Name calling

        "Damned right the Democrats are too quick to cry "racist." They lob that grenade at all sorts of people who are not anything like the Southern segregationists. They redefine the word and talk about abstractions like "structural racism," that are so vague they could be applied to just about anything. "

     Michael Trigoboff, comment to yesterday's blog post

There is a school of thought on the left, that everything is, more or less, Germany in the 1930s. 

Trump is Hitler. 

Sanders is Churchill. 

There are too many Chamberlains to count, but certainly Obama, Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and all the moderate, let's-get-along Democrats.

Unification and calls for "civility" are understood to be tolerating the intolerable. The memory that haunts the left is that Americans refused entry to Jewish refugee ships, sending them back to their eventual deaths. There is blood on the hands of enablers.

The political left replaced the political right as the voice of political morality. The old Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell evolved into the devil-may-care practicality of the new evangelical right. Trump is just fine. He was sent by God, who works through flawed men. 

To the left, the status quo is obviously, demonstrably flawed. An economic system that steers wealth to the top tenth of one percent is a moral failure. So is our health care system that leaves millions without health care. And so is endemic racism and misogyny. There is an obligation to call it out, to avoid complacency.

A leftist political activist says right is right: 

    "[T]agging a scurrilous, immoral person with a fitting epithet isn't the same as banal, schoolyard name-calling. Further, there are two issues that are being conflated: whether a. tagging does any good (as in discrediting a disgusting immoral person) and b. whether it is morally repugnant/onerous/debasing/offensive to the tagger. . . .

     [F]itting epithets have been effective over history in terms of repudiating a target.  Frankly, this is one of the motivating factors in propaganda and politics and quite often it works."  

Shame: M. S, St. Louis. 900 denied entry.

Backfire. People on the left think scolding works, and it does. It works to make the left feel guiltless--see, we aren't Neville Chamberlain--and morally superior. That is a good feeling.

It also works to supercharge Trump and the political right. Even more galling than resentment of limousine liberal wealth privilege is the moral snobbery embedded in the fine distinctions of prejudice identified by college town elites. 

 Michael Trigoboff commented on yesterday's post:

     "This is a huge part of how people on your side helped elect Donald Trump. You have no idea how fed up people in this country are with the left's incessant accusations of racism. . . . The targets do not appreciate it. During the Tea Party movement, I remember seeing a sign that said, "It doesn't matter what this sign says, because you'll call it racist anyway.   I didn't vote for Donald Trump. . . . 

     I don't particularly like Donald Trump. But I love the way he shreds political correctness."

It only takes one high visibility Democrat to cry "racist" or "deplorable" for the political right's media machine to make it emblematic of the politically correct left. It makes sense for Republicans to point to and amplify Democrats who condemn Trump. Trump's supporters take it personally. Call Trump a racist misogynist pig and one is calling people who like Trump racist, misogynist pigs, too.

Joe Biden was scolded by Kamala Harris on busing and by Cory Booker on civility when Biden said he had worked with southern Senators James Eastland and Herman Talmadge. "We didn't agree on much of anything. We got things done."  

Getting along and progress is not good enough for the left. Quoted by NPR, Biden stood this ground.
  
"Here's the deal: I could not have disagreed with Jim Eastland more. He was a segregationist. I ran for the United States Senate because I disagreed with the views of the segregationists. The point I'm making is, you don't have to agree. You don't have to like the people, in terms of their views. But you just simply make the case, and you beat them."

Liberal hot water

Scold-culture divides the left. Some people insist on it, and failure by Biden to participate fully will peel off some votes from people who say Biden simply doesn't deserve their votes. That is Trump's current message to the disappointed Sanders voters. Be angry, Trump advises them. Some are.

Meanwhile scold-culture infuriates the suburban middle voters who turned out for House Democrats in 2018. It is lose-lose for Democrats.

There is no good solution for Democrats. The problem is baked in. Still, Democratic voters picked Biden. Biden comes across as weak and frail to his detractors, but he doesn't come across as angry and judgmental. He is a sentimental old guy, not a hater. He can get along with southern segregationists, if it is for a good purpose.

It is an olive branch.