Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, starts this Sunday evening. It’s a time for asking forgiveness of others, and for finding ways to reconcile.
But with many Americans worried that we are on the brink of some kind of civil war, and a large majority of Democrats convinced there are tens of millions of supporters of Donald Trump preparing to overthrow the government by force, President Joe Biden has clearly failed to unify the country, as he promised to do in his Inaugural Address last year.
Rather than reconciling Americans to one another, Biden is fanning the flames of hatred. His frightening speech on September 1, in which he called for “continued battle” against “MAGA Republicans,” whom he said were a “threat” to the country, made clear he has no interest in unity.
Granted, it is an election season, and some divisions and discontent are to be expected. But Biden took the rhetoric of partisanship to an extreme, slandering a significant proportion of the Americans whom he governs.
What was also unique about Biden’s speech is that he took the lead in dividing the country. Before, he had been content to let Democrats in Congress do that.
When the Senate decided to put former President Trump on trial — for the second time, and without clear authority to do so — the White House was content to let it do so. And when the House January 6th Committee began its show trial, the White House cheered but did little to participate, other than waiving Trump’s executive privilege.
But now Biden is leading the “battle,” as he calls it, trying to make the 2022 midterms about Trump, hoping to limit Democrat losses and shore up his faltering presidency.
Biden could have chosen the path of magnanimity. He could have recognized that most of the January 6 protesters were there because they did not trust the 2020 election result. Perhaps he could have called for real voting reforms that did not merely help his party, but improved the credibility and integrity of the system as a whole.
While punishing the violent perpetrators of the riot, Biden could have offered clemency to the rest — those who were merely trespassing, just like the millions of illegal border crossers whom Biden has chosen not to prosecute are also trespassing.
But there is a pattern in his behavior: he seems not to understand reconciliation. Even when he has managed to forge bipartisan deals with Republicans in Congress, he has immediately undercut those deals by pressing toward his own partisan goals.
On gun control, for example, he reached the first bipartisan compromise in decades, with Republicans agreeing to fund “red flag” laws and some expanded background checks — then promptly demanded a new ban on so-called “assault weapons.”
When Republicans agreed to a deal on a $2 trillion infrastructure bill, one that would exclude Biden’s ambitious spending plans, he pocketed their concessions and immediately put the rejected spending proposals in his “Build Back Better” bill.
That bill failed, thanks to the opposition of two Democrat senators. But Biden repeated his tactics with the CHIPS Act, which Republicans backed on the understanding that Democrats would not pursue a massive climate spending bill. Biden did so anyway, signing the so-called the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which has little to do with inflation. And now even the “side deal” to expand fossil fuel production, which was crucial to secure Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV)’s vote, is in danger of failing.
Biden’s philosophy seems to be that “unity” means his side gets what it wants, then asks for more. It is the opposite of the spirit of reconciliation in which the Framers of the Constitution agreed to suspend some of their differences and forge “a more perfect Union”; or even the generosity with which victorious black civil rights leaders often forged new relationships with, and forgave, the white Democrat segregationists who had tried to suppress them (and who were Biden’s earliest Senate allies).
We, as a country, have lost touch with what reconciliation means.
In 2020, with the flames of the Black Lives Matter riots still smoldering, Congress approved a proposal to rename ten military bases named for Confederate generals — names that were adopted in the spirit of post-Civil War reconciliation. True, that reconciliation was between white northerners and southerners, and was probably outdated, but the ease with which the very idea of reconciliation was ignored was a bad omen for the future.
Biden was sold to the American electorate as someone who could unify the nation, given his 36-year career in the Senate, an institution more given to compromise than the House on the other side of the Capitol. But while Biden might have been a back room wheeler-and-dealer — a skill from which his family’s personal interests also benefited — he was, for 36 years, one of the most divisive members of the Senate, especially on the Judiciary Committee, which he turned into a battlefield.
The angry, shouting bully at Independence Hall is just as much a part of Biden’s personality as the grandfatherly, grieving, touchy-feely figure his campaign tried to emphasize in 2020. And his hostility has amplified his party’s worst tendencies. We now see the formerly moderate Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) talking about the need to “kill and confront” the MAGA movement; we hear the gun-controlling feminist Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) issuing a “call to arms” against her Republican colleagues.
Left-wing journalist David Corn defended such rhetoric this week by citing Abraham Lincoln — who, he said, had no empathy for those who “threatened the union.” Perhaps not, but in 1865, as the Civil War drew to a close, Lincoln famously declared at his Second Inaugural: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” He showed greater magnanimity to military enemies than Biden and his party show to mere political rivals.
If there is to be reconciliation, it must begin with Demcorats’ defeat.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.