Paul Begala, one of Bill Clinton’s most trusted political strategists, has a metaphor to explain how the Biden campaign team views the choice voters should be given in the 2020 race. He calls it “the steaming pile of shit theory,” and he explained it to Ryan Lizza of Politico last week (
Why Biden’s Retro Inner Circle Is Succeeding So Far):
“You’re sitting down for breakfast and there’s a steaming pile of shit on your table and you say, ‘Can we get this shit off of my table?’” he told me recently. “And Elizabeth says, ‘I’m going to build you a new house!’ And Bernie says, ‘I’m going to build you a new city!’ And I’m like, no, just get this fucking shit off my kitchen table and we’ll get back to normal life!”
You may think Begala’s theory is overly-vivid or disgustingly crude, but I think it is an accurate metaphor for how Joe Biden and his campaign believe that the only major issue Democratic voters are interested in is getting rid of Trump.
Biden has repeatedly stated that he thinks Trump as president is a temporary disturbance in the American political system. Once the aberration of Trump is gone, Biden believes, the Republican Party will
return to “normal” —
“have an epiphany” — and the supposed pre-Trump environment of bi-partisan comity and cooperation will return to once again make the nation’s capitol a fun place to reach across the aisle and practice the art of the deal.
"is an 'aberration' in the Republican Party is naïve at best and historical revisionism at worst. Only an intentional misreading of GOP politics could consider Trump anything other than the culmination of xenophobic, identitarian rhetoric that conservative media and elites have stoked for decades.”
It's painful to admit this, but Republicans have flat-out rejected democracy. As a group, they are pushing towards replacing democracy with a system where a powerful minority holds disproportionate and borderline tyrannical control over government and blocks the majority of Americans from having meaningful say over the direction of the country… Republicans clearly feel empowered by Trump. He frees them to reveal their darkest desire — which is to end democracy as we know it, and to cut any corners or break any laws necessary to get the job done….
...the darker truth is that Republican voters, like Republican politicians, see clearly what Trump did — use the power of his office in an overt attempt to cheat in the 2020 election — and they love it. Like their leaders, Republican voters are feeling done with democracy and eager to follow Trump into a new world, where the majority of Americans who vote for Democrats are kept out of power, by any means necessary.
When Biden argues that once Trump is defeated and out of the picture, Republicans will be reasonable again, and bipartisan governance will become possible, Biden is displaying a potentially catastrophic strategic misunderstanding of what the Republican Party has become. The electoral power of the Republican Party now rests solely on a foundation that has been radicalized and misled by nearly a half century of “feeding red meat to the base”: stoking an ever more intense hatred of “the other,” beginning with Reagan’s imaginary welfare queens driving Cadillacs.
As George Packer wrote in December 14, 2018 ("The Corruption of the Republican Party," The Atlantic):
It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means... There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.... The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.
....Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.
Seems too many people simply do not realize how dangerous is Biden’s flawed view of the GOP. A historical parallel is how most Americans, before 1860, thought radical abolitionists were the most dangerous threat to the Union, not southern slaveholders. As the 1850s came to a close, the popular demand was not to free the slaves, but to preserve the status quo. Lincoln and the new Republican Party campaigned on preserving the Union, and little more. Other than among a small group of radicals such as US Congressman Thaddeus Stevens from Pennsylvania — ”a fearsome reformer, who never backed down from a fight” — there was no general understanding that the “fire eaters” and slave-owners of Dixie had stoked an intense hatred of “the other” to build and sustain a dangerous secession movement that within a year would plunge the nation into the brutality and savagery of Civil War.
There are some people who are trying to warn about these lessons of history: Meet the ‘Fire-Eaters,’ the Real Antecedents of Donald Trump
This cadre of pre-Civil War Southern orators were the pioneers of American demagoguery.
“As Biden and other centrist candidates share their fantasies of bipartisanship, the Democratic Party seems unable to recognize the seriousness of the moment. It is only luck that the right has not yet found a skilled autocrat. Palin was clueless, and Trump is his own worst enemy. He is a historically weak president who lacks even a passing understanding of how to use the power of the office effectively…. Democrats may get one more chance to govern before a competent authoritarian emerges from the right; that opportunity cannot be frittered away on four years of West Wing cosplay under the delusion that the GOP will have an “epiphany” and cooperate.”
Yes, the fate of the republic will be decided by next year’s election. The will of the voters will be made known, with results that bend and shift mighty currents of history — or not. That is why I am terrified and terribly troubled that historically ignorant Joe Biden is the Democratic front-runner.