-rich, requiring some energetic government intervention to mitigate income inequality, solve the looming crisis of climate change and manage global crises without plunging the nation into more wars. They also must hold off that anarchistic opposition which sees the world as a dystopian hellscape and that may be the greatest challenge of all.

A little over a year from now voters are going to decide which country they want to live in. Let’s hope they choose wisely. The rest of us are going to have to live in it too.

READ MORE: “Sorry, Haters: Hillary Clinton Won the Democratic Debate,” by Amanda Marcotte (Salon); “Hillary Clinton Won the CNN Debate with a Surprisingly Spectacular Performance,” by Josh Voorhees (Slate); “Why Clinton’s Debate Dominance May Change the 2016 Race,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog); “Hillary Clinton Passes Her First Major Test and Momentum Is on Her Side” (NBC News).