BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Andrew Sullivan: How Biden Lost The Plot.
One explanation, perhaps, for Biden’s dense and hard-to-sell legislative juggernauts is that if he’d broken them up and prioritized any single policy, he’d have split his own party. Look what happened when infrastructure passed the Senate first: the left went nuts. In that sense Biden is not so much governing the country as trying to keep the Democrat coalition together, and in the end, achieving neither.
Another aspect of the problem is that so many Dem activists and groups have deeply imbibed the notion that America in 2022 is a “white supremacist” country, designed to suppress non-whites, and that we are now living in a system of de facto “legal fascism,” with a minority “white” party holding the country in its undemocratic grip, perhaps forever. The Democrats and elite liberals really seem to believe that we are back in the 1960s or 1890s or even 1860s, that we live in a black-vs-white world of good vs evil, and that the choice today is literally, in Biden’s words, between backing Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis. This is as self-righteous as it is ludicrous. It’s MLK envy. It’s an attempt to recreate the moral clarity of the civil rights movement, in a country no one from 1964 would begin to recognize.
The Democrats also increasingly view the Constitution itself as a problem for democracy. Notice how frequently they bring up the anti-majoritarian nature of the Senate and the Electoral College, as if that’s a bug and not a feature of the American republican balance. Notice how adding seats to the Supreme Court is also popular among Dems, because they have been outmaneuvered by the wily and shameless McConnell in the Congress. And how many more columns in the MSM do I have to read by people who believe the next election will be our last if the Republicans win? I remember when Norm Ornstein and Ron Brownstein, for example, were solid pillars of centrist conventional wisdom. Now, they both appear to believe it’s 1933 in Weimar, and without a federal takeover of elections, our democracy is over. Our democracy isn’t over. It’s our liberal democracy that’s under threat, and this kind of morally pure Manicheanism is one reason why.
Weimar, you say? Flashback to 2020: Niall Ferguson: ‘Weimar America?’ The Trump Show Is No Cabaret. Detractors have been equating the U.S. with 1920s Germany for 85 years, and they are still wrong:
Weimerica has recurred in dystopian function: in Stephen King’s “The Running Man” (1982), Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004) and Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” (2008). In each case, although the focus is on life in a fascist America, there is a version of the Weimar back story, for without the degeneration of the republic, the rise of the dictatorship is inexplicable. (For some reason, the Weimar syndrome rarely claims dear old Canada, which provides a bolt-hole for the U.S. resistance.)
So when my old friend Andrew Sullivan urged us last month “to be frank” about recent developments in American politics and admit that it is all “very Weimar,” he was adding to an 85-year-old tradition.
“The center has collapsed,” Sullivan wrote. “Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.”
It’s not the first time Sullivan has made the Weimerica argument. Six months before the 2016 election, he warned that “our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy” was leading “the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump” — and from there to tyranny.
As far back as September of 2007, Sullivan referred to then-President Bush as “The Weimar President,” as a way to do the Bush is Hitler analogy that every other leftwing pundit was making back then without fully redlining the Godwin Meter.