Mr. President, Is Liz Cheney Also Among the MAGA Republicans?
The President Views Everyone on the Right as an Enemy of Democracy And That's a Problem
The president gave a divisive national speech warning of MAGA Republicans: those election-denying, insurrection-supporting forces within the GOP. However, the President assured us that not all Republicans are MAGA Republicans as his defenders reminded us even while his opponents accused the President of accusing every Trump voter of being a MAGA Republican.
I didn’t really have an opinion one way or another on the speech. It’s not likely to be a factor on Election Day. However, strategically, it could be a plus for Democrats if they can run against MAGA Republicans and separate them from the mainstream voters in the GOP. Of course, the stupidest thing in the world you could do if you have that strategy would be to make the term MAGA Republican interchangeable with Republican.
So, the President has been making the term MAGA Republican interchangeable with Republican, brushing off old school attacks on Republicans and using them on the MAGA wing.
Yes, MAGA Republicans know for their love of…Wall Street? Jonah Goldberg hit the President back on this:
Then we got this beaut from the President on Saturday:
So MAGA forces are against “the right to choose *(an abortion.*)” The rest of this is a misrepresentation of the mainstream pro-life movement. The President is arguing that anyone who is pro-life** is a MAGA Republican.
Let’s take the case of Jamie Herrera-Beutler, She voted to impeach Trump and lost her primary to her unhinged challenger Joe Kent. She also addressed the 2018 March for Life:
Is she part of the MAGA forces?
Or take Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo) who has a career A+ rating from the Susan B Anthony list. She sponsored a bill that would protect all unborn children under the 14th Amendment and ban abortion nationwide.
Is Liz Cheney part of the MAGA forces?
According to President Biden’s reasoning, she is.
Thus by simply using MAGA Republican as synonymous with Republican, the President has rendered it useless as a way to address rampant extremism in the GOP
The Democrats’ Inability to Distinguish Democracy from Their Political Preferences
The Democrats have stunk at actually thwarting Trumpism. If Democrats had been smart several years ago they would have temporarily refocused their party as a tolerant, broad-based “Save Democracy” party that would represent a united front that could draw Americans from across the ideological spectrum to stop Trumpism.
Instead, within months of Trump taking office, then Democratic Party Chairman Tom Perez suggested pro-life Americans had no place in the party. In recent years, the last pro-life Democrat in the House was kicked out in the primary along with many center-left voices.
And if you oppose them on anything, you’re an enemy of democracy. The great failure of the Democrats at this time is that they can’t separate “saving Democracy” from their partisan agenda.
Why is this?
I used to think this was a case of the left following the advice of former White House Chief of Staff and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and not letting a crisis go to waste. The far left viewed Trump’s presidency as an opportunity to take the Democrats as far to the extreme left as possible and dare voters to vote Republican instead, betting that they would never support the nuttiness of Donald Trump.
But I think it began it may come down to something more fundamental and that is a fundamentally different view of what Democracy is.
Supporters of liberal democracy regardless of their political persuasion would agree that liberal democracy is more than just being able to vote on candidates or policies. There are certain key rights that have to exist for a society to be a true democracy.
For those who were on the political right in the pre-Trump era, there was a limited list of dictates such as free speech, freedom of the press,, equal protection under law, and safeguards against political corruption and abuses. Many on the right believed in principles of natural law: rights are not granted by the government. They are granted by God, the government just acknowledges those rights. There’s not a long parade of new rights just waiting to be discovered in the Constitution. It’s not, “The Bible Code.”
For the United States, when it comes down to the core question of whether the U.S. is a truly democratic society, the traditional conservative position leaned into what rights were clearly supported by America’s founding documents and subsequent constitutional Amendments.
The American Left took a different path. Through the magic of substantive due process rulings, the American left created new rights through the auspices of the Supreme Court such as the right to abortion. At the same time, the left began to carve out new ideas of what freedom and democracy meant. You can see this going back decades in ideas like FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech, which in addition to traditional freedoms laid out in the Bill of Rights (Freedom of Speech and Worship), it laid two far more nebulous rights in “Freedom from Fear” and “Freedom from Want,” that the American government was never constitutionally designed to meet.
And over the decades, the Democrats have turned every issue into a “right” or a “justice.” And justice is required for a democratic society. Thus, if you don’t support a gay rights bill that progressives want, you’re not opposing them on social policy, you’re opposing human rights. If you oppose their latest global warming initiative, you’re not disagreeing with them on an environmental policy, you’re against climate justice. If any part of the Left’s agenda is denied, it’s a threat to democracy. When everything’s a threat, nothing is.
Certainly, these tendencies are worse the further left one travels on the political spectrum, but as President Biden has shown, many Democrats who are more centrist than AOC can still fall into this trap. And this sort of thinking goes back decades. See Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA)’s infamous Robert Bork’s America speech given within earshot of President Biden in 1986:
This is why supporting the Democrats is not an effective way to save democracy. For this to work, Democrats would have to articulate a vision of Democracy that meant something other than a world in which they get way on everything or the world is not just and good luck finding an elected Democrat who believes that.
The Democrats are quite capable of calling out anti-democratic behavior but they’re turned up to eleven at all times. They often expressed how “dangerous” the Trump Administration was even when it was making mainstream Republican policies and appointments that you would have seen in a Marco Rubio Administration. Their shrill alarms have become like a car alarm that goes off all night that no one pays attention to anymore.
As President Biden continues to try to associate more and more traditional conservative ideas with “MAGA Republicans,” many Americans who were open to a critique will instead conclude that when President Biden says, “MAGA Republican,” he means them.
Politicizing @POTUS Account
One thing that’s worth noting is how the President is politicizing the traditionally official business Twitter Account. The above Tweets from the @POTUS Twitter account instead of the @JoeBiden Account.
This isn’t the only account the Administration’s been politicizing. The @WhiteHouse Account became a partisan attack account listing Republicans who received PPP Loans that were forgiven but opposed student loan forgiveness. Forget the merits of the attack, should the @whitehouse account be used to attack the President’s political opponents?
In this way, the Biden White House is actually worse than Trump’s White House. Trump’s personal and political social media accounts were absolute garbage piles. Yet, there was a clear understanding that the official accounts had to be different and the Trump White House knew that.
Looking at at Trump’s archived White House and POTUS accounts, you think an actual American government was working government. It’s about 99% sane. Yeah, it puts a pro-Trump spin on events, but that’s expected. There’s far less attacking opponents by name than on the current occupant’s account.
True, there are some posts around November 2020 that walk a fine line that makes them campaign ads, and one tweet included (without comment) a video of the President’s first big post-election stop the steal speech from the White House podium, but most of the time, the office Twitter accounts stated on-point with a lot of video clips of people from the administration and celebration of accomplishment. The level of politicization two years on the official accounts two years out from the election by the Biden Administration is a step in the wrong direction.
It would be fair to ask, “Who cares other than a political nerd?” This is a fair point, Twitter accounts are of little importance in and of themselves. However, it is emblematic of the Biden Administration’s overall approach to these issues. The President ran on healing the soul of the nation. Instead, he has only deepened our divisions. He has not done so to the same degree as his predecessor, but he’s still made things worse in big ways and small ways.
*Abortion added lest we think the pro-choice position included things like choosing what school to send your children go to and having education dollars follow your choice. Please there are some choices, you can’t make.
**The Internet is full of, “You can be personally pro-life and not be MAGA, you can’t just think that should be imposed.” That’s sophistry. The purpose of the pro-life movement has never been to organize people who have negative opinions about abortion. It has been to ensure that unborn children are protected by law. Anything less than that isn’t a historic pro-life position is playing word games. Also, the President is still arguing that anyone who disagrees with him on abortion is the moral equal of insurrectionists.