Honestly, it's not even an unreasonable conclusion to reach when politics is presented as it is in US electoral politics. There is such a small substantial difference between the parties that you can take any infinitesimal part of that difference and extrapolate it to mean ridiculous things like OOP did. Not only that, but take away knowledge of history and materialism, and you wouldn't distinguish between Republicans' opportunistic appeals to populism and anti-war rhetoric, versus their actual praxis of warmongering.
The good news is that it makes our job as socialists pretty easy when we can show those people that the symbols, cultural markers, and ideas they are being imposed are distinct from the political positions of bourgeois politicians who choose to associate with those superficialities. It's hard to get people to make that break, because the positive alternative doesn't actually exist yet.
Honestly, it's not even an unreasonable conclusion to reach when politics is presented as it is in US electoral politics. There is such a small substantial difference between the parties that you can take any infinitesimal part of that difference and extrapolate it to mean ridiculous things like OOP did. Not only that, but take away knowledge of history and materialism, and you wouldn't distinguish between Republicans' opportunistic appeals to populism and anti-war rhetoric, versus their actual praxis of warmongering.
The good news is that it makes our job as socialists pretty easy when we can show those people that the symbols, cultural markers, and ideas they are being imposed are distinct from the political positions of bourgeois politicians who choose to associate with those superficialities. It's hard to get people to make that break, because the positive alternative doesn't actually exist yet.