MAGA is a scourge on America, but so is Wokeness. Biden's speech missed that
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If I were Andrew Yang or Christine Todd Whitman and had just witnessed President Joe Biden’s overtly political speech outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, now would be the time to strike.
Now would be the time for these two centrist leaders to stand up a new American political party called Forward to oppose the Democrats and Republicans.
Yang is a former Democratic candidate for president. Whitman is the former Republican governor of New Jersey. Both envision a new party that can “give Americans more choices in elections, more confidence in a government that works, and more say in our future.”
Joe Biden’s speech on Thursday night, that sought to place Donald Trump – rather than Biden’s own dismal record – at the center of the midterm elections, creates an enormous opportunity for that third party.
Biden's right about MAGA but wrong on this
If I were Yang and Whitman, I’d rent a hall today, invite the national media and tell Americans that Joe Biden isn’t wrong.
There is a political ideology driven by Donald Trump and lifted by his most crazed followers that is angry, belligerent and hostile to all evidence. It’s called MAGA and its greatest blight on the country to date was its anti-democratic scheme to overturn the last election through legal chicanery and a raid on the U.S. Capitol.
Speech fallout: Biden may risk backlash after going on offense against MAGA?
It is a pernicious ideology that has insinuated itself in a large part of the body politic and must be opposed politically.
What Biden got wrong, and is not capable of getting right, is that this is NOT a one-front war against a radical ideology.
If Americans are to defeat the forces that have shaken the foundations of our politics, we need to fight a two-front war.
Because there are two pernicious ideologies that have insinuated themselves in a large part of the body politic, that are impervious to truth and critical thought and must be opposed politically.
One is MAGA.
The other is radical social justice or Wokeness.
The theatrics behind his speech didn't help
Joe Biden and Donald Trump can’t lead this fight because both are captured by at least one of these ideologies. And anyone who cares about the future of our country is going to need to oppose them both – on two fronts.
Last night we witnessed a U.S. president beclown himself with theatrics that included a bizarre display of militarism with two U.S. Marines posted behind him.
Long after the speech is forgotten, Americans will remember their president bathed in garish red light pierced by long streaks of black that evoke the strong horizontal lines of the Reichsadler, the “Imperial Eagle” that the Nazis used in much of their own bizarre pageantry.
The people who handle Joe Biden were too clever by half. They were trying to evoke the extremism of Trump Republicanism. They succeeded in turning their own president into Charlie Chaplin’s little dictator.
Rather than provoke the overreaction of Republicans that they were no doubt aiming for, they provoked a spasm of laughter from Republicans and other Americans who wanted to know who was Biden’s advance man ...
Riefenstahl was the German filmmaker who became Hitler’s propagandist with films on the 1934 Nuremberg rallies (“Triumph of the Will”) and the 1936 Olympics (“Olympia”).
The problem with the White House's Wokeness
In his speech, Biden said, “For a long time, we’ve reassured ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed, but it is not. We have to defend it, protect it, stand up for it. Each and every one of us.”
The problem is that Biden has turned his brain over to the same handlers who made him look the fool on Thursday night. And those handlers are pushing a radical ideology from the White House that is dividing and subdividing Americans with its grubby tribal politics.
The Biden White House has seized upon these extreme racial politics that grew out of the fever swamps of American universities and is now imposing them on government, the military and private life.
Snake-oil purveyors such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakkers of the faculty lounge, are now the “thinkers” who inform the Biden White House on race.
Kendi is an unabashed racist whose great contribution to American society is the pursuit of a new culture that discriminates against white people to atone for the historic wrongs committed by their ancestors or, at least, other white people’s ancestors.
He doesn’t even try to hide his racism. He put it in his bestseller “How to Be an Antiracist”:
“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Robin DiAngelo’s great contribution to all of this is the double-bind that says any white person who uses their brain to push back against this illogic only demonstrates in greater magnitude their own inherent racism.
These ideas create paralyzing internal strife
Like much of the bilge that comes out of the university social sciences – the Kendi-DiAngelo brand falls apart in real-world practice.
In June, The Intercept, an independent journalism site, published an illuminating article on how discussions and initiatives on race equity and social justice have had the unintended consequence of creating enormous internal strife at some of the nation's major charitable foundations – strife so powerful it has diverted the organizations from their core missions.
One foundation leader who finally left his position told The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, “So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bulls--- that it’s had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver. It’s been huge, particularly over the last year and a half or so, the ability for groups to focus on their mission, whether it’s reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change.”
To hear a more recent observation on how this ideology in practice turns offices into warring tribes, listen to the interview Quillette, a site devoted to Libertarianism and free thought, did with Nicole Levitt, an attorney for a Philadelphia-based nonprofit.
Levitt explains the turmoil created when her organization hired diversity consultants to teach staff “the mantras of social justice.”
The nation’s charitable foundations are bastions of liberal thought and wealth. If the Kendi-DiAngelo social model is going to blow up a room full of liberals you can imagine how well it works in more ideologically diverse settings.
It doesn’t.
Eventually, Wokeism will collapse
And yet Biden has set it loose on the U.S. military and the federal bureaucracy.
One of Europe’s leading public intellectuals, Douglas Murray, predicted the coming collapse of Wokeism more than a year ago.
In an interview with “Triggernometry,” a YouTube podcast, Murray said,
“Do you think (white people are) going to be happy to be told, ‘Your past was disgusting and reprehensible. And not just ordinarily reprehensible but uniquely reprehensible. None of your forebearers are of any worth. Your society didn’t get anything good other than by stealing it. What you have now you do not deserve. You should give it to other people. You should give it to other people who look like people to whom things were done in history, because you look like people who in history did some of the things that were done. We will ignore anything done by any other group of people other than you. You have to do this for all the rest of time. Are you happy with that?’
“Do you think you’re going to win?
“Do you think that the British public is going to suck that up forever? Do you think that’s going to work?
“Oh, it might work this year. It’s not going to work for very much longer. And I can see exactly what the plague is that comes back, which is, ‘That’s a shame. We have put an awful lot of faith in this pluralistic, multiculturalist ideal. Turns out it wasn’t wanted.’ How do you unknit that without going to hell?
“These people are playing with the most dangerous elements of our society. It’s like seeing a child playing with a nuclear device.”
There are authoritarian impulses on both sides
In his Thursday speech, Biden upbraided Republicans, “Don’t tell me you support law enforcement if you won’t condemn what happened on the 6th. You can’t be pro law enforcement and pro insurrection.”
But Democrats were for months slow to respond to violence happening to police officers in the summer of 2020, including the burning down of one of their precincts in Minneapolis. Leftist commentators played willing apologists to the left-wing marauders who were busting storefront windows and putting torches to buildings.
And all because they were captured in the same way Republicans in red ballcaps are captured.
Immigrants to this country have been raising the alarm about the authoritarian impulses of radical social justice.
(New York) Newsday columnist Cathy Young is a fierce Trump critic and émigré from the former Soviet Union. She wrote in Forward:
“Many of today’s anti-racists are motivated by genuine and commendable concern about bigotry and inequity. But animating this anti-racist moment and the cadre of activists seeking to build a utopia of absolute equality, cleansed of all broadly defined oppression or ‘harm’ to any member of a traditionally disadvantaged group, I see the same passion that drove communism, whose anthem, ‘The Internationale,’ famously promised ‘A brand-new world we will create; / We who are nothing shall be all.’
“It has the same conviction that – to quote yet another Soviet slogan – ‘whoever is not with us is against us.’ In today’s version, you are either actively anti-racist as defined by the activists, or racist, with nothing in between.
“These activists do not control a totalitarian regime, but they have a totalitarian mentality — and plenty of cultural power.
“This story does not end well.”
It's time for a third party to fight them both
The oldest Chinese-American civil rights group in America looked at critical race theory, which informs the same woke ideology Biden has embraced, and saw in it the echoes of the Chinese Cultural Revolution that devastated their former homeland.
They called it “a hateful, divisive, manipulative fraud” and published a two-page manifesto warning against it, Newsweek reported.
Again, this is the same ideology that animates today’s White House and much of today's Democratic Party.
Someone needs to tell the American people they are in a two-front political war for the soul of this country, a confrontation with poisonous ideologies on the right and left. Why not the centrists who are ambitious enough to launch a third party?
The moment is ripe.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Biden is right on MAGA. But he ignored the 'Woke' problem
