Joe Biden, Commie

If you are to believe the feverish rhetoric and fear-mongering of election-year Republicans, all Democrats are shameless Liberals. Liberals, in turn are actually Socialists. In a curious and deeply unfortunate turn of events, Socialists are all semi-furtively Communists. 

According to this logic, Democrats are secretly and no secretly crazed Bolsheviks who would happily destroy capitalism if given half a chance. Nancy Pelosi? Hates America AND capitalism and is patiently waiting to shove an ice pick in the spine of both. Chuck Schumer? Basically Stalin. Hillary Clinton? Worships Marx and would outlaw Christianity as her first act as president. 

It does not matter to these people that Democrats have historically barely tweaked capitalism, let alone left it in ashes following a brutal, sustained class war. The fantasy that Obama would institute martial AND Sharia law and force flag-waving, patriotic Americans to gay-marry trans Muslims is so powerful and so deeply embedded that a good portion of the far-right still seems to genuinely believe that nearly four years after quietly leaving office with his signature dignity and self-respect, Obama lies in wait to implement all the sinister, Commie schemes he somehow never got around to during his eight years in office. 

For as long as I can remember, Conservatives have aggressively promoted the ridiculous fiction that inside every milquetoast Democrat lies a molotov cocktail-throwing radical who longs to see the streets run red with the blood of the ruling class. 

Republicans love to depict themselves as the party of capitalism and Democrats as the party of Communism when the reality is that Republicans are essentially the party of laissez faire capitalism whereas Democrats are the super pro-capitalist party that thinks capitalism should perhaps be regulated slightly to be more fair and equitable. Republicans similarly love to depict Democrats as a party that hates the military and the police when, in reality, it LOVES the military and the police but feels that perhaps they could behave in a more honorable fashion. 

So it is not surprising that one of Trump’s main attacks on Joe Biden is that if he is elected capitalism will end, communism will be the law of the land, the educated and wealthy will be forced into re-education camps and/or assassinated and Christianity AND heterosexuality will be outlawed. 

But is Biden a Trojan horse for a radical left socialist agenda? Inquiring minds want to know!

A racist, sexist hate-monger like Trump does not want to be running against an affable white straight man with a long history of supporting the status quo like Joe Biden. He wants to be running against women, and people of color, and Socialists and Jews. So Trump has cynically and predictably chosen to depict Biden as a weak-willed vessel for the radical, extremist ideas of Bernie Sanders, a cranky old Jewish self-professed Socialist, Ilhan Omar, a terrifyingly non-white, non-male, non-Christian non-Republican and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Socialist woman of color whose charisma and tremendous personal magnetism enrage and arouse conservatives in ways they do not seem to understand but makes them angry all the same. 

Trump is a genius when it comes to branding. And when I write that he is a genius at branding what I mean is that he is a hateful moron who knows that if he just keeps repeating the same horse shit over and over and over again the public will begin to see it as true whether it has any basis in reality or not. 

Trump and his campaign have accordingly gone out of their way to brand a tepid, mainstream and fundamentally safe and predictable Democratic Party as the “far left” or the “extremist left” or socialists intent on turning Missouri into Venezuela. 

In the minds of Republicans, Democrats are revolutionary socialists pretending to be moderates and centrists. So you can imagine how exciting the prospect of facing off again a genuine, bona fide, self-described socialist selling revolution must have been to Trump. It’s so exciting, and so irresistible, that Trump has chosen to run against Bernie Sanders in 2020 despite Biden winning the nomination by portraying Biden as a lily-livered weakling, a “cuck” in the Alt-Right terminology, more than willing to capitulate to the angry demands of women of color and the extremists in his party, to let them have their wicked, Socialist way with our formerly capitalist nation while he watches passively.

The problem with this line of attack is that we know who Joe Biden is. He’s been around forever. Hell, he was the Vice President less than four years ago, a fairly high-profile gig. We know he’s a safe, predictable corporate democrat, not a wild-eyed zealot.

I wholly expect the Bernie Sanders and AOCs of the party to pull Biden to the let but he’s starting from such a centrist/Conservative place that he’ll still remain a cautious moderate in extreme and dramatic times even if he adopts some ideas and specific policy proposals from the far left wing of the party.

As is invariably the case, Trump’s bleary conviction that Joe Biden is the acceptable white face of dangerous extremism is largely a matter of projection. It’s the Republicans under Trump who are the real extremists. The notion that Biden is a dirty Commie is laughable but Trump’s Fascist tendencies are very real and very pronounced. 

So when the would-be dictator who talks lovingly of “the most vicious” police dogs attacking BLM protestors whose name he has publicly deemed a “symbol of hate” instead of a protest against hate whines about a dangerous extremist in the race whose views are wildly out of step with the way most Americans see the world and their place in it, know that he’s really talking about himself. 

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