Assault on America, Day 709: The more Joe Biden calls for unity, the less likely he’ll get it

Democrats’ obsession with unity cloaks their unwillingness to achieve it

What would you give up for unity? It’s a question many of us are forced to confront these days. With the 2020 presidential election still undecided more than a month after the last votes were supposedly cast, there isn’t much that the two ideological sides agree on just weeks short of 2021. While the Trump campaign and its allies search for a fair hearing in various courts and legislatures around the country, so-called “President-elect” Joe Biden is busy making appointments to his phantom cabinet. Predictably, the establishment media spins his potential nominees as “moderates” and common sense driven “professionals” (translation: swamp creatures) who would restore competence and good government to the nation after four years of Donald Trump haphazardly tearing down the system (which is by and large a positive thing, don’t you think?). Big city streets are largely clear of “protesters” today, who appear to have mysteriously crawled back into hibernation now that the weather’s turned cold and blue state mayors and governors decreed that everyone must be on their best behavior lest they spread the dreaded Chinese Communist Party (CCP, or Wuhan, if you prefer) virus to members of their own clique. It’s a lot less of a thrill for the spoiled and useless to be out at 3 a.m. when it’s 20 degrees and the nearest woke coffee house sounds a lot more appealing. Still, unity is hard to find. With the Electoral College vote scheduled for a few days hence, the wrangling was supposed to be over by now. Liberals and Democrats who whined and moaned about “counting every vote” and making sure the election wasn’t stolen -- by Trump -- are notably silent despite the piles of affidavits and funny smelling evidence that unmistakably points to their own side’s culpability. Who’s capable of solving the issues? Joe Biden? Doubtful. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod wrote at CNN.com, “With divided government, Biden will have to deal not only with implacable Republicans but his own fractious coalition, mediating between a left averse to compromise, minorities demanding their rightful place at the table and suburban moderates who are an increasingly important element of the Democratic base.

“Gone but not forgotten, Trump will likely launch the resistance from Day One, and will be abetted by a right-wing media ecosystem long on conspiracy theories and short on facts, stoking the red-blue divide.

“Biden may have been the only Democrat in the race who could have defeated Trump in 2020. But now the oldest president in history faces a Herculean task, not only in leading the country, but growing his party for the future.”

As a devoted member of the “right-wing media ecosystem,” I heartily disagree with Axelrod. The “conspiracy theories” he referenced are supported by eyewitness accounts practically everywhere you turn, to a much, much greater degree than outlandish claims of “Russian collusion” were in 2016. Liberals have such short memories and their ability to ignore their own follies in recent times is nauseating. How can they live with themselves?

Axelrod is right about one thing, however: Joe Biden will have a heck of a time trying to get anything done. Grampa Joe’s looming struggles have little to do with the Republican opposition primed and ready to confront his every move. No, Biden’s task is near-impossible because he mercilessly slimed his opponent and his opponent’s voters as incorrigible racists and irredeemable deplorables who were dead set on denying citizens of their legal rights. Being opposed to merit-based immigration makes one a bigot in their hemisphere.

Trump’s people are in no mood to buy Biden’s baloney now. It’s a little late to go begging for mercy and forgiveness.

If Biden were a real leader, he would acknowledge that his own lies and impossible promises led to the current impasse. But he’d also grasp that “unity” isn’t achievable. Looking back at history, there just aren’t any examples of perfect unity. Splits in opinion led to the formation of most if not all of the world’s major religions. While Judaism, Christianity and Islam would seemingly all stem from the same source -- Abraham (and then his sons, Ishmael and Isaac) -- the agreement ends there. Jesus further divided the believers and thousands of years of history have failed to bring a resolution to the differences in faith. If anything, they’ve gotten wider.

Students of European history see the continent as nothing but turmoil and disunity as populations separated and warred over territorial disputes and religious schisms. The Roman Empire spanned vast geographic territory but it didn’t mean everyone got along. Later on, what became England, France and Spain split along religious and cultural lines and instigated hundreds of years of practically nonstop warfare.

Not even the colonists of revolutionary America “united” in opinion, with roughly one-third supporting the liberty seeking independence movement, one-third preferring to thrown-in with the king and parliament of Great Britain and the other third staying “neutral,” wishing one side or the other would win so they could just go on with their lives. Even the various Native American tribes broke down upon divided loyalties, some going with the insurgents, others with the redcoats and still others wanting no part of either one of the white man factions.

This is a fairly simplistic explanation of a complex situation, but anyone who thinks the North American continent was ever “united” had better look again. Our nation was split from the outset with differences over slavery, western expansion, trade, nullification (of federal authority) and finally, whether a state could lawfully opt out of the union. A little war that started in 1861 cost over 600,000 lives and caused incalculable property and wealth destruction.

Reconstruction was supposed to foster a “unity” between the newly readmitted southern states and the northern victors. It didn’t work. In return for political support from the south, Democrats convinced Republicans to pull the union military forces out of the region. (If you think today’s battle over Electoral Votes is unique, check out how the 1876 election impasse was resolved.) A century’s worth of racial oppression ensued, the scars of which we’re still living with today.

“Unity” doesn’t -- and never has -- won elections. And there’s no reasonable expectation that two opposing sides who despise each other will ever come together in any meaningful way. Any Democrat or media honk who says President Trump and Republicans are being obstinate and obstructionist by continuing with their rightful election challenges is not only flat wrong -- they’re ignorant, too. The closest thing to a state of unity that America has realized post World War II was in the eighties, when Ronald Reagan won nearly 60 percent of the popular vote in 1984.

Didn’t Barack Obama make us unified? Hardly. Obama won 53 percent up against a wishy-washy, ineffective Republican candidate (John McCain) in 2008. In 2012, the Big O was reelected with a little over 51 percent (again, against a lousy Republican opponent, Mitt Romney). These are popular vote figures, which everybody knows doesn’t mean squat in the Electoral College. Ballot harvesting and illegal alien votes in California doesn’t cancel out votes in North Dakota. Thank the lord for the Founders’ brilliant system!

America’s Founders realized that achieving consensus in their new nation would be difficult. They were well versed in history and philosophy. They weren’t dumb. Joe Biden and his Democrat henchmen don’t appear to understand much about what’s happened in the past. And their ridiculous promises to promote “racial justice” and to combat “climate change” only make their problems worse. So be it.

What “unity” would mean in today’s America

Political divisions don’t just crop up overnight. Democrats’ preoccupation with Donald Trump as the cause of “disunity” is absurd. As has been argued many times in this space, Trump didn’t initiate any differences in cultural or political beliefs that weren’t already there. He didn’t even fan the flames. He merely kept his promises to enact conservative policies. It was enough to send liberals into a tailspin.

To speculate that Joe Biden would “heal the nation’s wounds” is flat out stupid.

Take the Second Amendment issue, for example. For liberals and Democrats to succeed, they would either have to completely give up their fantasies of a gun free America and/or acknowledge that mass shootings are rare and the type of firearm doesn’t really matter if the individual is bent on carrying out an act (ex: Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho shot 49 people with two legally obtained handguns). Time and again it’s been shown that perpetrators offer plenty of warning signs if only authorities would act on the signals.

In the alternative, conservatives would need to agree to further restrictions on their fundamental rights. As the NRA has correctly asserted for years, there are already a host of laws on the books if they were only enforced. Plenty more innocent people die from handguns or other weapons -- or a human’s bare hands -- than are killed by so-called “military style assault weapons.” Second Amendment defenders would need to agree to buybacks -- or confiscation -- to satisfy the liberal perspective. Unity? Not likely.

How about abortion? In order to achieve “unity” on an unborn baby’s right to exist, either liberals would need to one, acknowledge that it’s a human being growing in the womb, and two, that a “Woman’s choice” comes before deciding to have relations with a man (this of course doesn’t include rape or incest, which are different matters entirely, and are present in only a small fraction of abortions).

To come to agreement with the liberal perspective, conservatives would have to adopt the notion that unborn babies aren’t actually human -- and that a woman has 100 percent control over the life growing within her with no other legal considerations at hand. With fetal viability being moved back farther and farther, pro-lifers would need a complete change of mindset to allow living human beings to be terminated by choice.

“Unity” just ain’t happening. Liberals want what they want. Conservatives believe what they believe. Politicians promise what they promise. Compromise is possible on budgets and taxes, but the “big” matters of dispute can’t be neatly split in two. As long as one side demonizes the other, the animosity will persist. Good luck, Joe.

The more government arbitrarily tramples on freedom, the less “unified” we become

Not only are there cavernous differences of opinion on vital issues, there’s a persistent overreach from Democrat elected officials so drunk with power that they don’t have a clue as to how their unconstitutional edicts are being interpreted by the “little people” out there.

Hugo Gurdon wrote at The Washington Examiner, “A Los Angeles restaurateur's video went viral this month when she showed tented outdoor picnic tables, which the mayor had allowed a movie company to set up to feed its workers, right next to her eatery's tented outdoor picnic tables, which had been banned from opening for business. The restaurant owner, Angela Marsden, articulated the rage of every small-business owner who is being hemmed in and, in many cases, ruined by clumsy, illogical, pointless, and cruel restrictions. Weeping into her face mask, Marsden shouts, ‘I'm losing everything. Everything I own is being taken away from me. And they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio, and people wonder why I'm protesting and why I've had enough.’

“All across the country, people are enraged that governments at all levels are going too far, are imposing restrictions that the Constitution does not grant them the power to make. They voted for Biden in the hope that he'd bring moderate government and a modicum of political peace. But their vote wasn't permission for Washington, or state or municipal governments, to treat the whole public as a mass of deplorables clinging (to coin a phrase) to their livelihoods and religion.”

When it’s impossible for citizens to determine the need for, or rational basis for a policy, order breaks down. Mask mandates and business closures never made much sense -- and the Los Angeles restaurant owner’s video demonstrated the point. It’s favoritism, pure and simple. And it gets people angry. What was that thing about unity again?

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