Joe Biden is Like Family

I may not have been a Joe Biden fan in the past, but I think this line is perfect for our times.  He is not pitting one group against another.  When he looked into the camera and said this is about “your family,” he was speaking to each individual without regard to race, creed, color, etc. 

In the 1950's, most Americans believed in individual liberties and Lincoln’s “Liberty to all” still resonated with the vast majority. There were grievous injustices calling for rectification, but we could be empathetic as we could connect with the individuals: the murders of the three civil right workers, the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the beatings as people marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Then, things flipped and everything became about the group to which someone belonged. 

One pernicious thing which happened was that the concept of individual liberty was highjacked by the right wing to mean everyone had the liberty to lift himself up by his bootstraps.  Then, they set about making certain other people had no bootstraps.  Today’s US Supreme Court is a practitioner of this approach, pretending not to notice that a lot of bootstraps are being stolen. 

Behavior which in the 1950's was vile individual wrongs which all decent men condemned later became politicized and converted into group rights with statistical analyses of how well this group was doing or how abused this group had become.  The change of focus away from individuals to philosophies of group victimization grew into the huge divide which plagues America today. We ceased to see the individual person but instead we mandated that there be quotas for groups, which turned out to be particularly harmful to the groups which they are supposed to help.  As de Tocqueville noted, the harms of Equality are hard to perceive and take a while to materialize, while the promise of the immediate rewards of Equality are easy to visualize. That change from protecting individual inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to measuring the equality of groups has driven a deeper and deeper wedge into American society. 

It is not surprising that many moderate whites will not admit to pollsters that they will vote for Trump, the madman.  While they detest the Alt Right yahoos, many moderate whites will vote for the crazy guy who at least promises to protect them and from the Dem Party which gave away their manufacturing jobs and took their homes to make Wall Street wealthier and actually shortened their life expectancies. 

Biden’s speaking to “your family” side stepped the Dems’ group rights and group grievances approach and focused on the individual needs of individual human beings without regard to political party, race, creed, etc. There should be no gainsaying that the Obama-Biden Administration under the tutelage of Timmy Geithner savaged the blue-collar white workers in the Rust Belt.  Assuming Biden prevails, his and the nation’s most serious challenge will come not from the Alt Right, but from his left flank which is deeply committed its Group Rights agenda in order to build a national patronage system of minorities, believing that soon the minorities will be the majority. It is solely a power play gussied up as better social programs.  Both the left and the right can be duped by their own charlatans. 

Assuming Biden gets to 270, I suggest he form a centrist cabinet including a number of moderate GOP.  America cannot longer allow the extremes to dictate the policy of the center. In the 1950's we listened to Eisenhower, and we shunned Joe McCarthy. 

Closing Thought: The biggest threat to individual Americans and our inalienable rights comes not from the Alt Right or from the Alt Left, but from Wall Street who funds both the Right and the Left.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams’ views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.)

-cw