Can there be any rational debate about this post's title?
President Biden's address to the nation was the 21st-century barnburner of all rhetorical barns. For a year he kept mostly mute on the personified "dagger at the throat of America," but yesterday Biden got mad. Really mad — and he let it rip. The country not only remains in that other person's pressure cooker, the pressure is escalating, which few observers, a year ago, anticipated. And it has escalated solely by means of history's misuse.
Biden, then, delivered a speech on history as it actually was, not on history as it has been "twisted," as he put it. The time for being mute, tactful and gracious expired none too soon, for as 17-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes also put it, "Hell is truth seen too late."
Biden's sort-of "live in infamy" soundbite undoubtedly will be that which was first quoted: that Trump and Trumpism were and remain "a dagger at the throat of America." Given that the singular object of that phrase is a sociopathic narcissist, also doubtless is that much enjoyment was had by same. To rise from two-bit con artistry to being the sharpest blade of national decay and destruction is, in Trump's mind, a rewarding and magnificent achievement.
Another of Biden's passages, however, surely transfigured the Orange Blight into a frothing dervish: "He's not just a former president. He's a defeated former president."
There it was, as nakedly truthful and personally traumatic as any Trump characterization could be. He's a loser — to Trump, the most ignominious of all personal histories. What's more, he had to hear that he's a loser from his vanquisher, which in itself was a kind of Trumpian dagger plunged deep.
Yet Biden took on more than just Trump; he also took on the bedraggled but oddly powerful GOP at large: “While some courageous men and women in the Republican Party are standing against [Trumpism], trying to uphold the principles of that party, too many others are transforming that party into something else."
"Too many others" translated means virtually all of them; the courageous, scarce as can be. Look no farther than the House floor yesterday, where lawmakers gathered in historic sorrow. One — count 'em — one Republican representative joined the conscientious party's members: Liz Cheney, the one brought lowest by ensiform retribution, from Dante's Paradiso, then, for the briefest of moments, Purgatorio, and finally to the cavernous Inferno.
The Cheneylike Karl Rove had, the day before, fingered the "too many others" in their democracy-shattering hypocrisy. "If Democrats had done [in 2017] what some Trump supporters did on that violent Jan. 6, Republicans would have criticized them mercilessly and been right to do so," he wrote in a Wall Street Street Journal op-ed. He added they also "would have torched any high official who encouraged violence."
To "torch" has two meanings, of course — the literal and the figurative. Is there any doubt as well that Republicans would have chosen the former? Not in my mind, and likely not in yours either. Which begs the question: What should Democrats do now against what Republicans are gearing up to do in 2024 and '25? That is, steal the election — as national arsonists, if needed.
Rick Hasen, the prominent elections-specializing law professor at the University of California, suggests three actions, the first two of which can be dispatched with reasonable haste. First, "Democrats should not try to go it alone in preserving free and fair elections," as though they could find any significant number of Republican allies, which they couldn't. Second, "all sectors of society need to be mobilized in support of free and fair elections," including "business groups, civic and professional organizations, labor unions and religious organizations." Business groups lead the list because business groups are where the money is. But they're already back to subsidizing the terrorist Trump Party.
"Finally," writes Hasen, "mass, peaceful organizing and protests may be necessary in 2024 and 2025." Now, perhaps, we're getting somewhere. "Gerrymandered legislators may not respond to entreaties from Democrats," he continues, "but they are more likely to respond to widespread public protests made up of people of good faith.... If the officially announced vote totals do not reflect the results of a fair election process, that should lead to nationwide peaceful protests and even general strikes."
Still, having gotten somewhere with that, what next? What if "nationwide peaceful protests" and the improbable spectre of general strikes fail to persuade the election-riggers? This seems more likely than not. As does the prospect of un-peaceable protests of any, shall we say, persuasive size.
No, it's Democratic Party leaders — specifically one — who must now begin waging the war, through, as Hasen notes, "anti-subversion legislation," which, curiously, Hasen buries in his first recommendation. And here it's the future, not history, that will rise as the greatest challenge of Biden's presidency.
I can imagine no keener horror than sitting across a negotiating table from Sen. Joe Manchin, in all his menacing, self-interested conceit. That, however, will be the president's necessary drudgery. He's to give a speech next Tuesday on the understated pressing issue of electoral legislation, which, as you know, shall first require some serious finessing of the filibuster, Manchin's baby. It's the "serious" part that worries — not only about the filibuster, but the legislation's potency.
Yet maybe, just maybe, Biden's speech next week will replace yesterday's as the moving, most critical Speech of the Century.