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Will “Enough Is Enough” Politics Eclipse Dems’ Futile Hopes for Bi-Partisanship?

Tim Libretti, PhD
5 min readSep 8, 2021

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“Folks [are] supposed to have common sense.”

These are the now well-known words of Alabama’s Republican Governor Kay Ivey when she called out those hesitant or downright resistant to getting vaccinated, declaring that “it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.”

It’s hard to know who qualifies as regular folk these days, though, given that in the states witnessing the most severe increases in COVID-19 cases and deaths are those with vaccination rates hovering below 50 percent. What constitutes “regular”?

It may be even more challenging to talk about “common sense” in any straightforward way these days.

The term itself, “common sense,” suggests a shared understanding, a common ground of knowledge and understanding upon which members of a community can arrive at an agreement, regardless of their differences. “Common sense” is the set of ideas, norms, and ideals that should simply go unquestioned.

But when one sits down to have a conversation with folks who insist Democrats are in league with a bunch of global elites running a vast pedophilia enterprise out of the basement of pizza parlor, or who insist drinking bleach is the…

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Tim Libretti, PhD
Tim Libretti, PhD

Written by Tim Libretti, PhD

Professor of Literature, Political Economy enthusiast, Dad, always thinking about the optimal world

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