Biden, The F-Word and the Reclamation of the L-Word
There is actually reason for the President to be all "jacked up" in his rhetoric.
image via Wikimedia Commons
The administration’s messaging over the last week can only be properly construed under the category of “jacked.” There is, of course, reason for the President to be delivering muscular, rib-busting rhetoric while throwing down on the stump. His economic and climate program, though scaled down, passed. He finally delivered on his campaign promise, after Herculean labors, to provide student debt relief. And, as this newsletter noted last week, the administration’s social media has dramatically pivoted into aggressive territory after surprising wins in special elections. Speaking of special elections, we will not suggest that any of President Biden’s most recent public superflexes have anything to do — heaven forfend! — with the proximity to the midterms. (Averted Gaze)
Victory lap time yet?
By last Thursday, things had reached a fever pitch. On August 25, in Rockville, Maryland at a midterm rally, the President called the present MAGA philosophy that dominates the Republican Party, “semi-fascist.” A President using the pulpit to compare the opposition one of the scourges of the 20th Century is, one cannot fail to note, not nothing. “Though plenty of people have described Trump and Trumpism in similar terms over the past six years, whether pejoratively or analytically, it was the first time that Biden or someone of his stature has done so,” noted Matt Ford of The New Republic. To paraphrase a politician of the Obama era, it was a big f’n deal.
The comment sent Republicans like New Hampshire Governor Chris Sunnunu into pearl clutching mode, demanding an apology. None, however, appears to be forthcoming from the President. The days of Biden treading lightly in the hope of some bipartisan affection are a reflection in his aviator glasses. Further, in a telling sign of things to come, Democrats running in Trump districts are not placing any distance between their campaigns and the President’s remarks. It would appear that there is party unity among Democrats (at least for now) on how to refer to Trumpism, with or without the principal at the top of the ticket.
If the left (and the center) appear concerned with the spectre of fascism rising in America, the right is just busy, counterclockwise, invoking The Woke Menace. The woke issue has been good for Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line — Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal Opinion page all regularly, shamelessly, “invoke the woke,” the great destroyer of American values. From Ishaan Tharoor of The Washington Post:
On the right, there’s a parallel, if more histrionic, insistence that the Democrats and the liberal establishment comprise some sort of tyrannical front. That grievance has supercharged their long-running culture war and underlies recent moves by Republican state governments to ban certain books and censor what schools can teach about race, history and sexuality.
And never the twain shall meet.
But what of Biden’s pivot? Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast somewhat unfairly compares Biden’s employement of the term “semi-fascist” to Hillary Clinton’s notorious “basket of delorables.” That remark, we cannot fail to note, was made at Cipriani’s in New York City, to a group of LGBT fundraisers, as — and I kid you not — the opening act for Barbara Streisand. In other words, Hillary was in the base of the base of the belly of the liberal beast delivering remarks to fire up the core to give money to the collection plate. In retrospect, the former Secretary of State cannot be blamed for intemperate campaign banter, keeping those remarks in context of the audience and the place. The press has never been kind to Hillary.
Rather, Biden’s remarks conjure up something of what I call a “Reverse Scarlet L Strategy.” George Bush the Elder in the 1988 Presidential campaign utilized against Michael Dukakis what I call the original “Scarlet L Strategy.” Bush, Sr. branded the former Massachusetts Governor as a”liberal,” thus defining him, negatively, right before Labor Day. There were many other dark arts aspects to that campaign, to be sure; for example — the using of racism on the death penalty issue to make Dukakis appear soft on crime (Or, African-American crime, to be precise), and thus unelectable in the then-lily white suburbs. But it is the Scarlet L brand that still clings to that long ago campaign, decades afterwards.
After weeks of avoiding the Scarlet L, Dukakis finally embraced his liberalism. ″I’m a liberal, in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John Kennedy,” he said while down in the polls, a week to go before the election. But by then it was too late. Bush won the popular vote by just under eight points, and won 426 of the 538 electoral votes in 1988.
The Reverse Scarlet L Strategy takes back the L-word by calling out the authoritarian drift of the party of Bush the Elder, 34 years later. Biden, in aggressively characterizing Trump — and Trumpism — as “semi-fascist” is negatively branding the philosophy that his party is running against in the midterms, right before Labor Day. It is a mirror-reflection of what Bush the Elder did to Dukakis, that just happens to have the political virtue of also being accurate. And with threats to Democracy as topping cost of living as top of mind for voters, according to a recent NBC News poll, it is a smart way to go into November. It also just happens to be an accurate characterization of a ragtag Republicanism that appears to have no central governing philosophy other than an anti-democratic subservience to Trump as the father figure of the movement and a marked hostility towards women, the LGBTQ community and people of color.
“Unite the Right” Rally, Charlottesville, VA via Wikimedia Commons
The MAGA “philosophy” — if you can call it a philosophy — is an authoritarian attempt to disrupt election systems and even falsify elections, if necessary, to subvert our demographic destiny as a diversifying nation. This ethnonationalist wave is a hydra-headed international moster, revealing its many heads in Israel, in Hungary, in India. All are varieties of neo-fascism. The Trumpist variety appeals to the aggrieved white man, promising to make America his privileged stomping ground once again, by any means necessary and over whoevers neck the boot has to be applied.
President Biden, imho, called it like he saw it.