During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden brought out his old let’s-get-along Kumbaya rhetoric from his kit bag of phony political tricks. “Fighting for the sake of fighting, power for the sake of power, conflict for the sake of conflict gets us nowhere. That’s always been my vision of our country, and I know it’s many of yours: to restore the soul of this nation; to rebuild the backbone of America, America’s middle class; and unite the country.” Not that he’s ever taken action worthy of the name to achieve any of this.
Nor did Biden have a big audience. There were approximately 20 million viewers for the state of the union. Ten million of those were likely hate-watching or love-watching. Compare that to about 120 million viewers for Rihanna’s halftime show at the Super Bowl. Viewership actually increased at halftime by about half the audience of the State of the Union.
At the SOTU, one side of the audience was those on the Left who take AOC at her word: we are three or so years from the world burning up and life as we know it coming to an end — all as those capitalist oil barons do us to death with their greed.
On the other side were those who see president Biden as the Trojan horse of secular humanism, ready to take away their right to free speech, religion, and self-defense, a wretch with the blood of murdered millions of innocent children on his soul. He is the second coming of Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor who tried to end Christian Rome and restore paganism.
Exclusively for our VIPs: ChiComs Have Joe Biden Pegged: Their Assessment of the State of the Union Address Is Right on the Money
But as Joe begins his “Let’s demonize those MAGA Republicans who aren’t bipartisan” reelection tour, it is fair to ask how “divisiveness” today stacks up against political fights in the past. Our Congress in certain ways was modeled on the government in England at the time of the American Revolution. At that time, the two main parties in England went back to when King Charles I was executed by Parliament. Talk about divisive politics!
The party that supported high church liturgy and the king were called Tories, a slur meaning “papist Irish thugs.” Their opponents, who supported the supremacy of Parliament, were called the Whigs, a slur meaning “covenanting Scottish cattle thieves.”
In our own country, tar and feathering has now gone out of style in politics. No one from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to FDR and “tricky” Dick Nixon, the president who gave us President’s Day, has been spared divisive politics. President Grover Cleveland was accused of having an illegitimate son, and hecklers would chant, “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha.”
Are today’s politicians sleazier and more divisive, as Joe Biden would have us believe? Is there more flip-flopping, more backstabbing, and less double-dealing than in the past? Given that government is more into our lives than it was back then, it does affect our day-to-day lives much more. But the root cause of our political troubles may be less in our leaders than in ourselves.
Andrew Breitbart’s famous declaration, “Politics is downstream from culture,” is a reminder that politicians try to mimic the public and the culture. Consider how our current president went from being pro-life to pro-abortion without losing a night’s sleep over it. Politicians generally have the backbone of a chocolate eclair. And like the paper these are wrapped in, they blow with the wind of culture.
But conservatives — whether you are “papist thugs” or “covenanting cattle thieves” — need to focus on building up a culture where freedom can flourish. We need to restore some sense of the normal. Whether it is sports, entertainment, media, music, the arts, or education, conservatives need to start putting more points on the board in the cultural arena. Lately, the oddballs have been driving things to an amazing degree. Politically, this has made Joe Biden president.
The Super Bowl viewership numbers show us that six times more people cared about the halftime show than the State of the Union. People generally don’t listen to spineless politicians, but spineless politicians, even if through the distorted influence of their megadonors, do listen to what they think the popular culture is telling them.
Conservatives have neglected the influence of culture to their peril. But the game isn’t over yet. The people who want to end “divisiveness” are usually the ones in charge who want to shut down criticism, comedy, free speech on social media, and sane entertainment that tells a human story rather than some woke message-play. In short, they want to stop anything that loosens their poisonous grip on the cultural lives of ordinary people.
And while the ancient Greeks taught us that only the true, the good, and the beautiful will stand the test of time, our everyday culture is the soil in which our politics grow. There has been plenty of manure put on it in the last few years. Now is the time for conservatives to start growing something worthwhile for the long term.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member