The mid-terms are critical, but may not be historic

SPEAKING in Washington a week before the US mid-term elections, President Joe Biden described the mounting strains in American democracy and warned that the Nov 8 vote results could set his nation on a “path to chaos”.

He delivered his address only steps away from the US Capitol, which was attacked after the 2020 election by a mob supporting his predecessor Donald Trump. He spoke against the backdrop of forecasts of violence by domestic extremists after the elections and a few days after an assailant armed with a hammer broke into the house of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, and bludgeoned her husband.

For months Biden has been calling his political adversaries as “MAGA Republicans” – in reference to Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” – trying to distinguish those party members aligned with the former president who have refused to recognise the result of the 2020 presidential race from more traditional Republicans. He warned that the MAGA Republicans represented “extremism that threatens the foundations of our republic”, as he put it in a speech in Philadelphia in September. At one point, he suggested that the GOP was headed toward “semi-fascism”.