National Review Online
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Joe Biden doesn’t seem to hold the country that
elected him to the presidency in especially high regard. At least, that’s the
assessment observers are left with following the president’s self-indulgently
downcast commencement address to the graduating class of
Morehouse College.
In his speech to a group of newly minted college
graduates at that historically black institution, Biden informed his audience
that it should abandon all hope. The forces of bigotry are on the march,
and, we must conclude from the urgency in Biden’s appeals, his feckless
administration has been powerless to stop them.
“Extremists closed the doors of opportunity,” Biden told
the students. Republicans, in particular, are busily attacking “the values of
diversity, equality, and inclusion.” They’re on a tear amid their pursuit of a
“national effort to ban books” and attacking voting rights by, for example,
refusing to “allow water to be available to you while you wait on line to vote”
in places like Georgia. “What the hell is that all about?” Biden asked as
though he had not had ample opportunity to correct the misapprehensions that
gave rise to these mendacities.
“They don’t see you in the future of America,” Biden said
to the young black men in his line of sight. This egregious calumny is not,
however, attributable solely to the disease of the soul that translates into
Republicanism according to Biden. Rather, the president maintained that this
campaign of malicious right-wing subterfuge would not be enjoying its present
successes but for the failures of American democracy.
“What is democracy if black men are being killed in the
street?” Biden asked. “What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still
leave black — black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be ten
times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? And most of all, what does it
mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it
doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”
What an odious passage. It is reflective of a particular
fatalism that has overtaken the progressive activist class, the members of
which appear to regard any concession to the notion of America’s fundamental
goodness as a species of naïveté. It must be a genuine conviction on their part
because Biden’s articulation of the horrible ills that plague America runs
directly counter to the usual imperative for an incumbent president
seeking reelection — convincing voters that they are better off than they were
before he entered office.
The Biden White House’s political strategy is not
difficult to discern. The president’s campaign has embarked on a cynical effort
to frighten black voters, who are disillusioned with the Biden administration
and unenthused by his candidacy, into reengaging with the political process.
But unlike Barack Obama’s campaign, which successfully implemented a similar
strategy, Biden’s message is not leavened with optimism about the future.
Biden’s team is giving dispirited minority voters something to vote against but
almost nothing to vote for. Indeed, only toward the end of Biden’s speech did
he allow himself a throat-clearing hint of optimism about the capacity of
“democracy” to overcome America’s ephemeral challenges.
Judging from the morose tone Biden took in his bleak
address, he must hold the incompetent stewards of American democracy in
contempt. Presumably, Biden is going to have some choice words for whomever has
been the president these past three years.
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