Originally posted by Reid:
I think a big thing I'm getting at is, the left will criticize and suppress antifa only if the right will actually work to push out the obviously super racist elements on their side. Right now, it feel like many on the right are softening up to overt racism, and Donald Trump is ringleading this in a new way. As far as I can tell, most Republican representatives are sort of tolerating Trump and the far right, and that's really completely unacceptable, and I see no reason why the left should work to suppress our radical elements if the right has a president in office who's encouraging the opposite.
I don't think the reason why the neither the left nor the right is cracking down on their extremists is because the other side isn't doing it. I think both sides refuse to seriously take stock of themselves and acknowledge that they have problems with violent extremism (in most cases because, it doesn't only appear to be a fringe phenomenon. It is one). So for both Republicans and Democrats, it's easy to play the extremism off as if the other side is making a bigger deal out of it than it really is. But I don't think that it's really parallel. On the left, it does seem that college students and campus politics play a disproportionate role in antifa and other violent extremism, which, I think, makes make on the left feel as if it's really unimportant, and that the right is wasting a lot of hot air verbally attacking kids. But it's a little different on the right, because, unlike on the left, extremism has clearly entered into electoral politics on the Republican side. And it's not just because of Trump. Go back to Republican primaries in the 2012 election and you'll see Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum doing more than their fair share of dog whistling. The populist (and xenophobic, racist and antisemitic) segment makes up the largest single voting block of the Republican coalition. So Republicans have to pander to them.
I'm not too quick to say that even those racists to whom the Republican party panders are "extremists". Someone who has retrogressive views about immigration and whatever minority groups is very different from someone who trains in an armed militia and waves a swastika flag. But Republicans have broken with norms of decency that existed for most of the second half of the 20th century (at least), even in the Republican party.