In case you didn’t know:
“Let’s Go Brandon!” means “Fuck Joe Biden!” The latter phrase was chanted at some NASCAR event and the sportscaster mis-heard it as the former, referring to a race driver named Brandon Brown.
And so a new rallying cry has entered the American lexicon, alongside the likes of “No taxation without representation,” “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” and “Remember the Maine.”
But notice a difference. Those other slogans each concerned an actual issue. “Let’s Go Brandon!” is, well, something else.
Nevertheless, it has been taken up by Republicans as their great cri de coeur. Flaunted on t-shirts, flags, and bumper strips, even on guns. On “Let’s Go Brandon!” they’re taking their stand. But this is actually something serious. Not merely the reduction of political discourse to a vulgarity.
Democrats do hate Trump for all the very real damage he’s done, though they don’t go around in t-shirts with coded profanity. Republicans may imagine they have corresponding reasons to hate Biden, but by and large those are a witch’s brew of bogus nonsense. Exemplified of course by the great “Stolen Election” lie.
Yet reasons don’t really come into it at all. What “Let’s Go Brandon!” shows is that politics has become — for Republicans at least — wholly tribal. They’re using it as a badge of tribal identity. And the real reason Biden is their bête noire is simply that he’s seen as the avatar of the enemy tribe.
It’s no small irony that for all the passion they invest in the slogan, it actually represents a timidity from openly saying what they really mean. If they’re in favor of a certain procedure being performed on President Biden, fine, it’s their free speech, but why not just say it? What a bunch of pathetic weenies.
Today’s Republican party has dishonesty at its very core. Epitomized by the undisguised disingenuousness of this slogan.
One wonders what Brandon Brown thinks of all this.
