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It's relevant in that you claimed Bunker was presented as a bigot but not dehumanised. That was forty-plus years ago. Today, we wouldn't get an Archie Bunker except as a villain with no redeeming features, or else he does a 180 degree turn and realises he was wrong about everything and current-day idpol is right, true and just.
Have you really not seen any online descriptions of Republicans? Even Freddie deBoer has to do the customary obligatory disclaimer about how bad they are:
I like Freddie, I think he's honest and he makes reasonable points, but even he goes for "maniacal zeal", "utter insanity", "bitter racist yokels", "interchangeable lunatics" and so on. Maybe it's not yet at the point of calling Republicans actual rats and vermin, but some will go that far.
Ditto with the pro-life movement, TERFs, etc. It's a short step from "they're bigots and maniacs" to "they're not real humans, not like us, they have no compassion and are motivated only by hatred and spite and destructiveness".
"Customary obligatory disclaimer" implies that he's just saying those things due to outside pressure, not because those are his actual thoughts. Freddie is a socialist, you'd expect him to view Republicans very negatively.
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This doesn't actually seem dehumanizing. There is no comparison of republicans to animals(unless you count the handwringing over dogwhistle politics), no description of disgust, no description of republicans as lesser-than.
It's an accusation of republicans being evil. And in a democratic system, that's far, far from unprecedented- the Greeks had a special word for it(stasis) and the Romans saw the same thing occurring in their republic and saw it as almost identical to the Greek process. Nor, by the way, is it a one way street; republicans also see democrats as evil.
This is an emergent process of republics and cannot be fixed by one party acting alone.
Online rightists call leftists "NPCs".
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Again, how is that relevant? My point is that the categories "calling someone a bigot" and "dehumanizing someone" are distinct categories. Hence, whether someone is dehumanizing Republicans is an empirical claim which must be established by evidence more than that said person called Republicans bigots. I note that deBoer's articles from which you got those quotes seem to have little to do with bigotry, for example.
I think the point is that "dehumanising != bigot" is ITSELF irrelevant because while you are right that it is theoretically possible to portray someone a bigot without dehumanising them, if you use a 1950s dictionary and several slide rules, it is not practically possible to portray someone a bigot without dehumanising them in The Current Year, because the incentives of the zeitgeist converge modern media writers on that conflation too incentivisingly.
That is true only if you are using a very eccentric definition of "dehumanize." it does not mean "immoral" or "evil" or even "loathsome."
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