I am a lifelong Democrat. I even worked for Joe Biden at one time. Thus, nothing that has happened in America since January 2021 has surprised me. But the president’s speech in Philadelphia last week marked a new low for America and a new low for a party that I once idolized.
To me, the Democratic Party was the party of hope, tolerance, and opportunity. Indeed, those themes echoed through Bill Clinton’s speeches in 1992. Clinton’s presidency was the high-water mark of the post-war Democratic Party. He blended JFK’s idealism with Reagan’s folksiness. He embodied America’s middle class, the greatest political force at the time, and pulled the country into a new century that our leaders promised would be peaceful and safe.
That has all vanished. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last Thursday confirmed it.
As speeches go, the Biden speech was a letdown, filled with shallow attacks on broad categories of people and, of course, the former president. Nobody outside of a CNN newsroom, which appears to have modified the speech’s lighting in real-time, will be inspired by a fall campaign focused on Donald Trump and the people who rioted at the Capitol.
But writing a poor speech is one thing. Delivering it in front of a Nuremberg-style backdrop is quite another. The imagery shocked many people. It should have shocked everybody. It took just a few minutes for The Babylon Bee to draw comparisons between Biden’s speech and Nazi Germany. And while most Nazi comparisons are exaggerated, these ones struck a little too close to home.
After all, while the president warns about fascism (or “semi-fascism,” whatever that is) in America, his administration is the one censoring people who disagree with it and trying to prosecute its political opponents, both flagrant violations of democratic norms. His administration is
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