It is the ‘duty’ of American citizens, President Joe Biden announced in his inaugural address last week, to ‘defend the truth and to defeat the lies’. Much of Biden’s speech was an unremarkable stringing-together of patriotic platitudes, but this call for a great truth crusade stood out for its audacity. America is, after all, the homeland of the public relations industry, of televangelism, of Madison Avenue, of PT Barnum. Our leading scholars worship at the shrine of post-structuralism; our brightest college graduates go on to work for the CIA; our best newspapers dynamite the barrier between reporting and opinion; our greatest political practitioners are consultants who ‘spin’ the facts this way or that.
In declaring a national quest for truth, of course, Biden was referring to none of these things. His target was a single man: Donald Trump, the most energetic shit-shoveler ever to occupy the Oval Office.
Consider the events of just the last few months. After losing the election of 3 November, Trump refused to acknowledge what happened and instead filed lawsuit after preposterous lawsuit charging that the election had been stolen from him by some unspecified method. Ambitious young Republican politicians pushed the nonsense along, trying to agree as conspicuously as possible with the president’s vain theorising. The last straw came on 6 January, when Trump addressed a throng of hardcore true believers and urged them to take their protest to the Capitol itself, where the final electoral formalities were then taking place.
Unlike Donald Trump, FDR was a genuine populist, and genuinely popular. But, as commentators noted at the time, the unified front that upper America presented against him in 1936 made him even more popular still.
Read more at:
Can President Joe Biden mend a torn America?, by Thomas Frank (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, February 2021)
No comments:
Post a Comment