Nixon Demonized Hippies and Students, Biden is Demonizing Trump


The times are different, but the politics is the same. Issues are thorny, hard to explain and usually have no emotional punch. Personalities, human frailties and fear will beat issues every time. That's where the votes are. It is said Biden often advised President Obama to go after his opponents. Obama disliked this kind of politics and preferred to discuss issues. Now Biden has the pulpit. Better look out opponents.

Biden's signature line about Trump in his recent speech was, "You can't just love your country when you win."

There seems recently to be a hint our country can return of its former version of patriotism. The former version was sort of, "a good American is honest, helps his fellow citizens, defends again enemies, etc." The Trump and company version is a good American is lower taxes, against abortion, against regulations, believes Biden stole the election and hates foreigners. 

An interesting effort to turn back this new and terrible version of patriotism was just started by a couple dozen pastors in Georgia. They are on a hunger strike to preserve voting rights. Way to go, pastors. In the old version of patriotism voting rights were important. In the new version voting rights are not Christian and need to manipulated to elect Tump Republicans. 

It's been widely reported Trump and company has been combing local Georgia communities to run anti democracy candidates in local elections. This, according to their plan, is to ultimately place poll judges in positions to rule out ballots wherever the opposition is in the majority. If they have been able to do this in enough Georgia precincts the state would have gone to Trump. This is new patriotism to the max.

Biden believes that by finding the right villain, like Nixon did, he can undercut enthusiasm for the dishonest and unpatriotic Trump. Trump may not be as good a target as the students and hippies were in the 60's but you never know. 

At least Biden is doing smart politics, appealing to motions instead of rationality. We can all wish politics was about discussing issues and policies. Reality is something different. 

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