I honestly don’t see any difference between this and how the Rs were back in the ’90s when Clinton was in office. This is just the kind of crap that Clinton used to face, and what the next Democratic president will face for four to eight years.
Some of the people in the blogosphere are too young to recall the impeachment proceedings and the run-up to them, but it was kind of like this, except on and off for years instead of two or three days, and I have listened as one Vast Right Wing Conspiracy member explained to me since in all earnestness how he genuinely believed the reason the Republicans were never able to take Clinton out was because they did not go after him hard enough, or humiliate him enough. And remember, back then we did have multiple
incidents of right-wing violence — domestic terrorism — from clinic bombings to the Oklahoma City tragedy. So, yeah, such hatreds do shade over into physical form every so often.
The ’90s were hardly unique in this regard, either, though they were much less violent than the civil rights era, with its bloody physical confrontations and awful ending by assassinations.
The right’s greatest strategic weakness is that its members never know when to stop, and repeatedly outrage the public so severely that they are beaten back for a time, until everyone forgets and the old hatreds regroup and come roaring back, to outrage the public anew.
If you look back on some of the earlier conflicts in our history, what the suffragettes and early union organizers went through, it’s hard to avoid thinking we live in comparatively placid domestic times, as appalling as they can be.