We are fighting the wrong enemy.

[Jedi Guy]

80. "...they believe that Western Civilization is a failure..."

That doesn't really track with a lot of the rhetoric coming from their side, though, does it? The Proud Boys, for instance, were founded as an explicitly Western chauvinist organization that glorifies Western culture and civilization as exactly what you describe, the most successful system in human history. I can see the argument being made that the Proud Boys have strayed from those roots and are now little more than a paramilitary group or a mob of brutes looking to smash heads, but still, their genesis was "Western civilization good, everything else bad".

That's very much a right-wing position. They believe that Western culture and morality are superior to other ideological systems and they explicitly reject the notion of moral relativism. They reject the notion that other cultures have things of value to offer. Your average Republican voter probably can't have an intelligent conversation about the seeds of Western civilization in ancient Greece and how it's gradually gone through permutations throughout history until we end up with it as it exists today... but to be honest, I doubt your average Democratic voter could have an intelligent conversation about it, either. Your Average Joe/Jane likely isn't conversant on Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, etc., given the state of our educational system.

I would say that your average Republican voter probably has a much higher likelihood of tolerating autocracy, so perhaps that was more what you were thinking about when making the comparison to Russia. I don't know any American conservatives who would countenance the idea of an American king, though they're inclined more towards "strongman" type leadership than the left is, broadly speaking, and Trump is evidence of that inclination.

Even your observation about conservatives wanting "little to no science or free thought" isn't necessarily accurate, in my opinion. Most conservatives are fiercely supportive of the First Amendment, whereas there are folks on the left, some of them right here on DU, who have advocated for "hate speech" laws to ban speech they find objectionable, which is another way of saying speech with which they disagree.

Those same conservatives who will fiercely defend the First Amendment, though, will nod and smile when Donnie Dipshit attacks the media as the "enemy of the people" and advocates for media organizations he dislikes to be punished or shut down, which goes back to a stronger inclination towards autocracy and more than a little hypocrisy in the bargain. On the other hand, how many threads have there been here on DU advocating for right-wing media outlets to be shut down? Yes, it's one thing for a President to advocate it and quite another for a private citizen on the net to do the same, but the idea isn't a good one regardless of who's expressing it.

The rejection of science isn't solely a trait of the left or the right, either, not in the current state of our society. There's a very human tendency to dismiss science and experts in favor of our "gut feelings" or pre-existing beliefs. That's utterly rampant in society right now. If Dr. Expert on the news says X and you think X sounds odd, you can hop on the net and find twenty other people saying X is ridiculous and Y is the truth. Once upon a time, society agreed on a basic set of facts. Individual interpretations of what those facts meant certainly occurred, but the bedrock facts were at least agreed upon. Those days are over.

Even the greater inclination towards autocracy isn't necessarily just an issue on the right. In the aftermath of the 2024 election, there were people here on DU saying Biden should reject the results, refuse to leave office, and all kinds of other wacky things. You know, the kinds of autocratic things Trump talked about and did. They were okay with the idea of an autocratic leader/government as long as it was one they agreed with. Yes, I will grant that those voices were far, far less numerous on the left than they ever were on the right, but it's disturbing that they existed at all, on the left or the right.

This is just a (very) long-winded way of saying that I think there are deep problems with our society at this moment in time, and of course those problems make themselves felt in politics. I just don't think those issues can be conveniently boiled down to left vs. right. I think it's across the board.

Our society is broken in some fundamental way and the problems aren't getting better.