The Republican Party has evolved from alternative facts to alternative universe. At their convention, Trump is the COVID savior, the immigration advocate, the rescuer from the dastardly Obama economy and it is Biden and the Democrats who are corrupt, racist and incompetent. Psychiatrists call it “projection” but I fear that this complete rewriting of recent history coupled with fear of the dangerous “other” will be effective. We all watched how the George W. Bush campaign turned the world upside down and instead of being the commander-in-chief of an administration that had lied us into a war that they were badly mismanaging, he rode to reelection on the myth of a strong leader running against a traitor to his country, despite John Kerry’s Vietnam War service and Bush being AWOL; truth and facts be damned. Can the GOP do it again?
When Joe Biden gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, it reminded me not of 2004 or any recent election but of a message I remembered learning about in school many years ago. So I went looking for the parallel to it online. When I found Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s acceptance speech from the 1932 Democratic Convention on www.fdrlibrary.org, I knew that was the one. Reading about that election reminded me that the similarities between then and now go beyond the words of that one speech.
FDR, then governor of New York, accepted his party’s nomination for president on July 2nd, 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression [more]