Is the Left or the Right More Dangerous in America?

This question is complex but can easily fall prey to sophistry and mere perceptual bias. If you ask right-wingers about dangers on the left they point to Antifa, Black Lives Matter riots, race-based education, redistribution of wealth, limitations on various basic freedoms, and the strange gender craze that has enraptured the country. If you ask a leftist about the dangers of the far-right, they will point toward a litany of “phobias:” homophobia, the newly minted term transphobia, years ago Islamophobia, etc. They will also now of course point toward January 6, 2020, and Donald Trump’s denial of the election results, which are in their view a creep toward dictatorship. Included in leftist worries about the right-wing are also climate change “denialism,” corporate cronyism, and needless military expansion.

So, here we are. Both halves of the country believe the other half is crazy, evil, stupid, or all three at once. But what is the reality of these claims along the lines of the various dialectical viewpoints from left and right? I do not have the scope in this essay to address the litany of complaints in the first paragraph, but there are two broad domains of issues that I would like to detail here that have received little attention in the way that I will describe them.