Was President Biden’s ‘historic speech’ about the past, present or future?
Its explicit appeals to patriotism stand in sharp contrast to the Left’s “transformative’ agenda
President Joe Biden made it clear yesterday in a hard-hitting speech delivered near Valley Forge that his most likely general election opponent, former President Donald Trump, is the main issue. His campaign aides and journalistic supporters have already hinted at this posture, which the President has now confirmed. No “pointing with pride” at his accomplishments but rather “viewing with alarm” the allegedly “dictatorial” Republican leader.
Naturally, the President’s critics have called attention to this unusual strategy which in effect renders his administration’s purported accomplishments practically non-existent and certainly not useful. My object here instead is to contrast the silence with the appeals to patriotism enhanced by the historic site, the references to George Washington and the nation’s numerous achievements which Biden and his supporters have more often than not deprecated or dismissed in their supposed quest for a more equitable society and government.
Had Trump given a speech at the same location with the same patriotic themes, Democrats would have dismissed it as shallow and cynical, believing as they do that Trump is not sincere, and they put little stock in such appeals anyway. But they believe in their heart of hearts that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” With Biden’s most recent effort, though, they have found their mark.
In appropriating America’s first commander-in-chief as a great defender of “our democracy,” Biden tacitly ignored the Left’s charge that the American founding was a sham that denied democracy and strengthened slavery. The other national accomplishments to which he made more general references, which surely includes the end of slavery and racial segregation, have likewise been dismissed as meager or trivial. That’s why the Left calls America a white racist nation, not to mention, a patriarchy.
We did indeed have numerous obstacles to genuine justice to overcome, but who led the campaigns against them? Indeed, which political parties deserve praise or blame? The Federalist Party (Washington’s party) initially sought to encourage free trade and commerce throughout the country, but that policy was blocked for decades by the slave-holding states. Later the Democrat Party encouraged white males to vote while ending that same right in the few states that previously had granted it to women and blacks. In due course, the defense of slavery became Democrat party doctrine, whether that was keeping slavery where it existed or permitting it to go into free states or territories if the people there wanted it.
The worst decision of the United States Supreme Court aimed to render this situation permanent in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). What prevented this tragic outcome was the formation of a new Republican Party, the main object of which was to stop his dreadful movement in its tracks. Doing so drove slave-holding states to armed rebellion and not a few free Democrat states to undermining the Union cause.
While there was unanimous public support for ending slavery with war’s end, the other Reconstruction amendments were passed over virtually united Democrat opposition in both houses of Congress. The equivalent of slavery was introduced into the former slave states as an infamous bargain was made to end federal enforcement of civil rights and other remedial laws in the 1876 deal to settle the presidential deadlock in three southern states.
In the twentieth century, racial segregation in public education was officially ended in 1954 by the Supreme Court, strengthened by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Those laws passed with overwhelming Republican support and no southern Democrat support. Since that time, the “color-blind” character of those laws and others has been undermined by Democrats’ transformation of them into “affirmative action,” “goals and timetables,” and most recently, “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Racial discrimination is once again official public policy.
This goes a long way to shedding light on why Biden’s passionate recall of our great achievements is so short on details or anything substantive whatsoever. That would cause at the least public embarrassment if not repudiation of the party so wedded to “our democracy.”