Biden chooses divisive approach

Speaking at a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008, Barack Obama sought to explain the reluctance of working-class Pennsylvanians to rally to his cause.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and ... the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing’s replaced them.”

“And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment ... as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Translation: The world has left Middle America behind.

Now, President Joe Biden has addressed the same issue. But it was not with an off-thecuff remark that our president revealed his thoughts.

At Independence Hall in Philadelphia, whence came the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and flanked by two U.S. Marines, Biden described the Middle Americans of 2022. Only now they’re known as “MAGA Republicans,” and no more anti-American assemblage is to be imagined.

In a speech he labored on for days, the president described that half of the Republican Party he sees as wedded to “semi-fascism.”

“The Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.”

“MAGA forces ... promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”

Biden is here hypocritically denouncing as “backward” moral stands championed by his own Catholic faith — opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage — that he himself held not so long ago.

Biden went on: “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election.”

“MAGA Republicans ... are destroying American democracy.”

On Labor Day, Biden returned to the theme:

“Extreme MAGA Republicans ... embrace political violence ... (and) defend the mob that stormed the Capitol. And people died.”

This is the place at which Biden has arrived, 19 months into a presidency that began with his commitment to bring America together:

The name of the game now is an old one: divide and conquer. Biden hopes to split “mainstream Republicans” off from “MAGA Republicans” and demonize the latter as intolerable allies or partners in our democracy.

Indeed, the catalogue of sins and crimes Biden attributes to MAGA Republicans — extremism, violence, mendacity, authoritarianism — not only raises a question as to the state of the soul of the nation; it raises a question of its continuance as a democratic republic.

At his first rally following the Biden diatribe, Trump called the president “an enemy of the state” and Biden’s speech, “the most vicious, hateful and divisive ... ever delivered by an American president.”

A house divided against itself cannot stand, said Abraham Lincoln, invoking a biblical truth. While the attributes and conduct Biden attributes to MAGA Republicans may not be such as to make a civil war inevitable, they surely do raise the question of whether our republic ought to endure or to be dissolved.