Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden pay their respects to victims at a memorial across the street from the TOPS supermarket that was the scene of Saturday’s mass shooting, May 17, 2022, in Buffalo, New York.
In his speech in Buffalo, President Biden called out “the haters.” In other recent speeches, condemning the fringe views of MAGA Republicans, Biden has belatedly discovered his inner partisan. Now it’s time for him to connect the dots.
Think of the rhetoric of replacement theory and white supremacy; the doctrine that women’s health must be subordinated to far-right dogma on conception; the Wild West policies of gun toting by mass killers; the belief that elections can be overthrown by a coup.
These insane conceits have two things in common: Most Americans do not support them. And they are being spread and condoned by Republican leaders.
But the fact that lunatic views lack majority support does not keep them from attaining power. If the fringe is on the march and Democratic leaders fail to respond with sufficient emotional and political force, fascism wins. That’s why it keeps feeling like Berlin, circa 1931.
In his Buffalo speech, Biden declared, “Hate will not prevail.” He described “a hate that through the media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated, lost, and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced.” And he warned, “The American experiment in democracy is in a danger like it hasn’t been in my lifetime … Hate and fear are being given too much oxygen by those who pretend to love America but who don’t understand America.”
Too much of this was in the passive voice. Those who pretend? Why didn’t Biden name names?
Karine Jean-Pierre, the new White House press secretary, told reporters traveling with the president that Biden did not want to elevate those people by identifying them. “The people who spread this filth know who they are,” she said.
Sorry, but that is wimping out. This is no time for cowardly lions. There is still a fundamental decency to most Americans that needs to be reawakened. In that respect, moral leadership is also good politics.
Biden should be naming not just those like Matt Gaetz or Elise Stefanik who explicitly espouse these hatreds, but those in the Republican leadership from Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy on down who refuse to break with the explicit haters.
After the Buffalo killings, Liz Cheney tweeted: “The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”
Biden is the president. He should display at least the gumption and moral clarity of Liz Cheney.
