In the Mail
Oddly enough, I receive a great deal of “right-wing” email. I’m sure in my quest to try to understand “the other side”, my address landed on a saleable list. Now I hear from Hillsdale College and Praeger University (one a real school, one a right-wing training site). I get plaintive fundraising requests from Marco Rubio, Korey Lake and even JD Vance. And I also get mail from several “news” websites, carefully taking pieces of mainstream news and crafting it to their message.
I read a lot of it, because I do think it’s important to hear what they have to say. And what they are saying about President Joe Biden is telling.
Sure there are the insults: old, demented, addled. Those often conflict with the “crafty, old liberal” message, though they call Biden a “puppet” of his far-left backers. Puppets don’t have to understand what they’re saying. I guess they haven’t heard from the real far-left powers, who are almost as disgruntled with Biden as they are. So, no matter how they spin it, Biden is “baaaaad”.
Mirror Images
And with the President now being up-front and honest with his concerns for the survival of our Democracy, my “right-wing” sources are singing a common hymn. They claim it’s all just politics, Democrats versus Republicans. They’ve been calling Democrats radical-left-wing-socialists for so long, they simply see the President in the mirror. They say he’s calling “them” semi-fascist authoritarians, and he’s insulting every single one of the 74,224,319 voters who chose Trump over Biden in 2020.
It’s a common political tactic: paint your opposition with a “broad brush”, and include as many on “your side” as you can. Convince every single Republican that Biden is talking about THEM: THEY are fascist authoritarians. And if they don’t quite get what that means (Trump loves the uneducated), think Hitler. He’s calling you Nazis.
They know that message can work. When Hillary Clinton used the unfortunate term “deplorables” to describe some of the Trump supporters, the right-wing used it as a wedge to drive the voters apart and to the polls. If deplorable worked, semi-fascist authoritarian might work even better. The fact that Clinton was describing the folks we now identify as the Proud Boys, or the Oath Takers, or the Three Percenters, didn’t matter.
Damaging Democracy
Of course, that’s not what Biden’s doing at all. He’s saying that those Republicans who are denying the results of the 2020 election, claiming out of thin air that the election was rigged, are damaging American democracy. He’s saying that those who look at all of our institutions: boards of elections, Secretaries of State, local, state and Federal courts; and say they are all complicit in “the steal” have already undermined our nation.
Biden’s message is actually pretty simple: if elections don’t work, then democracy can’t exist. If the only answer to losing election is violence, then the American Constitutional experiment cannot survive. That is the existential threat.
And that would have been true had Hillary Clinton lead a mirror-image “Stop the Steal” movement in 2016. It’s not that we didn’t think about it. There are many who started down that “rabbit-hole” in the years after 2016. I wrote three essays about it: 77744, Put on My Foil Hat, and Foil Hat II. But Democratic leaders, and particularly Hillary Clinton herself, saw it as their political duty to accept the results and move on. They didn’t question the election, instead, they worked to win the next ones in 2018 and 2020. And they did.
The Difference
So when President Biden calls for “MAGA Republicans” to stop, he is really calling on almost all of the Republican leaders who have conceded to Donald Trump. Where is their “political duty”, their obligation, to protect the Constitution? Biden isn’t “blaming” all 74,224,319 voters who chose Trump. He is attacking those who attack our Constitutional democracy by undermining it for their own political gain.
They are deplorable. They subvert faith in our democracy and our institutions. And they are willing to use mob violence to achieve their own political ends.
That’s who Biden is calling out. That’s the distinction between “Republicans” (what the MAGA crew would call “RINO’s”) and “MAGA Republicans”. It’s a distinction with a difference.
