Supporters wait to hear U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker speak during an election night watch party as they watch TV host Tucker Carlson, May 24, 2022, in Atlanta.Brynn Anderson/The Associated Press
The capacity of hotheads on the American right to wreak havoc should not be underestimated. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is currently on the warpath, trying to hold Democrats hostage on the issue of the debt ceiling – the statutory cap on the amount the government can borrow to pay its bills.
But for the political arsonists, it has been a very bad week. They’ve lost their chief pitchman, nightly flame thrower Tucker Carlson. They’ve seen their propaganda arm, Fox News, lose yet more credibility. The setbacks come on the heels of other beatings. The upshot sees momentum being sucked away from the hard-right populism that has turned Americans against one another.
At the same time as Mr. Carlson’s firing, President Joe Biden announced he would be sticking around, running for another term despite his dotage. From his side of the political spectrum, there was scarcely a word of protest. Under their conventional-thinking leader, the Democrats present a unified front. “We need stability,” said Jamaal Bowman, one of their New York congressmen. “Biden provides that.”
So score two advances for domestic harmony. With his mammoth audience, huckster Tucker was the great destabilizer, pushing the culture-war buttons on racism, sexism, xenophobia. With the death of Rush Limbaugh in 2021, the hard right lost its hugely popular talk-radio evangelist. Hence, two stokers of rage have left the stage.
Fox could take a serious ratings hit with Mr. Carlson’s exit. It comes on top of the network suffering a major embarrassment in having to pay an eye-popping US$787.5-million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems for airing false claims that the company conspired to rig the 2020 election. Text messages revealed that Mr. Carlson and other network heavies didn’t believe Donald Trump’s bunk about a stolen election but went into full fake-news mode in endorsing the fiction anyway.
The Dominion case humiliation was preceded by Mr. Trump becoming the first ex-president ever to face criminal charges, with more of greater gravity likely on the way. The Trump charges were preceded in December by the Jan. 6 select committee’s final report citing Mr. Trump as a central cause of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. This was preceded by the midterm elections wherein the populist-styled Grand Old Party faltered in failing to gain control of the Senate.
Those elections were a grave test for American democracy, as it was feared vote tallies would be rejected. That didn’t happen. Many candidates who were deniers of the 2020 election outcome went down to defeat. One of Mr. Biden’s promises was to restore American democracy. He has made some progress on that pledge.
In contrast to the chaos in GOP land, no serious challenge is anticipated to Mr. Biden winning his party’s nomination. It’s hard to build unity in the country if you don’t have it in your own party. But Mr. Biden’s approach has calmed the Bernie Sanders types on the left. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is mounting a challenge but he is a black sheep in his family, harbouring fringe policy beliefs such as opposition to COVID-19 vaccines. His campaign will go nowhere.
But all is not hunky-dory for Mr. Biden. He still fares poorly in national opinion polls, consistently falling below 50 per cent in approval ratings. A huge majority of Americans continue to say that the country is on the wrong track. Mr. Biden is being investigated for possession of classified documents. His son Hunter Biden is being investigated on questions of taxes and foreign business dealings. Despite his fine list of legislative accomplishments, Mr. Biden has failed on such promises as getting an assault weapons ban, instituting a national sick leave plan and stopping the migration crisis at the southern border.
His problems pale, however, to those of the Republicans. Their big new hope on the far right, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has stumbled badly and the party appears to be set to nominate Mr. Trump again. He lost last time to Mr. Biden and has incurred repeated embarrassments since that time.
Small wonder that Joe Biden wants to run again. In announcing that intent he said, “We – you and I – together we’re turning things around and we’re doing it in a big way.”
Now, “It’s time to finish the job. I said we are in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are.”
He still is. And he is gaining ground in that battle