On The Subject of Naming and Shaming

This post is about Jennifer Rubin's urgently misguided column in The Washington Post entitled:

To defend democracy, Biden must identify its foes

But first I need to take a brief side quest to Mona Charen's Bulwark podcast which, for my sins, I monitor on a regular basis.  And this week, among all the carping and complaining about what Democrats "must" do from a bunch of recently-former Republicans who have no idea how politics actually works, there was this delicious exchange between Ms. Charen and panelist Bill Galston in which Mr. Galston, to his credit, comes down hard on Charen's insistence that OMG! Democrats are blowing it!

Mona Charen:  Bill Galston let's imagine it's December 9th 2022 and the midterms are behind us and the Democrats have lost control of, let's say, both houses, uh, which could happen.  Maybe senate. Lot less likely than than the House, but in any event are Democrats going to be kicking themselves for having lost the chance to protect democracy in... in the ways that really mattered?

And here comes the cold water.

Bill Galston: There is, in my judgment, no way that the Democrats can do this by themselves if Republicans are not willing partners.  I didn't say equal partners, but at least willing partners.  In an exercise such as the revision of the Electoral Count Act it will not happen.

 And more cold water:

Galston: This is not the sort of thing that could be done by simple majority vote. It's not the sort of thing that can be crammed through by a reconciliation and so, as a realistic political matter, what are the chances that Republicans are going to be willing to cooperate with Democrats in this venture?  And you'd need at least ten of them because there's no evidence that the Republican party as a whole is willing to go down this road.  Among other things there is no way of going down this road without coming out foursquare against the sorts of tactics that Donald Trump was determined to use -- tried to force others to use in the Justice Department even his own Vice President -- and has has never repudiated and would use again. 

And still more:

Galston:   So I think this discussion is, y'know, the equivalent of the old economist's joke about an economist caught on a desert island with a case of canned food which he cannot open finally he gets an inspiration and says, "Aha, I've got it! Assume a can opener!"

And then comes the cold water with big chunks of pointy in it ice as Galston drags every Never Trumper's favorite Democrat into the conversation.

Galston:   So before we berate the Biden administration for not going down this road we have to ask ourselves whether it's Mission Impossible or not.  And as Exhibit "A" I advance, uh, Joe Manchin's compromise bill on voting rights, which he basically wrote himself in the belief that if he dramatically trimmed and moderated the other Democratic bills he would surely get a lot of Republican collaborators and signatories.  And I think we all know how that's worked out...

Which, as promised, brings me around to Jennifer Rubin's urgently misguided WaPo  column in The Washington Post.

To defend democracy, Biden must identify its foes

You see, among America's recently-former Republicans who have media platforms, there is a widely held and not-incorrect belief that we are in deep shit.  Specifically that the GOP has a knife presssed to the throat of our democracy and that something must be done immediately eliminate that threat.

And, sure, it would have been awesome if, instead of abetting the rise of fascism on the Right and mocking and slandering those who were sounding the alarm, these recently-former Republicans had figured all this out +30 years ago when they might have been able to do something about, but that never happened.  So now that it's far too late to stop the avalanche they helped to start they are adamant that  somebody better do something about the threat from the GOP and they'd better be damn quick about it. 

Of course, the "somebody" who needs to leap into action is always a Democrat or Democrats, because frankly who else is there?  And the "something" that Democrats must do always amounts to heeding the advice of whichever recently-former Republican is holding the Beltway Media Conch at the moment and undertake some course of action which is either impossible or futile or both.  

In Rubin's case, her  entire column consists of repeating this admonition (emphasis added) --

[Biden] said himself at the Democracy Summit: “As the leaders of governments, we — we have a responsibility to listen to our citizens, to strengthen the guardrails of democracy, and to drive reforms” that will make democracy more resilient against “the buffeting forces of autocracy” and “the naked pursuit of power ahead of the public good.” Biden must pinpoint the source of the threat if he is to have any chance of fulfilling that pledge.

-- in different ways again and again.

In other words, Rubin wants Biden to make speeches.  Lots of speeches. Speeches that "pinpoint the source of the threat" as if the fascist poison the Right is selling is bootleg rotgut and no one knows where it's coming from, who's selling it and who's drinking it.  

But Jennifer, everyone knows where the booze is.  That's not the problem. 

So what is the problem?

Let's go back to your headline.  Your insistence that Biden must identify [democracy's] foes.

Identify them to whom?  

Republicans have been lost to reason for decades precisely because your Republican project has succeeded.  It took the better part of two generations and billions of dollars, but your recently-former party has managed to build an electoral Doomsday Machine with no "Off" switch.  They are happy to be democracy's foes, so pointing this out to them in one speech or a hundred changes nothing.

Does Biden need to identify democracy's foes to Democrats?  Fuck no.  Democrats are already quite aware that the GOP is a dangerous dungheap of bigots and imbeciles. 

So who does that leave to be persuaded?  The spineless Centrists and "independents" who would rather walk 1,000 miles, naked, across a burning desert to find a fence to straddle than actually pick a side?  Christ on a Tilt-a-Whirl what have those assholes ever done when faced with GOP atrocities but plug their ears and chant "BothSidesBothSidesBothSides!"loud enough to drown out the sound of another democratic norm being fed into the woodchipper by the Republican party? 

So no joy there.

And what of the mainstream media?  How would the gatekeepers of Beltway Common Wisdom react to President Joe Biden giving speech after speech calling out the Republican Party as our democracy's greatest enemy?

For the answer to that you need look no further than the 2016 presidential election when Hillary Clinton pointed out that the Trump campaign had a White Supremacist Problem, which was 100% true.

And the Beltway media's reaction to Clinton's willingness to identify this deeply ugly element that of the Trump campaign -- to pinpoint the problem -- was swift and overwhelming.  

Here is an artist's rendition of how Meet the Press met the moment:

And here is Christopher Hayes of the "liberal" MSNBC going out of his way to Both Sides the issue.

And here is the pick of the litter.  Michael Steele -- whose role in the Republican Party was explained eloquently by Malcolm X here -- and who loves some false equivalence for breakfast, lunch and supper more than Paula Deen loves butter:

So what would one or a dozen  Biden speeches actually accomplish beyond sending Both Siderists running for their ideological panic rooms and feeding ammunition to both the Beltway Media and the Republican Hate Machine?

The mistake Jennifer Rubin makes is that Joe Biden is not where Franklin Roosevelt was in 1936: with an American public still sunk deep in a Great Depression which was ready and eager to hear that --

Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

and that --

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.

Joe Biden is also not where Franklin Roosevelt was in 1942.  With a American public sufficiently traumatized by the attacks on Pearl Harbor that they lined up three deep to go off to fight monsters on the other side of the world.

No, if there are any comparison to be made, it is to where FDR stood in the Spring of 1941.  A president who knew perfectly well that fascism was on the march across the globe and that democracy was hanging by threads, but with an economy that was still a mess and a public where the scars and trauma of the Great War were still fresh and tender.  A public that was in no mood to hear a president calling on them to take up arms against some shit happening in faraway lands.

In this regard, Biden's predicament is worse than Roosevelt's because this time the threat to our freedom does not come from a goose-stepping enemy waging war on another continent.  

This time, the enemy is here, living among us.  

This time the mortal threat to our democracy is coming from within our own communities.  From within our own families.  From our co-workers.  From local business owners.  From veterans and cops and firefighters.  From schoolteachers and lawyers.  

From people who sit three pews away from us in our churches and synagogues.  

Who sing in the choir.  

Who are standing behind us at the grocery store and who babysat for our children when they were little. 

And who are convinced that the 2020 election was rigged, that Joe Biden was illegally installed as president and that all they hold dear is under immediate and existential threat from us depraved commie Liberals who all engaged in an a massive conspiracy against them.

And a presidential speech that says or even lightly implies any of that is not one that faithless media is ready to cover honestly and not one the Somnambulate Center is ready to hear.

 

Burn The Lifeboats