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| Biden -- The Guardian |
The Democrat and Republican campaign scripts are beginning to come into view. Here and there, reading newspapers, one finds scattered references to both in news stories and commentary pieces. The creation of the scripts themselves are shrouded in mystery. We know who distributes the scripts: newspapers, largely progressive in the Northeast; television stations, largely progressive in the Northeast; and internet sites, largely progressive in the Northeast.
But who creates the scripts? They are fashioned, one
supposes, by leaders of the two principal parties in the United States, most of
them not containing the warning “Made in Washington DC.”
Rather than relying upon the native intelligence of a
national audience in shaping the scripts, both parties, the Democrat Party more
intensely, rely upon two propagandistic devices to sell their messages:
incessant repetition and the power of totemistic words and labels to haul in votes.
Political debates in the United States have for some time
relied upon word-hurling and repetition to sell partisan products to an
increasingly skeptical public. These are not the techniques of rational debate.
They are the tried and true methods of advertising geniuses, well paid for their
efforts in inducing buyers to purchase products and services they may not need.
Of the two scripts, the Democrat script is much simpler than
the Republican: The yet to be announced Republican Party primary
candidate, likely former President
Donald Trump, is an enemy of democracy, and electing him president for four more
years will result in the ruination of our 246 year old Republic. How this is to
happen is part of the unannounced mystery of American politics.
The yet to be announced Democrat Party primary choice for
president, current President Joe Biden, has not been forced by an insistent
media to provide an answer to the question, though Biden and his political supporters
--both on Main Street and in Hollywood -- have asserted countless times that the
reelection of Trump as president will spell the doom of the Republic and an end
to America’s long experiment in limited government and ordered liberty.
If Trump were able to bring our Republic to an end in four
years, why did he not do so during his first term in office as president? Is
the claim reasonable? Is it not rather further evidence of H. L. Mencken’s view
of practical politics: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the
populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with
an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Americans are in their politicking generally “pragmatic,” an
American doctrine that traces the meaning of an idea to its practical effects.
Not at all oddly, one has not heard much of pragmatism in our politics lately. Pragmatism
was first launched by Charles Sanders Peirce and richly developed by American
philosopher William James.
According to The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
“Pragmatism is a principle of inquiry and an account of meaning first proposed
by C. S. Peirce in the 1870s. The crux of Peirce’s pragmatism is that for any
statement to be meaningful, it must have practical bearings. Peirce saw the
pragmatic account of meaning as a method for clearing up metaphysics and aiding
scientific inquiry.”
The left, as we well know, is not interested in the
practical bearings of statements, metaphysics or scientific inquiry, except as
these disciplines aid revolutionists in accomplishing Karl Marx’s vision of a
new world. “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it,”
Marx said.
Biden is not a pragmatist. He is a revolutionary president,
a change in course during his more than fifty years in politics that must
surprise those who voted for a largely hidden “moderate” Biden in 2020. In a
September Philadelphia speech Biden announced a “battle for the soul of the
nation," while off camera calling Trump supporters “semi-fascists."
Nearly four years have passed since Biden assumed office,
and his record in office is not invisible, as Biden was during his highly
misleading 2020 campaign.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson,
conversant with war, American politics, and political effronteries, has characterized
the Biden presidency as the most radical since that of Franklin Roosevelt’s,
and Hanson was not extending a compliment.
In 2020, the U.S. Southern border was non-porous. In the last year alone, border officials
recorded 1.7 million illegal crossings, the greatest number since 1960, when
the U.S. Government began keeping records. Visible in their rear view mirrors
were migrants from more than 160 countries of origin. The influx of illegal
migrants is entirely political and entirely the result of Biden’s executive
orders.
Biden insists that he could not reverse energy production gears
by re-implementing those “fascist” policies of his predecessor that he had
nixed through executive orders. Too many voters think these bald-faced pretenses
are unconvincing.
Biden has decided that energy production should be reduced
considerably within the next three decades because, battling for the soul of
the nation arm in arm with environmental radicals, he has envisioned a future
in which natural gas and nuclear energy, a much neglected environmentally
friendly resource, would be replaced by wind and solar power.
A spiritually depleted man who needs power to survive is not
fit to battle for the soul of the nation.
Orator Robert Ingersoll, in his 1895 "Abraham Lincoln, a
Lecture," wrote of Lincoln, “Nothing discloses real character like the use
of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity.
But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the
supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he
never abused it, except on the side of mercy."
Biden is no Lincoln.
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