It’s entirely possible, here in attention-deficit America, that President Biden’s fervent Friday speech excoriating MAGA lies and incipient fascism has already slid down the memory hole. But one particular line stood out. It warrants our attention:

“We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is, ‘Who are we?'”

That’s what this year’s election is ultimately all about. Are we as a people forward-looking, democratic, and inclusive – or are we hate-infested budding authoritarians?

On the morning after the 2016 election, after a minority of the electorate had managed to catapult Trump into power, my wife (who had stayed up all night in a state of shock) said to me, “This is not the America I thought I lived in.” She’d wrongly assumed, as had many others, that Barack Obama’s multiracial, pluralistic America was forever ascendant, or, at minimum, that it was durable enough to withstand a reactionary ignoramus like Trump. But the ’16 race was a triumph for the other America, backlash America, fear-mongering America, and it was there all along.

And ever since that fateful year, those of us who revere free elections and at least minimal decency in civic life have reacted to each episode of MAGA mindlessness with the mantra, “This is not who we are.” We said it when the neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville. We said it when Trump killed off hundreds of thousands of Covid-afflicted Americans with his anti-science blather and his tips about drinking bleach. We said it when Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees greased the erasure of women’s reproductive rights. We said it when Trump’s goons stormed the Capitol to stop certification of a democratic election. Heck, even pitiable Kevin McCarthy denounced the Jan. 6 insurrection while it was happening, publicly lamenting that “this is not what our country should look like. This is not who we are.” Then, within weeks, he flew down to Florida to lick the shoes of the insurrectionist-in-chief, thus signaling that fascist fealty was who we are, or at least aspired to be.

The truth, for anyone who knows American history, is that we’ve always had competing visions of who we are. Which side gets to write the next chapter?

Our national story has been one long clash between progressives and reactionaries, cosmopolitans and xenophobes, pluralists and racists. The Civil War was the most violent manifestation of that tension, but our current battles are notably traumatic. A stunning 74 million people, 47 percent of the electorate, voted for Trump in 2020. Large swaths of MAGA Republicans fantasize about some sort of ethnic cleansing and applaud Trump for saying, a la Adolf, that non-white immigrants are “poisoning the blood.” He sustains a huge poll lead in the Republican primaries despite (or because of) his denunciations of critics as “vermin,” another Nazi trope. His own former chief of staff, John Kelly, calls him “the most flawed person I’ve ever met,” but his rally stooges remain besotted. One wiseass on social media said it best yesterday: “Republicans are basically running a shock jock in a diaper who reads at a fourth-grade level for POTUS for the third time in a row because the party itself is so devoid of intellectualism, morality…It’s the political equivalent of a truck stop gift shop.”

Last Friday, Biden challenged us with the most fundamental question: “Who are we?” The answer is simple. We Americans are the sum of our best and worst instincts, forever warring with our profound contradictions. The only realistic option, for those of us who revere democracy and pluralism, is to pile up enough votes in Electoral College swing states to thwart those who envision a 1950 America fed by Russian disinformation. If the felonious criminal defendant is somehow given license to drag his knuckles back to the Oval Office, then that is indeed who we are.