Pity Joe Biden. Here’s a candidate who really believes that he can reset the clock to 2008 if he can just win the election in November. Here’s what he said in May 2019:
.…the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends. And it’s already beginning…. But you are seeing the talk, even the dialogue is changing.
In fairness, Biden said this before the Senate trial began, but only the most naïve didn’t realize how that was going to go down. And Biden has repeated his Kumbaya mantra over and over again: The lion will lie down with the lamb, and Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn and Matt Gaetz will stop being horrible people, and Louie Gohmert will stop being an idiot. (Fun exercise: Google “congressman Texas idiot” and see what comes up first!)
And while pundits and everyday people like to blame Senator Mitch McConnell and Fox News for the polarization of this country — and they certainly deserve a lot of blame — the polarization goes a lot deeper than that. It’s just that no one realized it before the shocking 2016 election.
Trump’s Far Right and white nationalist supporters constantly bring up threats of a second Civil War. But the comparison is more apt than most of us realize. For we are now a nation, as we were in 1860, with two completely different and completely incompatible views of America.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”We are now a nation, as we were in 1860, with two completely different and completely incompatible views of America.” quote=”We are now a nation, as we were in 1860, with two completely different and completely incompatible views of America.”]
Ironically, the white nationalists are the ones who get it: They are the philosophical inheritors of the Confederacy that rejected the equality imbedded in the Declaration of Independence and the democracy promised in the U.S. Constitution.
Forty percent of America — the MAGAs, for short — do not believe that the fruits of this Republic should be shared equally.
- They do not believe that black and brown people should have the vote; otherwise, they wouldn’t support voter suppression. (They know that voter fraud is nonexistent; they just don’t care as long as those people don’t vote.)
- They do not believe that women should have the same rights as men. (Notice how easy they are on sexual predators and how harsh they are on their female accusers.)
- They don’t even pretend that LGBTQ persons should have the same rights; their arguments would probably center on whether or not they should be arrested.
- They believe that white police officers have the right to shoot unarmed black teenagers if they’re sassy. Or even if they’re not.
- They believe that black, brown, and Asian people don’t have the right to drive (too many instances to mention), barbecue at lakes, visit malls (“Shopping while black” has its own Wikipedia entry), or deposit large sums of money in banks, and they really don’t have the right to swim in public pools (here, here, here, and plenty more).
- They don’t believe that the cost of government should be borne by white people; that’s why in Ferguson, Mo., and surrounding towns, the police routinely arrested African Americans so that the high court fees would keep whites’ property taxes low.
- They don’t believe in democracy; otherwise, their default position would not be to support Republican legislatures stripping Democratic governors of their powers.
- They don’t believe that this country should be one of laws and not men. If you don’t believe that, just know that Trump’s supporters openly admit that they know he broke the law; however, as he hates the same people they do, they don’t care. Trump wasn’t kidding when he noted that he could literally shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his hard-core supporters. Because laws don’t apply to dictators or messiahs, do they?
Trump’s supporters envision an America that’s Mississippi in 1930, where nonwhites get only as much as the whites deign to grant them, women know their places, and the mill and plantation owners set the rules to their benefit – and openly flout them when they’re inconvenient.
So explain to me how there will be any end of polarization after Trump – even if Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Alex Jones, and Russian bots magically disappeared? What is the compromise between those who believe in democracy and equality and those who do not? A country that’s half a progressive First World nation and half apartheid South Africa?
We tried that compromise once: We decided on freedom north of the Mason-Dixon line and slavery south of it in the Missouri Compromise. How did that work out?
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