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 weaponizing racism for longer
than I’ve been alive and I’m now in my mid-50s. Think about that: Roll it around in your head for a moment.
No, really: Use this paragraph break as a break and actually think about that for a moment.
And then just ignore everyone calling Trump some kind of unprecedented aberration because they are historically illiterate imbeciles sadly 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 by painting the recent past as some halcyon era of comity. It's vomitsomely dishonest. You know better.
Seriously, consider your dignity – why risk it to bolster the rediculous myth that there was just recently a reasonable Republican Party to negotiate with? At this late date, it's long past time give up the ghost. Don't compose retroactive rationalizations. Resist the sinister temptation to fritter time away with silly centrist revisionism. Just adult-up and take the L so that you can finally move forward and begin winning again.
Remember winning? It doesn't come from sleeping with the enemy or making stupid excuses for them.
And it's not just conservative love of racism: They've 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.
