How did we go from Thomas Paine to Genocide Joe Biden? "So we must face squarely that Cold War liberals had a geographical morality. They offered Cold War libertarianism for the transatlantic 'West,' a Hegelian statism (with violence if necessary) in their Zionist politics, and a caustic skepticism about the fate of freedom in either form elsewhere, based on an implicitly hierarchical set of assumptions [i.e., white supremacy] about the world's peoples." Samuel Moyn, "Liberalism Against Itself," 138. Genocide Joe is not heir to Paine but to the Cold War liberals who took over the American Left in the middle of the 20th century. We must also remember that Biden's first mentor in the U.S. Senate was the segregationist Strom Thurmond. His racist roots run deep.
