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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Biden goes there [1]

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Date: 2022-09-03

There was no more experienced, more serious journalist on @CNN than White House correspondent @JohnJHarwood . So, of course, Harwood’s been let go by the network. Why? He was under the mistaken impression that speaking truth to power still matters at @CNN . pic.twitter.com/VrkwRwbPAJ

NY Times:

Excellent @anneapplebaum column about last night's speech. Biden is gambling that the idea of America still lives and can prevail. I think he's right, his very election suggests he is right, and it's the gamble he was elected to take. https://t.co/Pvy2msU0Q4

Federico Finchelstein/WaPo:

Biden is not wrong, but historical definitions of fascism do actually matter. Over the past century, fascism has evolved, as leaders have reformulated its look. While explicit fascism faded from power after World War II, its illiberal ideas survived, often intertwined with various strands of populism. This historical perspective helps us understand how Biden’s term, “semi-fascism,” actually reflects the most recent iteration of a global fascist playbook that has sought to undermine democracy in the United States, Brazil, India and Hungary today.

President Biden has taken a firm stance on the modern-day threat of fascism: “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.” Biden made this key remark in a speech in Rockville, Md., while launching a push toward the midterm elections . While he stressed the violent nature of Trumpism and its threat to democracy, he was vague about the specifics of what he identified as half-baked American fascism. In fact, when he was later asked to clarify what he meant by fascism, he answered, “You know what I mean.”

Jon Allsop/CJR:

The pathetic semantic squabble in coverage of Biden’s democracy speech

Of course Biden wants people to vote for his party. It’s also true that he used his speech last night to tout his agenda, including in the run-up to his call to vote; indeed, the Times characterized the address as effectively “two back-to-back speeches,” one focused darkly on threats to democracy, the other optimistically on his administration’s progress. But, at least conceptually, these focuses cannot be neatly separated, just as calls to vote and the touting of an agenda can’t be separated from the broader work of defending democracy—encouraging voting and making the case that the votes should be for you is the basic stuff of democracy. And it’s all the stuff of politics, which is one reason journalists’ efforts to police the political nature of Biden’s speech last night were so misguided. Merriam-Webster—and I hate to be this tedious, but apparently it’s necessary—has a whole bunch of entries for politics, the broadest (and, I think, best) of which defines it as “the total complex of relations between people living in society.” Saving democracy is thus political, inherently so. So is the military. So is just about anything the president says, no matter who is picking up the tab. Arguing about whether last night’s speech was political would have been silly and pedantic at the best of times. At this fraught moment, it’s akin to watching your house catch fire and shouting, “Wait a minute! Is this a house?”

What various top outlets seemed to actually mean by political—and some stated it outright—was partisan, referring to the idea that Biden was criticizing members of another party. To take a charitable view, this isn’t totally irrelevant as a concern, since there are rules governing campaigning using federal resources. (See: Trump hosting part of the 2020 Republican convention at the White House.) But it’s close to irrelevant in this case; there was much about the speech that was much more important than the setting. And partisan, like political, is a slippery term. That some members of the press used the two interchangeably last night is telling of a broader trope in political journalism: that politics is principally about the interrelation of political parties, not least in the electoral arena. The “total complex of relations” in a society, this is not.

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