Over at the Continental Telegraph, Alex Noble has come up with an interesting analogy between politics and the Apollo 13 crisis. In the Apollo 13 situation the astronauts were in a race against time as the CO2 was rising in the spacecraft and dulling the crew’s ability to think straight. Ground control had to come up with an idea to sort out the rising CO2 levels before the crew became insensible and unable to carry out the tasks needed to raise the oxygen levels in the craft.

Mr Noble has said that the rising divisions in politics where opposing parties see their opposites as not just wrong but ‘evil’ is the equivalent of high concentrations of CO2 in a damaged spacecraft. In the past, in many countries, including the nations of the West, it was possible to those in politics to see their opponents not as evil but just wrong or merely morons. The problem is as Mr Noble sees it and to which I somewhat agree, is that the toxic gas of extreme division and the othering of political opponents, is rising in concentration.

Mr Noble said:

You see, in the past, political discourse was mostly civil, characterised by polite but firm disagreement between men and women willing to acknowledge that their opponents were at least well-meaning. There was very little presumption of malice.

Today, things are quite different. In almost all countries now, political discourse has grown toxic. The Left in particular now believe that if anyone disagrees with their solutions, it indicates that they also disagree with their goals.

And as the problems they claim to be trying to solve include racism, poverty, climate change etc, they therefore conclude that by opposing these goals, their opponents are callously trying to destroy humanity and the world.

Presuming nothing but malice, they now believe they are facing demons, not morons.

And of course when you think your opponent is pure evil and hell-bent on destroying humanity and the planet, almost any activity, no matter how morally questionable, becomes justifiable.

Whilst I agree that there are idiots on both sides of the political spectrum I have to agree with Mr Noble that parts but not all of course of the political Left have been key in this political othering. It’s these elements of the Left who have been behind the sort of division that sees for example a low tax small state party as racists, baby killers or whatever other insult or snarl word they can come up with.

If the toxic miasma of othering of political opponents that has been increasing over the last fifteen to twenty years gets worse then we will be on the same or similar path to the ones that led to concentration camps, gas chambers, gulags, ethnic cleansing and many other of the horrors that characterised the awful and bloody 20^th century. I’m on the centre Right and have been for a number of years but I can clearly see that there are people on the centre Left who are not evil but who I believe are simply misguided in their beliefs. The main reason I can see this is because I once walked the same path as these misguided centre leftists and saw that they were not evil but merely wrong. If I’m willing to understand that there might be an absence of malice among my political opponents then why on earth can others not do the same?