Why comparing Marjorie Taylor Greene to AOC is rid

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Why comparing Marjorie Taylor Greene to AOC is ridiculous

No, Democrats and Republicans don’t have a similar “extremism” problem.

By Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp zack@vox.com Feb 3, 2021, 4:10pm EST

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When we say Ocasio-Cortez represents the “left flank” of the Democratic Party, what we mean is she has policy views that are well to the left of the median voter. When we say Greene is on the “right flank” of the Republican Party, we aren’t talking about her policy views on health care or LGBTQ rights. It’s not actually clear whether she’s all that extreme on policy, especially given how far to the right the GOP is in general.

Instead, we are saying she is part of a coterie of Republicans who are untethered from reality — so thoroughly ensconced inside their own informational bubble, they believe things that are objectively false and even dangerous to democracy.

Greene may be an extreme example, but the general problem is much bigger: Lead “birther” Donald Trump was president until recently.

So the asymmetry between the “extremists” in the two parties is really an asymmetry between the parties themselves.

One is basically in contact with reality; a large portion of the other is not. The nature of their internal disputes reflects this asymmetry: Democrats disagree with each other about a public option versus Medicare-for-all, while Republicans disagree about whether to respect the results of a free election or overturn it via legislative fiat.

This is a difficult reality for large swaths of American media to convey. Accurately explaining the nature of the Marjorie Taylor Greene problem requires grappling with the fact that the Republican Party is, as an institution, broken in a way that the Democratic Party is not.

But journalists are trained to try to treat both sides as equally as possible — an important value, to be sure, but not one that should come at the expense of accuracy.

This is, at root, why you get the mirror-image portrayals of Ocasio-Cortez and Greene. It’s much easier to say “Republicans and Democrats both have an extremism problem” than to grapple with the fact that the internal debates on the two sides are categorically different in a way that casts one party in a much more favorable light that the other.

Matthew Sitman, who hosts a podcast on conservatism called Know Your Enemy, expresses the problem quite clearly:

Matthew Sitman
@MatthewSitman

I think one thing that's happening is that, because the
Republican Party has gone so far off the rails, there's a
resistance to speaking and writing honestly about that
because to do so *feels* like you're being almost absurdly
pro-Biden or pro-Democrat as a kind of by-product

10:23 AM · Feb 3, 2021
2.1K 354 Copy link to Tweet

It’s hard for a lot of journalists, especially at ideologically neutral places like Politico and Axios, to break the habit of drawing equivalencies between the two parties. But portraying the reality of American politics requires explaining what’s actually at stake in our political disputes.

And right now, the issues run far deeper than left versus right.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22264...quivalence

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