In 2012, sitting Vice President Joe Biden, the current president and leader of the Democratic Party, told a crowd that Mitt Romney wanted to restore slavery and enslave black people.
If Biden could say something that completely deranged and defamatory about such an inoffensive politician as Romney, then whom will Democrats not attack unfairly? On whom will they fail to turn the dial of smear and slander up to 11?
Many Republicans asked themselves exactly that question in 2016. During the primaries, whenever their party comrades appealed to decency as an argument against Donald Trump and his intemperate behavior, they pointed out that it doesn’t matter. Democrats, they explicitly argued on many occasions, have shown that they would cancel their own mothers as racists during Mother’s Day dinner if they thought it would somehow benefit them politically. All that mattered was to shock and shut them up — nominate Trump and let him offend the hell out of them until they go out of their minds.
Democrats, with their vicious lies, thus helped Republicans talk themselves into the Trump era. And the party of Trump retaliated, actively working to irritate Democrats as much as possible. Those are not judgments but observations. Can anyone argue that such behavior, on both sides, has not widened the cultural divide and sharpened the political polarization that besets the country today? Is it any surprise that debates are now so much less policy focused?
We have no idea whether Republicans will have the stomach to nominate Trump once again. We hope not. But Democrats have certainly not changed their spots. Terry McAuliffe’s campaign for governor of Virginia, desperate in the final stretch, is attempting to turn the milquetoast Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, into George Wallace. Democrats are even claiming that Youngkin’s talk about parental involvement in education is tantamount to book banning (it isn’t) and even just a racist dog whistle — yes, the latter has literally become a Democratic talking point in the last 48 hours. That tells you more than any poll ever could about the state of the Virginia governor’s race.
But most of the time, McAuliffe satisfies himself trying to frame Youngkin as the second coming of Donald Trump. When Biden was in Virginia campaigning with McAuliffe last week, he invoked Trump’s name two dozen times in his speech, apparently forgetting that he himself has been president for the last nine months. In an odd nod to C.S. Lewis, McAuliffe himself even calls Youngkin “Trumpkin.” They falsely accuse him of racism, of Trumpism.
Of course, Youngkin is nothing like Trump. He might just be the very model of a pre-Trump Republican — center-right, soft-spoken, urbane, conservative but not angry about it. This gentle fellow wearing a fleece thinks parents should have a say in their children’s education — and when he says it, it makes the Democratic rank-and-file lose their minds. Democrats try to turn him into Trump because they are afraid they cannot beat anyone else.
Trump may have lost the 2020 election, but he has defeated the Democrats’ sanity in a landslide. Most voters have completely moved on from Trump, but Democrats remain as obsessed with him as they ever have been. McAuliffe’s campaign knows it cannot get Democratic voters to come out and support someone as slippery and uninspiring as he is without staging two minutes of hate and inducing flashbacks of negative emotion from the Trump era.
McAuliffe, not satisfied to compete with his opponent’s ideas, is trying to widen the nation’s social divisions still further. He is making America worse, and that’s why he will deserve it so much when he loses.
