The President and the former GOP hardliner both evoked the same metaphor, but for vastly different visions of America
I listened to President Biden’s Thursday night speech on “The Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation” on the radio, so I didn’t catch the optics of his standing in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the weird lighting that his advance team used to stage the event. The words alone were bracing enough, though I wish Biden had chosen to show his audience more than tell it why democracy is in danger.
It’s hard sometimes not to worry that we’re heading into this battle with the equivalent of Weimar Germany’s Paul von Hindenburg as our standard-bearer. (Hindenburg was 78 when he became President in 1925, the same age as Biden when he was inaugurated.) As a long-serving Senator and then Vice President, Biden has probably spent more time in historic buildings that embody our democratic heritage than most mortals and maybe thought that the symbolism of going back to the Founding Fathers’ stomping grounds would speak for itself. Though these days one cannot really draw on that well without care. In the opening paragraphs of his speech, Biden did amend the Declaration to claim that the unique American idea launched onto the world stage more than two centuries ago was that “we’re all created equal,” but in fact we know that’s not true, and it was only through ages of struggle that we’ve come anywhere close to that ideal.
Still, no one is going to remember anything specific about Biden’s words other than his plain choice to call out “MAGA Republicans” for their fealty to Trump, their denial of the 2020 election and their celebration of January 6th and what it means when a political movement refuses to accept the results of a free and fair vote and instead acts as if violence is justified. “Semi-fascism,” a term Biden used a few days earlier at a fundraiser, is a fine way to describe this movement, though apparently his speech-writers decided not to include it in Philadelphia. But now the question is whether he and other Democrats behave differently now that they’re calling Trumpism what it is.
Are Democratic leaders in Congress, or the people who run the party’s big campaign arms, joining Biden in his warning? So far, all they’re doing to echo his words are talking about “extreme MAGA Republicans.” Here’s House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Biden’s speech: “In the Congress and across the country, extreme MAGA Republicans are orchestrating a sinister campaign. From criminalizing women’s health care to ending Social Security and Medicare to undermining our elections, the GOP is working to turn back the clock on many of our most fundamental liberties while fanning the flames of violence and division.” It’s all accurate, but except for adding the word MAGA there’s nothing Pelosi says here that she and her fellow Dems haven’t said a hundred times before about the GOP. (Even worse, they seem addicted to praising Republicans for voting with them on a few big spending bills, as this clip of Rep. James Clyburn talking on MSNBC after Biden’s speech illustrates.)
Why the rhetorical flatness? This is what you get from people who have been doing their jobs for a very long time. Just add MAGA to the talking points. I doubt it will be enough.
Was it better in the original German? That was the great Texas columnist Molly Ivins’ line about rightwing commentator Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 GOP convention speech: “it probably sounded better in the original German.” I was reminded of Buchanan’s speech because he, like Biden at Independence Hall last week, also talked about a “struggle for the soul of America.” If you go back and re-read it, it should remind you of how little is new about Trumpism, other than the degree to which it is now embraced by a majority of Republicans. After nodding in a lukewarm way toward the man who beat him in the Republican primary, George H.W. Bush, Buchanan hits all the culture war hot buttons: he accuses the Democratic nominee, Bill Clinton, of favoring “abortion on demand,” of being the most “pro-lesbian” and “pro-gay” ticket in history, of favoring “state schools” over religious ones, and then he pulls in Hillary Clinton to prove that Democrats were “radical feminists” who think marriage and the family is equal to slavery.
What made Buchanan’s speech so foul-sounding to Ivins, though, was undoubtedly his closing paragraphs. There he evoked the young men of the 18th Army Cavalry who had been called to Los Angeles to help police the city in the wake of the Rodney King riots. The rioters, he claimed, was on the verge of “ransacking and looting” an old-age home until those soldiers stopped them. “Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know,” Buchanan growled. “And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” I bet Buchanan thought they were Proud Boys.