That Team Blue and Team Red fantasize about total victory over one another is no shocker in our current loathing-fueled political environment. “Democratic and Republican voters…despise each other, and to a degree that political scientists and pollsters say has gotten significantly worse over the last 50 years,” Emily Badger and Niraj Chokshi wrote for The New York Times last summer. Nothing has changed since then.
But free societies don’t make any provision for beating and defeating opponents in a permanent way, notes J.D. Tuccille. Republicans fantasize about a “hundred-year majority” and Democrats stroke themselves with talk of a “permanent progressive majority,” but it’s all back-patting self-delusion. Opinions and affiliations come and go. And so long as anything resembling legitimate elections continue to be held, no political coalition will gain a permanent lock on the future. Instead, victories will come and go, and the winners and losers will have to continue to take turns transitioning from role to role.
This, Tuccille point outs, is something libertarians learned a long time ago. It’s time for Team Red and Team Blue to step up to that same level of maturity.
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