Former Vice President Joe Biden frames his run for president as a “battle for the soul of this nation.” Three times in his campaign announcement, he used the phrase “who we are.”
Former President Barack Obama made it popular in Democratic politics to talk about “who we are” and to castigate what he wanted people to regard as un-American beliefs with the phrase “that’s not who we are.” Distinguishing between American and un-American beliefs was, a long time before the Obama era, easy, for the nation was indeed bound together by many shared assumptions and values. But Obama himself, among others, did much to unpick those unifying ties, and these days, as the culture wars heighten, it’s getting harder to say with any assurance what is and what isn’t American.
Biden began his campaign with some easy targets for who we are not. We’re not neo-Nazis, klansmen, and white nationalists who marched with torches, hoods, and swastikas in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.
We can all agree that the views of these virulent racists lie outside the bounds of acceptable opinion. The test for Biden, and for whoever wins the Democratic nomination, will be where to draw those boundaries and how much of the population to declare beyond the pale.
Democratic candidates will be tempted and pressed to declare larger and larger swaths of conservatives “not who we are.” The primaries will see dozens of Democrats trying to portray mainstream views as akin to neo-Nazism. The definition of “hate” will expand to include mainstream Christianity. How will Biden, Sens. Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, and the other Democrats deal with this left-wing pressure? Where will they draw the lines?
The question is important, because many mainstream Democrats have been expansive in declaring who and what is not us.
Andrew Cuomo in 2014 said people who oppose abortion are beyond the pale. “Who are they?” Cuomo asked about the Republican Party. “Are they these extreme conservatives, who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay, is that who they are? Because if that is who they are, and if they are the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York. Because that is not who New Yorkers are.”
Or recall when Hillary Clinton placed half of Trump’s supporters in “the basket of deplorables.” She was calling nearly a quarter of the electorate “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic.”
What definition of “sexist, homophobic, xenophobic” includes 23.5% of America? We have a guess, based on the way Democrats often use those terms. You are sexist if, like Mike Pence, you take efforts to avoid going on dates with women who aren’t your wife. You are homophobic if you hold the view Obama and Biden held in 2011, and which the major religions have preached for millennia, that marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman. You are xenophobic if you believe using walls to prevent illegal immigration into the country.
The Left today is more intolerant and censorious than it has been for a long time. Anyone to the right of Bill Clinton will be declared an intolerable bigot by some commentators and politicians. It is a facile tactic that often works, that avoids any competition of ideas that, like any real competition, can produce unexpected results.
If the Democratic nominee gives in to that effort, he or she will further smash any shared understanding of who we are.
