Guest Post by Pat Buchanan
The name of the game now is an old one: divide et impera, divide and conquer. Biden hopes to split “mainstream Republicans” off from “MAGA Republicans” … 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.
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, and Middle America has reacted by clinging to its bibles, bigotries and guns.
Eight years later, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee and, at a fundraiser in New York, addressed the same issue:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? … The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”