I suppose I should swoop back over and watch the Biden speech. I see the image. It is starkness. Starkness is what they are going for. I hear a couple of sound bytes — “Maga Republicans” as a force, A new force, A thing that must be defeated for small-d democracy. I see the reviews.

Rule number one everybody needs know by now: there is no “unifying message”. Every message worth its salt excludes someone. There are different parcels of divisive messages — ones that ameliorate at least a chunk that was dropped off and those that don’t. Either way, someone remains scorned.

A political message is a political message. Supposedly we have “walk back” from the claims of threats. Of course we do. It is a hard partisan walk: the other party sucks, and some of them need to vote for us.

I had a theory developing, and have just heard it articulated by someone on the podcast team at the libertarian Reason. Biden is more susceptible than previous presidents to cadres of professional Historians chattering on about what his presidency means. So he recently heard that he was the last bulwark against the Fascists of various examples — and jumped onto that one. A tad impulsively. I do not think we got this with Clinton and Obama — maybe in thinking at the outset there was a “I’m FDR! / JFK! / the reverse Reagan!”. But by the end of his presidency Clinton was talking up those late 19th century presidents you have to squint your eyes at. Gannon tried to see Trump on some things — Andrew Jackson! — and there were some religious supporters who had a great but sinful ironic Great Leader in Ancient Israeli history to toss out — but he forgot everything the next day. Wait for some historians to come about and start selling something else — and we have an entirely different speech.

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