New Identities
Boy, oh, boy, did Uncle Joe put his foot in it. The dotard went down to Georgia, looking for... a media moment? His mission, to use a grotesque distortion of Georgia's voter law reforms as a backdrop for pleading that his voter bill be enacted. This bill, blatantly designed to give the Democrats partisan advantage, was, no surprise, drafted with no Republican input or co-sponsorship, has zero Republicans supporting it, and therefore doesn't stand a chance of getting past the Senate's filibuster rules.
Rather than craft a bill that has bipartisan input and support, or even one that would actually improve election integrity, Biden begged that the Senate suspend the filibuster rules, just for his bill. A joke, of course - do that for this, and it'll be done whenever the party in power thinks a bill is "too important" to involve the other side in its drafting or enactment. Kyrsten Sinema, the 'other' long-view Democrat in the Senate (i.e. saving the party from itself, a la Joe Manchin), put the kibosh on kill-the-filibuster talk.
Biden's incredible shrinking Presidency feels over, not even a year into his first term. The Republicans deigned to grant him an infrastructure bill that did nothing for his popularity, and that may be the last success of his tenure. His Build Back Better, obstinately clung to despite rampaging inflation, was mercifully killed by Manchin. His effort to nationalize elections is similarly DOA thanks to Sinema's realization that killing the filibuster would have horrible future repercussions - for both the party and the country.
A wise man of measured thought and humility would have recalibrated when the warning signs ahead of Build Back Better first appeared. Or, he would have realized the thinness of his majority and sought to write bipartisan legislation.
Instead, our President likened those who oppose the (again, partisan) voting bill (as in, every single Republican Senator) to George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis. Two overt racist-segregationists (one a member of the Democratic Party, of course) and an actual traitor.
Of course, this is hypocrisy, coming from a party that supports all sorts of race-sorting policies (see: segregation) in education and business, but hypocrisy is stock-in-trade in politics.
As is identitarianism in leftist politics. As in, you are your label.
Biden has helpfully added some new labels to their lexicon for Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, and the balance of those who think this voting bill is a steaming pile of partisan poop. "Racist," "Segregationist," and "Traitor" are in their list. As is, we can presume, "Insurrectionist." Half the nation has now been tagged with the filthiest labels short of Nazi.
This from a man who, less than a year ago, uttered the word "unity" eight times in his inaugural speech. With the Capitol Riot fresh and raw in everyone's memory. As well as:
the answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don’t look like you do, or worship the way you do, or don’t get their news from the same sources you do.
We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.
Yet, his presidency has been one of pure partisanship and rancorous condemnation of half the country.
Fortunately (including for his party), his twin desires to spend us into Zimbabwe status and to jigger elections in his party's favor have hit stone walls - in his own party.
Biden's erstwhile boss was a notorious finger-pointer and name-caller, a more subtle and far more rhetorically fluid one at that. Those tactics didn't work for him, even though he had much larger Congressional majorities. His legacy is a loss of over a thousand legislative seats and an Untethered Orange Id winning the White House.
Nevertheless, and despite the lesson therein, expect the name-calling to continue. Identity gaming is all they know how to do.