President Biden on Friday delivered a ferocious condemnation of Donald J. Trump, his likely 2024 opponent, warning in searing language that the former president had directed an insurrection and would aim to undo the nation’s bedrock democracy if he returned to power.
On the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mr. Biden framed the coming election as a choice between a candidate devoted to upholding America’s centuries-old ideals and a chaos agent willing to discard them for his personal benefit.
“There’s no confusion about who Trump is or what he intends to do,” Mr. Biden warned in a speech at a community college not far from Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War. Exhorting supporters to prepare to vote this fall, he said: “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question is: Who are we?”
In an intensely personal address that at one point nearly led Mr. Biden to curse Mr. Trump by name, the president compared his rival to foreign autocrats who rule by fiat and lies. He said Mr. Trump had failed the basic test of American leaders, to trust the people to choose their elected officials and abide by their decisions.
“We must be clear,” Mr. Biden said. “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”
Judging by what I’ve seen in my own country in the non-mainstream Left, people who have grown-up in the neoliberal era have generally interiorized stuff like “greed is good” (for supposed lefties, maybe not at the overt putting yourself first level, but certainly as the demanding for your “group” that which mainly benefits people like yourself) and Consumerism, and very few overcome that without a little bit of experiencing multiple sides of life (not quite the same as being old but up to a point correlated with age).
This would explain why its so hard to find people even in their 30s with actual leftwing principles (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) rather than merelly liberal ones (“people should be allowed to do whatever they want”) interpreted in a way that’s compatible with things like extreme wealth hoarding - the latter are absolutelly compatiblle with neoliberalism (which wants that very same freedom of doing anything including in the economic field) whilst the former is not (because total freedom in the economic field quickly becomes the opposited of “the greatest good for the greatest number” because some people couldn’t care less about making others suffer if it yields them even the tiniest of personal gains and since money makes money and money is power those often yield enormous power in a system where the power of the state has been nullified in the name of “freedom”)