Quick Take: Joe Biden's Hymn of Hate

"Our" democracy," it seems, can only be saved by destroying it...

Who looks like a “semi-fascist” now…?

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Various conservative pundits—National Review Online’s Jim Geraghty, Commentary Magazine’s John Podhoretz—have made the point that President Biden’s condemnation of so-called MAGA Republicans is legitimate. It’s true, they say, that the former president and his supporters constitute a threat to democracy. While Trump was within his rights to dispute the outcome of the 2020 election, his persistence in doing so after exhausting all legal options crossed the line. The January 6 Capitol Hill riot was the ultimate result of Trump’s increasingly unhinged attempts to find some way around the inarguable reality that he’d lost the election to Joe Biden. So yes, the pundits have a point. Trump and those who parrot his claims that the presidency was stolen from him do pose a threat to orderly constitutional government.

But if this message is valid, President Biden is definitely the wrong messenger. His speech last Thursday in Philidelphia, decrying the evils of “MAGA Republicans,” was simply despicable—a testament to the hypocrisy and mendacity of both the man and the party he leads.

Sure, Biden’s tribute to the glories of our Constitution was nice to hear. But coming from the leader of a party full of progressives who’d like to run it through a shredder, it rang hollow. Just recently, two law professors, one at Yale and one at Harvard, published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the outright abolition of the Constitution—which they argue, bars the way to progressivism’s Radiant Future. Nor are the professors alone in their opinion: Progressive complaints about the Constitution’s alleged deficiencies abound. The Electoral College, the equal suffrage of states in the Senate, the Second Amendment—these constitutional provisions and more have come in for intensive criticism. After all, was not the Constitution written by a bunch of white male slave owners? Is it not a racist document designed to protect the institution of slavery?

There’s no doubt that given the opportunity, progressives would replace our current constitutional government, so tainted as they believe by the sins of the past, with a people’s republic based on vague and malleable theories of the “general will.”

Nor is Biden’s party short of election truthers. Both Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams have charged that they were cheated out of the presidency and the governorship of Georgia respectively. Back in 2004 Democrats retailed a conspiracy theory centered around voting machines in Ohio, which supposedly were tampered with to rob John Kerry of victory in that year’s presidential election. Indeed, it’s fair to say that modern election trutherism originated on the Left, not the Right.

Biden’s speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia was in this vein. Though it was billed as a policy address, that was a lie. It was a campaign speech whose clear objective was to frame the argument that all of his political opponents are “MAGA Republicans” and “semi-fascists.” Are you pro-life? Are you a Second Amendment supporter? Do you oppose Biden’s student loan cancellation scheme? Are you concerned about border security? Are you opposed to the introduction of sexualized and ideologically slanted curricula in public grade schools? Then you’re a “MAGA Republican”—and an existential threat to “our democracy.”

The President tried to be coy about this—not very successfully. He piously conceded that not all or even most Republicans are MAGA-tainted, then pivoted to the charge that the Republican Party is “dominated” by MAGA. Well, which is it? Biden didn’t say. Nor, with exception of Trump whom he mentioned just three times, did Biden name names. How, then, does one tell a “mainstream Republican” from a “MAGA Republican”? He didn’t explain. And just in case we hadn’t noticed the seam of dishonesty that ran through his speech, on Friday Biden claimed that he didn’t consider “Trump supporters” to be a threat. So apparently there’s a difference between “Trump supporters” and “MAGA Republicans.” But if so, what is it?

Despite these logical deficiencies, Biden’s speech did exhibit a certain low cunning. But for some reason it was stage managed in such a way as to highlight rather than conceal the President’s disingenuousness and hypocrisy. Independence Hall was transformed into creepy dystopian venue, bloodily illuminated, with Biden in the foreground, yelling and shaking his fists in a decidedly dictatorial manner. One was reminded variously of Nineteen Eighty-four’s Two Minutes Hate, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens, Snoke’s Throne Room from Star Wars.

The President’s speech was a sorry performance, deliberately contrived to further the cause of progressivism by sowing discord and hate. Remember that the next time you hear Biden and his minions blathering about “bringing Americans together” or “our common purpose as a nation.” They intend the opposite of what they say—and that too is an existential threat to “our democracy.”