Commentary
The message and optics of Joe Biden’s address from Sept. 1, 2022, were startling in our supposedly enlightened times. In the mid-1930s, however, both were conventional politics. This was a time in which the most menacing discovery of modern times came to be perfected in political rhetoric. That discovery was that the most successful path to regime stability is to unify political friends around loathing and hatred of some domestic enemy.
