Idiot Centrist Says Lincoln Was Too Anti-Slavery, Therefore Biden Should Moderate
For a certain segment of society, politics is forever frozen in the 1990s. Democrats had just endured twelve years of Reaganism and became convinced that pursuing morality in the 1960s was a bad political move, and they needed to dial back some of the gains made by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. When Bill Clinton won in 1992 with a little bit less of the popular vote than Donald Trump took in 2016, Democrats became convinced that moving right was the correct electoral move. This was further buttressed by Republican gains in the 1994 congressional elections, which were spearheaded by Newt Gingrich’s Trumpian strategy that helped create the world we live in today.
Clinton’s 1996 avalanche in the midst of a once-in-a-generation economic boom fossilized this belief in the broader Clintonian direction of politics, and this Democratic administration agreed with Republicans that progress is bad and undid New Deal staples like Glass-Steagall, enacting policies that helped lead to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.
Democrats kept spamming the Clinton button in the 2000s but kept losing and not learning, and this Washington Post guest essay by Francis S. Barry, Michael Bloomberg’s speechwriter for his 2020 campaign, is the avatar for this Very Serious centrist and left-of-center 1990s brainworm whose symptoms are more acute than the one afflicting RFK Jr.
Barry’s thesis and conclusion appear in the first two paragraphs, and anyone familiar with history can see the trainwreck we are speeding towards. Notice how he’s already warming up to throw democracy under the bus in the lede.
[Biden is] running as a democrat as much as a Democrat.
And here’s the harebrained centrist acid trip we’ve all signed on to by giving WaPo the rage-click they so desperately desire.
The answer might depend on whether he learns from a political blunder made by the man he often lionizes: Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln’s “blunder,” you see, is that he was too anti-slavery, and accepting the merits of the pro-slavery side was where logic and reason stood, so Biden should follow the example Lincoln laid out in the Lincoln-Douglas debates to distance himself from his anti-slavery positions. It is staggering seeing this paragraph published in a major American newspaper in 2024, and future historians will surely cite is as one data point among many in our era of widespread democratic backsliding.
Second, Lincoln separated himself from his party’s radical wing, assuring his audience that he was neither an abolitionist nor a believer in Black equality, and reaffirming his support for the right of enslavers to reclaim their “fugitives.” The Biden campaign should look for opportunities to underscore its separation from the party’s far left, especially on issues where Trump is inflaming fear, such as crime, “wokeism” and border security.
Do you feel your brain seeping out of your ears as it tries to wriggle out of this hell WaPo has constructed for it? Yearning for either death or freedom, whichever lies on the other side of your eardrum, is preferable to this dull pablum masquerading as serious thought. Francis Barry somehow found the essence of a dril tweet and removed all the humor from it while retaining its moronic sincerity and self-reverence. This perfectly reflects how most centrist “Dems must move right” essays boil down to a literary version of the kid’s “I win” game from Big Daddy, where a cacophony of illogic is cited as proof that one’s own political positions are empirically correct.
If I read this article without knowing who the author was, it wouldn’t take me long to land on a guess of Michael Bloomberg’s speechwriter. One of Lincoln’s lowest moments, signing on to a Fugitive Slave Act that forced freed slaves back into the hands of their captors, and was one of the primary sparks which inflamed the Civil War, was supposedly a good thing! This type of ahistorical nonsense could only come from a political faction famous for pretending to be students of history while failing to understand it.
Not only does Barry just concede any kind of fight to establish the contours of reality, and instead accepts as a default that Trump can define gravity itself, but he wrote one of the greatest “although” asides I have ever read. The point of the piece is that being explicitly us (anti-slavery) versus them (pro-slavery) cost Abraham Lincoln his Senate race*, which is why Biden should be anti-woke in his presidential campaign.
Although these tactics were not enough to carry Lincoln to victory in 1858, they ultimately helped lift him into the White House, where they remained hallmarks of his leadership.
*Except for, you know, that presidential election that Lincoln won
Francis Barry’s extremely scientific sample of one Senate race almost 175 years ago has led his Very Serious brain to conclude that actually, the pro-slavery contingent had an electoral point. This is the most classic centrist posturing, where they pretend to be the adults in the room by saying that morals should always be compromised for supposed short-term electoral gains they cannot produce much evidence of.
I have written many a time that mainstream political centrists have no actual beliefs, and just attempt to position themselves firmly in between both parties and declare themselves the rational ones. We currently have a Republican Party openly assaulting women across the country and fantasizing about staging migrant fights while planning large-scale detention camps and mass deportation campaigns, yet determined to prove me right even in the face of that kind of extremism, Barry clearly believes that moving closer to them makes him the intelligent one.
Fuck these people. They’re not serious, nor are they smart. They’re actors who have ascended in our extremely shallow political arena by making the right sounds and faces to the right people in power. A single-celled organism has more complex thoughts than these folks do.