What an extraordinary point we have reached in American politics. Large numbers of intelligent people have come to think it is acceptable to accuse opponents of fascism or, more pointedly, of being modern Hitlers, but at the same time think labeling them “garbage” goes too far.
I’d say both are unacceptable. But why the odd distinction, with the obviously worse allegation seen as slight in comparison to mere vulgar abuse?
Maybe it’s because of insult inflation. Democrats have compared Republicans to Nazis as far back as President Dwight Eisenhower more than 60 years ago, which means the accusation is as steeply discounted today as it always has been cheap as a matter of taste. “Racist,” “fascist,” and “Nazi” are old and stale. “Garbage” is shocking because it has novelty value.
President Joe Biden called former President Donald Trump’s supporters garbage while doing a Zoom call with a left-wing Hispanic nonprofit group on Oct. 29. Here is what he said: “Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community. Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
White House officials’ hair stood on end, and they rushed to “clarify” Biden’s insult — actually, they just lied — saying the president was referring only to a single supporter who at Trump’s Madison Square Garden gathering last Sunday joked that Puerto Rico was a floating island of garbage. There have been many news stories about Puerto Rico’s massive garbage problem. The joke might have been racist, but also perhaps wasn’t. What is certain is that it was stupid and unfunny. Either way, it provided glorious election ammunition for Democrats, and they fired it in withering salvos.
But their guns suddenly fell silent and their defenses shot up two days later when, on Tuesday, Biden boneheadedly decided to say out loud the contemptuous silent part of Democratic thinking about Republicans. Whereas Hillary Clinton in 2016 called only half of Trump voters “deplorables,” and did so in the confines of a private fundraiser, Biden chose to deliver his insult in a public forum and leveled it against everyone who will vote for the Republican nominee.
This threw Democrats into disarray. Many of their activists and news media acolytes magnified the White House falsehood that the president was referring only to the hapless Trumpy comedian. Others, such as that reliably leftist taxpayer-financed broadcaster NPR, which turned reflexively to its stock headline, “Republicans pounce,” focused on the bad guys’ reactions rather than the substance of Biden’s sweeping insult. Yet others tried to distance themselves from the president.
Notable in this last category was the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, who said, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for. As you heard in my speech last night and continuously throughout my career, I believe that the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not.”
This did not directly slap Biden for his crass intervention, but the vice president would have been justified in doing so. Behind the scenes, Democrats noted that the goofer-in-chief’s latest face-plant demonstrated again why he had to be dumped in favor of Harris despite having won his party’s nomination.
The problem with this line of defense for Harris is that she, as much or more than anyone else, concealed Biden’s growing and deeply troubling mental and physical incapacity until it became unconcealable during the first debate against Trump. She had willingly, even enthusiastically, gone along as “the last person in the room” with the Democrats’ attempt to defraud voters by putting up a candidate manifestly incapable of doing the job. She was happy for them to think Biden was as sharp as a tack or, as Joe Scarborough put it, “beyond cogent” and “better than he has ever been.”
This brings us back to the implications of Biden’s sweeping insult of Trump supporters generally as “garbage.” It is only possible to play along with the Democrats’ falsehoods about Biden, and to magnify their gaslighting falsehoods about the administration’s policies on inflation, the border, American global leadership, energy production, and all the rest, if one regards ordinary voters as contemptible and beyond serious consideration — in fact, as “garbage.”
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You can only run as a centrist, as former President Barack Obama did, as Biden did, and now as Harris is doing, and then govern as a militant left-winger if you think the wishes and desires of ordinary people are of no account, that they are cattle to be herded rather than fellow citizens for whom you work.
Biden said what Democrats think. They think they know better. He expressed their unvarnished contempt for people not like them. I suppose we should thank him for that.