The Dirty MAGA

is the enemy, according to President Biden

What, you might ask, possessed President Biden to make his ridiculous speech — “REMARKS BY PRESIDENT BIDEN ON THE CONTINUED BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE NATION” — about the clear and present danger of MAGA Republicans on September 1, 2022?

For a chap like me, it’s simple, because I am a follower of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who wrote:

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.

As I say, Curtis Yarvin makes it Real Simple.

There is no politics without an enemy.

Now, most of the time domestic politics is a bit more polite than that, and the politician running for office stops a bit short of calling his electoral opponent “The Enemy.”

For instance, when Donald Trump ran for president he lauded ordinary Americans and his enemy was the Deep State and the Swamp.

Thus, when President Biden called MAGA Republicans “semi-fascist” a week ago, he was observing that tradition. Of course, for our liberal friends, the worst thing in the world is a Nazi, “literally Hitler.” The next worst thing, I suppose, is a racist. And the next worst thing after that is a fascist.

By the way, did you know that words like Nazi, racist, and fascist are called “pejoratives?” And pejorative comes from the Latin verb “pejorare” which means “to make things worse.”

But when your back is up against the wall, and when your in-house polling is predicting an absolute wipe-out in the 2022 midterm elections, well, then you go for the jugular. Or at least you do if you are the Biden White House.

If you were someone other than Biden you might think: “well, with my presidential approval down at 40 percent, my majorities in Congress are toast anyway. But we are all Americans, right?”

And, if Biden were a Republican he wouldn’t dare go for the jugular, because the mainstream media and the fact-checkers and all the rest of the educated ruling class would utterly humiliate him, and eat his presidency for breakfast. Imagine what they would do with this:

We’re going to think big.  We’re going to make the 21st century another American century because the world needs us to.  (Applause.)
 
That’s where we need to focus our energy — not in the past, not on divisive culture wars, not on the politics of grievance, but on a future we can build together.
 
The MAGA Republicans believe that for them to succeed, everyone else has to fail.  They believe America — not like I believe about America. 

Now, if I were a respected fact-checker I would notice that the guys playing the “culture wars” and the “politics of grievance” are the Democrats.

And as a political philosopher I would note that the reason that the Democrats declared a culture war on ordinary white Americans, and created a politics of grievance, is because the programs that Democrats have created over the years have not had the beneficial effect that they knew — knew — would result. So, as primitive humans down the ages, they know that the reason things went wrong was not from accident, not from their own mistakes, but from the malevolence of their neighbor, the MAGA Republican.

And if you read Biden’s speech the one thing that comes through loud and clear is the malevolence of the MAGA Republicans. As he says:

And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people.

Really? As compared with, say, AntiFa protesters in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in 2020?

So the only question is whether Biden’s speech energizes his Democratic supporters to get out and vote in November. Or whether Biden’s speech energizes MAGA Republicans to get out and vote in November.

And there is the other problem. That ordinary American voters are not all riled up about MAGA Republicans on the one hand and AntiFa extremists on the other. They are concerned about inflation and jobs and gas prices and crime in the streets.