{"id":160540,"date":"2021-01-22T04:13:51","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T01:13:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/bidens-moralizing-mantra-is-more-likely-to-divide\/"},"modified":"2021-01-22T04:13:51","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T01:13:51","slug":"bidens-moralizing-mantra-is-more-likely-to-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/bidens-moralizing-mantra-is-more-likely-to-divide\/","title":{"rendered":"#Biden\u2019s moralizing mantra is more likely to divide"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Biden\u2019s moralizing mantra is more likely to divide<\/strong>”
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Inaugural addresses are meant to be aspirational, so President Biden might as well have doubled down on his call for unity in his speech on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Presidents have made such app<\/a>eals going back to George Washington, and after the events of Jan. 6, there\u2019s much to be said for more unity, or at least less poisonous division, and Biden\u2019s emphasis on unity was deeply felt and entirely sincere.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolitics doesn\u2019t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery disagreement doesn\u2019t have to be a cause for total war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who can disagree?<\/p>\n

But by making unity his goal and the standard by which he will be judged, Biden is setting himself up for failure. When Biden was walking the final leg of the inaugural parade route, a couple of CNN journalists shouted out, \u201cPresident Biden, can you unite the country?\u201d<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t answer, but if he had, honesty should have compelled him to say, \u201cActually, probably not.\u201d Just as no one really got tired of all the winning under President Donald Trump, no one is going to get tired of all the unifying under Biden.<\/p>\n

The problem is that calls for unity can carry an expectation of unity, i.e., the belief that truly reasonable people can\u2019t or shouldn\u2019t disagree in good faith on matters of profound significance. This is how self-styled unifiers end up becoming high-handed and divisive (Biden\u2019s ex-boss, former President Barack Obama, often fell into this trap).<\/p>\n

Regardless, there are deep factors in our politics and society that make unity more difficult to achieve than when Biden came up in politics.<\/p>\n

The media landscape is not as conducive to fostering \u2014 and de facto enforcing \u2014 a consensus as it was in the pre-cable, pre-Internet era of three broadcast networks. Attempts to impose a consensus via decisions about what content to allow and suppress on today\u2019s social<\/a> networks and Web sites won\u2019t succeed \u2014 in fact, acts of censorship \u00addirected overwhelmingly at conservatives, besides being wrong, will fuel a backlash that\u2019s already well underway.<\/p>\n

As issues with a cultural charge have moved to the fore in recent decades, divisions go deeper and are less prone to compromise or negotiation. The difference, for \u00adinstance, between the 1619 Project and the Trump 1776 Commission (immediately canceled by Biden) involves profound questions about the nature of our country that can\u2019t be worked out at a meeting of the House \u00adAppropriations Committee.<\/p>\n

Finally and relatedly, the parties have become ever more purely arrayed in ideological, cultural and geographical opposition to each other. These differences can\u2019t be bridged simply by good faith and goodwill.<\/p>\n

Then there are the more immediate practical issues.<\/p>\n

Sometime soon, Trump will become the focus of Washington again at an impeachment trial that will stoke the fury of his populist supporters. That\u2019s not a reason to shelve the proceeding, but no one should pretend that a post-presidency trial attempting to disqualify Trump from holding federal office will be anything other than a highly contentious drama blotting out whatever is happening to get the new Biden administration underway.<\/p>\n

On substance, Biden isn\u2019t going to pursue a consensus, bipartisan agenda, but a progressive one. That is his right. He is a Democrat who has always been in the center of gravity of his party, which has steadily moved left over the decades. He isn\u2019t going to act on the more extravagant demands issuing from his left flank \u2014 ending the filibuster, adding new states \u2014 both as a matter of temperament and because he lacks the votes in the Senate. But almost everything he does unilaterally or pushes legislatively will inherently be anathema to the GOP.<\/p>\n

Plus, with Trump exiting at such a low point, the temptation will be to ignore the lessons of his rise. That one of Biden\u2019s first big legislative proposals is yet another \u201ccomprehensive immigration\u201d reform of the sort that has failed repeatedly after triggering massive, grassroots opposition on the right shows an impulse to learn nothing.<\/p>\n

All that said, Biden can do his part to lower the temperature of our politics and raise the tone simply by not stirring the pot \u00adevery day the way Trump did \u2014 and by honoring the norms his predecessor cast aside. This won\u2019t be transformative, but there actually might be some unity around the proposition that it will be a welcome change.<\/p>\n

Twitter: @RichLowry<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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“#Biden\u2019s moralizing mantra is more likely to divide” Inaugural addresses are meant to be aspirational, so President Biden might as well have doubled down on his call for unity in his speech on Wednesday. Presidents have made such appeals going back to George Washington, and after the events of Jan. 6, there\u2019s much to be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":160541,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/01\/Biden-Inauguration-2021-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[90243,89743,991,32681],"class_list":["post-160540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-1-21-21","tag-inauguration-2021","tag-joe-biden","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}