Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
President Biden’s 100-days celebration smashed into a wall of silence: silence about the illegal immigrant flood at the border; silence about children locked out of schools; silence about the chances of Middle East peace; silence about the vaccine miracle and how to turn such a triumph into a structural resource in our government; silence about riotous turmoil in American cities; and silence about the over-hanging shadow of economic decline. Biden’s silence about these essentials of national well-being explains why he had to omit the traditional “the state of our union is strong” in opening his address to Congress on April 28. For in the case of each of these silences we can point to failures of action or inaction on his part that have manifestly placed the union in peril.
The most dramatic confrontation of these silences occurred in the powerful line in Senator Tim Scott’s response that “to lock a child out of school is to lock an adult out of a future.” Besides his failure to challenge teachers’ unions with a demand to reopen schools, however, we can trace his hand through all of the perils that we face. He, alone, is responsible for the flood of illegal immigrants at the border. Biden alone ripped up the lives of productive laborers on the Keystone XL pipeline, an action radiating through the lives of citizens far beyond the oil fields and construction sites. Day one of his hundred days brought forth destructive executive orders that immediately caused these disastrous results. Rather than uniting the nation around the common achievement of the anti-covid vaccine, he elected to pretend that nothing happened before he came into office. This posture requires citizens to pretend that the do not know what they do know and, in consequence, breeds disintegrating skepticism about the good faith of officials.
His failure to embrace the progressive peace agreements between Israel and several of its regional neighbors undercut the momentum toward peace and increased the likelihood of renewed hostilities in the Middle East that will imperil United States interests and citizens. And his deliberate falsehood that he was leading the country out of an economic recession that was the worst since the Great Depression not only hides the reality that, even at its pandemic worst, the economy remained in important respects stronger than it was during several years of the Obama Administration in which Biden served. That falsehood was perhaps the most dangerous of Biden’s early performance, inasmuch as it deflects attention from what is discernibly a potential economic overhang that will drive the nation into deep recession. Debt-fueled consumption tied to artificially low interest rates are operating mercilessly toward a cliff-fall encounter with reality, made worse still by ever increasing political demands to feed the frenzy with new and irresponsible welfare spending.
The story in short: Biden’s first hundred days constitute in politics something not unlike the process of railroad construction in the 19th century. Where the latter opened smooth highways to growth and productivity, however, the former smooths the way toward national collapse. While extending rails faster and farther served to hasten the day when the nation reached its frontiers and prepared to settle into civilization building, extending governmental dependence through the so-called “American Family Plan” paves the road to economic collapse. We borrow the term “family plan” from the hostelry and tourism industries, of course, and in which the term means discounted access to comfort and recreation. In Biden’s usage it means lifting responsibilities from families to place them in the hands of government, thereby isolating individuals within families as direct objects of government paternalism.
When we recognize the connection between economic collapse and political collapse, then we can understand the ultimate failure and most alarming danger made manifest in Biden’s first 100 days: his determination to sunder the bonds of fellow feeling through a relentless pursuit of critical race theory, embedded in all governmental contacts with the citizens of the republic and predicated upon the notion that the people require re-education before they can be trusted with the instruments of self-government, means quite simply that his plans are based on the proposition that only the regimented society can be a healthy society. He is silent about urban turmoils, therefore, because they provide pretext for the kind of changes in policing, education, health care, and elections that must occur in order to achieve his goals. What he wants to “build back better” are in fact the basic units of society re-constituted as an undifferentiated mass. It is much worse than ironic, therefore, to be constantly belabored with praises of “diversity” when it is clear that variation in tone, character, and purpose within the citizen body is the one thing that he is most resolved to eliminate.
We must in the end give the President credit for being consistent, however obscure his presentation. Despite the obscurity in the rhetoric, everything points in one direction: namely, under Joseph Biden the social welfare state in the United States is on the march.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved
Dr. William Allen is the Chief Operating Officer at the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.
https://theamericandossier.com/articles/the-biden-agenda-a-new-american-architecture
