Why I’m voting Republican. By Andrew Sullivan, long-time leftie political commentator and one-time editor of The New Republic.

You feel the decline in law and order, the slow fraying of the city, every day. …

So guess what? I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find tomorrow. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.

There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. …

In the 2020 election, Biden appealed to centrists and moderates. But then:

Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-Left agenda:

• the biggest expansion in government since LBJ;
• a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation;
• a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse;
• record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!);
• the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”;
• the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform;
• “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”;
• fast-track sex-changes for minors;
• next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went.

Even the policy most popular with the centre — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the centre? …

The blatant gaslighting:

Worse than this bait-and-switch is the condescension that came with it. Think of the absolute assertions by the Biden administration and their media flunkies:

• The border is secure. Covid vaccines prevent infection.
• There is no CRT in high schools.
• The lab-leak theory and Hunter Biden’s corruption were disinformation.
• There is no medical debate about fast-track, affirmation-only, sex changes for minors. Inflation is caused by corporate greed.
• Women in college always tell the truth; and men always lie.
• A president can forgive student loans by fiat.
• Debt doesn’t matter.
• A woman can have a penis.
• The people who attack Asian-Americans are all white supremacists.
• The idea of individual merit is racist.

Can you think of any social issue where the Biden administration hasn’t taken the position of the illiberal “social justice” Left? …

No nuances or other opinions are allowed under the new left. Even our leftie author has had enough:

And look, we can debate all these questions. There are many nuances. But Biden precisely denies those nuances. He never even gives a hint that he respects his critics at all. He sees his moderate supporters not as people to be persuaded or engaged, let alone listened to, but as bigots or victims of disinformation he can simply dismiss. “C’mon, man!” used to be a verbal tic he deployed to engage with critics; now it’s deployed simply to dismiss them.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Biden, for example, that violent crime and uncontrolled immigration affect poor minorities more than wealthy whites, jeopardising their lives and wages, and making a mockery of those who have made the effort to immigrate legally. He repeats absurd jargon such as “Latinx” to please his nutty, MSNBC-addicted donor base. He tells blacks they have to vote Democrat because of their race. He invites the most hardcore trans extremists to the White House; and takes no responsibility for making inflation worse. …

The shameless deceptions and false narratives of the MSM have pissed a lot of people off as well. No one appreciates being called a bigot or a hysteric for wanting to have a say in their own child’s education; or a “white supremacist” for opposing “equity-based” race discrimination. Yet it happens every day, with CRT-based indoctrination mandatory in many workplaces, teachers openly indoctrinating kids in queer theory, and corporations adopting bald race discrimination to appease the woke.

Biden is down with all of it, and is in such a bubble that I don’t think he even knows there is a real debate. …

Obama sees why this dynamic is so toxic. He sees why it alienates so many people unnecessarily. But the Democrats are not the party of Obama anymore, are they? Many of us who supported Obama are now deemed “white supremacists” for agreeing with him. …

Polarization:

The Weimar dynamic is a simple one. The Left and Right polarise; the middle collapses; inflation takes off, unnerving everyone and discrediting government; and at some point, as liberal democracy breaks down, voters are asked to choose between the extreme Left or the extreme Right.

What Biden has done, by showing that even an alleged moderate like him is just a vehicle for the extreme Left, is accelerate the moment when we are faced with that horrible choice. And if that is the choice, I have little doubt that Americans will pick the far Right.

There are many better alternatives for most of us than “their democracy.”