The Fight to Define Extremism

The Run-Up

The New York Times

News Commentary, Politics, News

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2023

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Two things are true: Bothsidesism can flatten the realities of political extremism in this country. And many voters really do see the Democratic and Republican parties as equally extreme at this moment. The parties know this. And they’re fighting to convince voters that it’s the other side that’s gone too far. That Republicans are the party of Donald Trump, election denial, Jan. 6 and six-week abortion bans. That Democrats are the party of woke-ism and the Squad. Today, we talk to two congressmen who have publicly clashed on this question — Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat, and Byron Donalds, a Republican — and press them on the roles they play in the fight.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In recent weeks, I've been thinking a lot about the idea of extremism, because as I've
0:06.3	been talking to voters who feel politically homeless in this moment, who hate their
0:10.3	options for 2024, one of the things that comes through really clearly is that part of
0:16.0	the reason that they feel this way is that they see both parties as extreme.
0:24.4	It made me think back to this scene outside of Donald Trump's arraignment in April.
0:28.5	We're here at the park that Marjorie Taylor Greene's holding a pro-Trump rally at.
0:35.3	We see some flags.
0:37.3	The extreme of the extreme right was there.
0:40.0	One says, Trump or death, okay.
0:45.6	The shadow of January 6th, loom large.
0:48.1	We've got like a police community affairs department, kind of looking at folks coming
0:53.1	there.
0:54.1	And in the midst of all that, I found the Democratic congressman, Jamal Bowman.
1:06.8	At a moment when most Democrats were trying to avoid being associated with the charges,
1:11.7	here was Bowman.
1:12.7	Do you have any worry about like impact on political system, no matter the truth of
1:17.7	the charges?
1:18.7	That's just like, in general, in dieting a former president leads my lead to unrest.
1:25.6	No, because I think justice is justice.
1:29.0	And I think when you look at American history, it's been a history of unrest.
1:34.0	We didn't have an abolitionist movement.
1:36.2	We were in the abolished labor.
	...

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