Because this topic interests me greatly, I'll just add to what I wrote above. Apologies for the long post.
I actually believe that the opinion in the OP, and widely expressed elsewhere - that there are two extremes, right and left, dominating political and social discourse to the detriment of us all - is an epic strawman perpetuated by the right and extreme right. This strawman is bought and promoted by even sophisticated and reasoned thinkers on the left.
Very broadly, I believe that the Fox News modus operandi applies: take an extreme position on the right - "get rid of Medicaid!" - and then show the minute subset of people abusing the system - "look at those freeloaders!" All of a sudden you have a dialectic created between what seems like two extreme opinions, and a battle is "waged" in the minds of Fox News watchers everywhere.
There are exactly zero people advocating the abuse of Medicaid. Not even the people who do it. Expanding, funding, reforming - these are actual opinions with backers on the left - but no one is advocating the abuse of the system. There are many very real and very well-funded advocates of cutting Medicaid altogether on the right. The well-funded part is the important part - before someone points out that even the US has communists.
Likewise immigration - Trump describes the alternative to his extreme immigration policies as MS13-loving antipatriots who want open-borders and the destruction of America. Trump undoubtedly holds extreme views on immigration (despite that pesky immigrant wife thing) - but there is absolutely no counterpoint worth anything on the extreme left with any significant backing. Sure, some hippies in Vermont might want open borders to all, but I wouldn't call their extreme position well-backed. And it certainly has nowhere near enough backing to get it to the point where a president is Tweeting about it.
But, because of the way Trump frames the issue, it appears as if there are two extremist sides to immigration when there absolutely is not.
This is why it is so vastly different when we discuss the far-right and far-left: for the far-left we are usually discussing a professor being fired here, a transsexual wanting access to bathrooms there, or a group of SJW taking censorship too far somewhere else. There are absolutely pockets of it, especially on college campuses.
But the key take is that every example of the far left is an isolated, pitiful attempt by (usually) nutjobs to change something micro and unimportant on a larger scale. The far left has no reach, and that is why examples are always individual. Most often, examples of the far left taking it too far are outnumbered 1000-to-1 by similar examples evidencing centrist or rational thought about the same issue.
The far right on the other hand? They have the ear of the freaking White House. There is no extreme right-left battle messing things up for us all. There is an unholy alliance of the extreme right with the corporate and greedy, backed by a lot of money. They use the strawman effectively in convincing others that there is a powerful force worth fighting against on the left, but there simply isn't.
The most that can be said of the left is that maybe they buy this dichotomy too wholeheartedly, believing that too many rightists are nazis or white-oppressors or whatever. But the people who hold these extreme views - of the other side - are not powerful nor influential nor worth even a minute amount of thought during any major election period.
It is not an equal battle and should not be characterized as such. The extreme right holds positions that ally them with moneyed interests and vast reach that got many of them all the way to Congress and the White House. The far left? They're lucky if they get a gender neutral bathroom or a controversial speech at the local university delayed by a half hour.
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