A LA Times opinion opines:
Opinion: The force propping up Trump that we still don’t talk about
There are legitimate and pending questions about Biden’s ability to serve another four years. But in terms of a leadership crisis, his age and health do not begin to compare to Trump’s moral decrepitude and general unfitness. The idiotic equivalency of this election season — that both men are unfit on a similar scale, though for different reasons — is deeply, dangerously false.
And it distracts from what’s really dragging us down.
Whatever his age-related problems, Biden is not alone in the confoundment he showed on stage at the debate. Face to face with Trump, the president’s fatigue and bewilderment mirrors what so many of us feel in response to an intensifying moral MAGA mudslide that is overwhelming, not just politically but emotionally.
As usual, Democrats relied on numbers and recitations of policy successes to parry Trump. The Biden administration’s achievements are indeed important. Truth and reality do matter. Except to roughly half the country, which has settled willingly into white nationalism, which runs not on facts but on emotion, specifically resentment and entitlement. It represents the very antithesis of a multiracial democracy that Biden’s policy successes support. You can talk about the importance of low-cost insulin or student debt forgiveness until you’re blue in the face — or until you’re stumbling over your words or losing your train of thought — but that doesn’t budge white nationalists at all.
Here’s the hard truth of the last eight years: America leans at least as much toward white nationalism as it does toward democracy (and that’s being optimistic). Nobody says it out loud, on either side, which is obscuring the real shape of Showdown 2024.
The GOP cult is clearly racist and anti-equality but claims not to be, despite rapidly mounting evidence to the contrary. Trump brags about how much Black folk love him, how much he’s done for civil rights. These are absurd claims, but they stand because the party needs to keep up the pretense of “all men are created equal” fairness, however threadbare. Fairness, civil rights and democracy are still America’s brand, as everybody knows (to quote Trump).
Meanwhile, Biden can’t call out white nationalism because he’s afraid of tarnishing the positive U.S. brand, which glorifies the “heartland” and “hardworking people” and “ordinary Americans” — code terms for “white.”
The president is in a bind: He must be the publicist in chief, saying we’re all good and well-intentioned people, but the MAGA phenomenon proves him wrong in the most obvious way. He’s tried to walk a line by criticizing MAGA extremists, but if those extremists number in the tens of millions and have seized one of the major political parties, what they espouse is not extremism, it is mainstream-ism.
The problem of having to name this problem without really naming it literally makes Biden tongue-tied, which is not a good thing for a man who has dealt with a stutter his whole life. The entire Democratic Party and its white fellow travelers further to the left have stifled themselves on this matter too, subconsciously or because they think talking too directly about white nationalist rot would be self-defeating politics. As disgusted as Biden and others may be by MAGA, they do not, will not call out white people about toxic whiteness. And so the rot spreads unchecked.
There is a silver lining. The storm is bearing down only because diversity is on the rise. Diversity is who and what America is. For most of us, this is an uncontroversial fact, the fulfillment of the founders’ promise of a truly democratic nation. But for Trump and his aggrieved nation within a nation, that ascending promise is a frontal attack that must be fought for however long is necessary, with whatever means is necessary.
It’s past time for the majority of us invested in the promise to employ whatever means is necessary, too. The crisis Biden revealed to the world last week is not about age. It’s about courage.
This opinion really resonates personally. The last sentence in particular “It’s about courage” hits home. I have occasionally framed the authoritarian problem as one of a failure of moral courage. The pro-Trump MAGA radical right does not have the moral courage to face the ugly reality of the bigoted, mendacious, kleptocratic authoritarianism they support. They deny they support what they actually support because they do not have the moral courage to face actual reality.
But the opinion here also argues that the left has also failed on moral courage grounds. That is a great point. It isn't made often enough.
The left does not have the guts to call the MAGA movement out as bigoted (White-centric, sometimes or often racist) kleptocratic authoritarianism. The mainstream media rarely calls it what it is, but seems to be slowly, reluctantly dragged by reality in that direction.
By contrast, the MAGA media and adherents never calls MAGA what it is but instead, shamelessly slanders and insults the left, political opposition and Democrats with false accusations of anti-White racism, corruption, socialist tyranny, pedophilia, massive election fraud, massive violence, microchips in the vaccines, etc. In essence, MAGA is mostly what MAGA falsely asserts what its political opposition is.
There is no way in hell anyone can rationally debate the FTZWS tactic that DJT used in the debate with Biden. The rules allowed all lies and slanders to stand unchallenged by moderators and a minute or two for a debater to respond. It is literally impossible to have a debate with a FTZWS participant under those rules. It wasn't a debate. It was a cornucopia of crap.
FTZWS - flood the zone with shit, the accurate name that Steve Bannon (now in jail) gave to the propaganda tactic that lying kleptocratic authoritarians routinely rely on to deceive, confuse, divide and disinform.
FTZWS isn’t just for the media any more --
it’s for everyone all the time, including the MAGA base
