Democratically elected governments don’t do revolution. First and foremost, revolution throws up the wrong kinds of people to lead a democracy. Joe Biden has only been captured by the radicals. Imagine if AOC or Bernie Sanders were actually president?
And revolution is no way to usher in a change of any kind. Radical change — to the culture, to the government, or to citizens — is a recipe for perpetual revolution. Mao Zedong understood that concept very well. That’s why he deliberately engineered radical change in China’s provinces, knowing that the continuous revolution would eventually rid the country of all “counterrevolutionaries.”
But that wouldn’t work in America. The U.S. does so much better when change is “evolutionary,” preferably gradual, and ideally, one heart and mind at a time. Incrementalism was the byword of both parties when world events didn’t move at quite the manic pace they move today.
Many would argue that’s poppycock, that the “tree of liberty” as Jefferson said, “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” He added rebellion was “as natural as manure” which was has been romanticized over the years to justify rebellion as both natural and bloody. Revolution is the consequence of a failed state. To believe that anything but more revolution can emerge from the ashes is delusional.
Joe Biden has embarked on a revolutionary course. He will bend American society and culture to his will — and the will of the radicals — or he will destroy it in the process. Biden is arguing that because of the hyperpartisanship in Washington and due to both sides being unable to come together to agree about anything, he must proceed using the enormous power of the presidency to effect “change.”
The vision Biden is placing before the people is a radical vision — equality based on outcomes, destroying the “American system” of the economy, radical wealth redistribution. And the means to get there is almost as radical and alters the nature of the American government forever.
Biden is basing his vision on the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. But both those men could only dream of the power possessed by Joe Biden in a modern presidency.
He has chosen momentous action over incremental, willing to cast aside visions of a bipartisan Washington in favor of tangible results Biden insists are resonating with Republican voters, if not their elected officials.
“The president was clear about the crisis of democracy and aware of the factors and forces that may try to undermine the American experiment if we are not careful to protect it,” said historian Michael Eric Dyson, who attended the recent session. “There was no question that the president was concerned about how we treat our fellow citizens and is keenly aware that the moral trajectory of the United States has made a difference in both domestic and foreign policy.”
“There’s a lot of autocrats in the world who think the reason why they’re going to win is democracies can’t reach consensus any longer; autocracies do,” Biden said Wednesday when he announced his infrastructure plan in Pittsburgh.
“That’s what competition between America and China and the rest of the world is all about. It’s a basic question: Can democracies still deliver for their people? Can they get a majority?” Biden continued. “I believe we can. I believe we must.”
But what happens if the president isn’t interested in getting a majority? He does the next best thing from his point of view; he becomes the partisan in chief, ramming legislation through Congress with nearly half the people in the country objecting.
We’re told that the changes wrought by Biden and the radicals are for our own good and the good of everyone. We’re not allowed to decide these things for ourselves anymore. We will be instructed. We will be taught. We will be coerced into believing what is for our own good and the good of society and what isn’t.
Biden “going big” threatens a lot more than “white privilege” as the left calls traditional American values. It threatens how we live, how we interact with our neighbors, how we see government itself. As Biden himself has shown, and as Trump demonstrated before him, a predecessor’s actions in office can be overturned if there’s no real consensus to maintain the changes they initiated.
Biden’s “changes” will be more permanent only if we allow his revolution to succeed.
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