Americans vs. Nazis: Joe Biden's rotten platform
Nicholas L. Waddy Commentary May 11, 2019
April 1932. Germany is seething with tension as it navigates the darkest days of the Great Depression. Political extremism is on the rise. Street battles between fascist and communist thugs are common. The German people, though, opt for sanity, decency. They re-elect as their president a retired field marshal and hero of the Great War, the elderly Paul von Hindenburg. The runner-up? The wild-eyed, aggressive populist Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party. Germany — and all of Europe — breathes a collective sigh of relief. There will be no “Third Reich,” after all.
We all know how this story ends. Von Hindenburg, despite his election victory in 1932, is forced to accept Hitler as chancellor in 1933. By 1934, Hindenburg is dead, and Hitler is Führer. Germany — and Europe — are doomed.
Joe Biden is hoping you've forgotten the last part of the story, because it's the first part that he wishes to replay in 2020. His campaign launch video makes that clear.
Biden argues that 2020 will be a simple, binary choice. On one side, you have Klansmen and Nazis, represented by the “white nationalist” protesters in Charlottesville in 2017, “bearing the fangs of racism,” who Donald Trump allegedly defended as “very fine people.” On the other side, you have innocent doves, true paragons of American decency, who reject “hate” and wait patiently for Nazi brutes to assault them and run them over with their cars. Trump, of course, is the champion of white supremacy, Nazism, and hate. Biden is the hero and defender of all that America stands for. He is, moreover, the “known quantity,” the trusty old war-horse who, like Paul von Hindenburg, can protect his country from fanatics and extremists.
Americans versus Nazis. An easy choice, right? Assuming no one thinks critically about Biden's message — and we can be pretty sure that no one in the Washington press corps will — he just might get away with it.
The inconvenient truth of the matter is that Biden is deliberately misrepresenting what happened in Charlottesville, vastly oversimplifying the nature of the protesters and counter-protesters, just as he is prevaricating about Trump's remarks about “very fine people.” Trump never meant to include Klansmen, Nazis, or white supremacists, and he made that perfectly clear at the time.
So Biden is a fraud. No matter — plenty of frauds have flourished in the long history of American presidential politics. Biden may be one of them.
Biden's gamble is that the American people despise Trump so much that they will happily embrace a trusted, experienced “moderate” candidate — like Paul von Hindenburg or Joe Biden — over the disastrous alternative. Biden does not even bother to construct an argument for why he, geriatric Joe Biden, should be chosen over the other 20 Democratic candidates for the presidency. That, presumably, is beneath his dignity. He wants to keep it simple: it's kindly Uncle Joe versus all the racist monsters who haunt your left-of-center American dreams.
One other thing is clear from Biden's launch video. He intends to focus on minority voters. His message stokes the usual fears common among non-white Democrats: that America is full of white racists, who would happily assault you, re-segregate you, re-enslave you, and perhaps even kill you, if they weren't restrained by a benevolent federal government, presided over by a Democrat in the White House.
Once again: America versus Nazis. It's the same morality play that liberals have been running for 60 years. Why change the plot now? Indeed, one wonders whether Biden would be capable of it. The tired, disingenuous nature of Biden's candidacy does not mean that he will lose. The theme of anti-racism has endured in the Democratic Party, and in America, for so long because it works. Everyone hates racists. Ergo, if you paint your opponent as a racist, you have a good chance of winning.
It will be Trump's task, and the duty of Republicans and conservatives, to explain that it isn't the president or the GOP that is stoking racial antagonisms and exploiting racial fears and resentments. That would be the party of race preferences, of reparations, of identity politics, of political correctness, and of knee-jerk claims of discrimination. That would be the Democrats.
Race is indeed America's Achilles' heel — on that score Biden is right — but the Bidens of the world aren't part of the solution. They're at the center of the problem.
https://www.lockportjournal.com/opinion/americans-vs-nazis-joe-biden-s-rotten-platform/article_f2035653-4d82-5cd8-85d6-01f393b25044.html