The most stunning part of President Biden's speech was totally missed by the media

[UCmeNdc]

Link to tweet

The president said something stunning last night during an address that marked the one-year anniversary of the start of the covid pandemic. If the press corps had been truly paying attention, it would be headline news. What Joe Biden said reflects the sea change I've been talking about here in the Editorial Board, a fundamental shift in thinking about pretty much everything. "We need to remember the government isn't some foreign force in a distant capital," he said. "No, it's us. All of us. We, the people."


This presumed separation between the government and the citizenry is important to keep in mind, because without it, it's impossible to understand conservative attitudes toward taxation, an attitude that has dominated policy discourse over the last four decades. Because of this presumed separation between the government and the citizenry, conservatives starting with President Ronald Reagan could characterize taxation as a form of "government tyranny," as something done to citizens, instead of something done by them—instead of something citizens should take responsibility for. Of the many sources of "political polarization" we experience today, I'd say this one, the unequal separation between the government and the citizenry, is its main source.


https://www.rawstory.com/the-most-stunning-part-of-president-bidens-speech-was-totally-missed-by-the-media/

[comradebillyboy]

1. Joe didn't put out a bunch of pithy comments on twitter

so the media was clueless about what he said.

[CrispyQ]

2. Excellent commentary!

That last paragraph you included is spot on, but then the author links the separation between the government and the citizenry to white supremacy.

Thurmond is a footnote to political history, but he articulated a key feature to periods in our history of white-power backlash against the slow liberalization of the republic, a feature that was never discussed while conservatives dominated political discourse. That feature was this: white supremacy demands what monarchy demands, the right to hereditary rule. The legitimacy of that demand depended to a great degree on the willingness of the American people—and the opposing party—to see the government as separate from the citizenry, a predicate reaching its zenith in the era of Donald Trump. Polarization wasn't a byproduct of Trump's partisanship. It was the point.

Thanks for posting!

[RussBLib]

3. It's PEOPLE! The government is people!

And I love the repeated message that trickle-down has been tried over and over and about all it does is make the rich richer and widens the gap between the rich and everyone else.