Long story short, Joe Biden said some profoundly true and long overdue things which were nevertheless still pretty weak tea and dishonestly polite. As I’ve noted often before, the right’s racism and hostility to democracy are nothing new. True, Donald Trump embodies both, but he definitely didn’t invent them. I know Biden was trying to throw vanishing moderate Republicans a lifeline, but it's pointless at this point.
After all, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign was the maiden voyage of the Southern Strategy, so Republicans have been stoking racist voters for longer than I’ve been alive and I’m now in my mid-fifties. Think about that. Roll it around in your head for a moment. And then ignore everyone calling Trump some kind of unprecedented aberration because they are historically illiterate imbeciles trying to ignore a half century of GOP bigotry. What is so often called “Trumpism” is just Republicans saying the quiet part out loud. I mean, you knew the Tea Party was racist, right? You recall the unhinged Militia Movement from the 1990s, right? Stop defending the indefensible. Consider your dignity – it's in danger.
And it's not just their love of racism. Conservatives have long loathed democracy too. In my 2014 book, Conservatism is Un-American, I argued that liberty, equality, and democracy are interdependent like the legs of a tripod – each leg supports the other two. Conservatives have always sought to shatter these three ideals. Usually, they concentrate their assault on equality, but they occasionally go after freedom or democracy too. “We are a republic, not a democracy” remains a favorite slogan of the racist John Birch Society which had opposed the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and it has become a popular slogan with Republicans today. This incidentally illustrates how tightly equality and democracy are intertwined.
