Reading George Will’s latest article in National Review online Praising the normalcy of the former Vice President Joe Biden, I couldn’t help whispering to myself: What is properly normal about Uncle Joe?
I am totally aware of his record as a moderate liberal in the Senate. He was against busing children to distant schools and supported a law-and-order policy to fight crime. However, I am also aware of his claim that a Mitt Romney victory in 2012 would have meant blacks back in chains, along with his defense of abortion and affirmative action, and the millions made by his son’s business with China while he was VP. Today, he has a developing “Ukrainian nightmare.”
Biden is no Mr. Normalcy. On the contrary, he is a professional politician ever seeking a radical cause to call his own. But moving to a more liberal position will undoubtedly be hard to achieve since he will run against figures like senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
In a year when liberals are looking for someone who can punch President Donald J. Trump in the mouth, being Mr. Normal is a liability — even if this is a misconception. And Biden knows it. The first thing the now-candidate has done is disown his more than 45 years of political history — or at least trying to reframe it all.
Candidate Biden says he is deeply sorry that Senator Biden did not play a more significant role in Anita Hill’s campaign to destroy one of the greatest Americans of our generation, Justice Clarence Thomas. Candidate Biden is also keen to show how he was always a friend of the cultural left and prayed for the gospel of the politically correct, which may have him disavowing the eulogy he did in memory of Senator Storm Thurmond. I’m counting down the days to see Candidate Biden denying three times his association with his former patrons, the State of Delaware financial services industry, which had had him on a short leash for nearly half a century.
Despite all that can be said about the progressive credentials of both Senator and candidate Biden, Uncle Joe has already proven that he has embraced the agenda of the radical left and that, once in power, will do everything to destroy the old America. Did Barack Obama not do the same? In 2008, the then-candidate Obama was in favor of restricting immigration, dubious about his position on gay marriage and preaching a post-racial society. In the White House, President Obama did the opposite of what he said he would do.
When I look at Uncle Joe’s alleged moderation, the only thing that comes to my mind is Virginia’s Democratic governor Ralph “Blackface” Northam. Elected as a moderate against the hatred that Trump it was claimed spreads across the country, the main job Northam nowadays seems to have is to make infanticide legal in the Old Dominion.
More than ten years after Obama’s election, the Democratic Party is now to the left of many European Social-Democratic parties. On economic issues, the Green New Deal – endorsed by all candidates for the Democratic nomination – would cause deep embarrassment to many die-hard socialists in Europe. Can you imagine the Swedish Social-Democrat Party trying to destroy all of those Volvo jobs?
As far as cultural issues are concerned, modern American liberals would be uncomfortable with comrades Lenin’s and Stalin’s selective respect towards Russian national history – which they tried to appropriate for political ends and do not entirely destroy. The American cultural left’s hatred for everything that can symbolize the tradition or history of the United States, on the other hand, has no parallel in the old European communist guard of the Italian Palmiro Togliatti or the Frenchman Maurice Thorez, for example. Indeed, the electoral bases of the communist parties through the Cold War were so socially conservative and many of their leaders so opposed to sexual liberation that, following standards of modern America, they would be considered the most reactionary among reactionaries.
If you do not believe me, watch the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek. According to the last, the word communism is a sort of provocation – without real meaning – after the disasters of the 20th century. Regarding economics, the content of Zizek’s speech was the old social-democratic chant that one must regulate capitalism, not subvert it or destroy it.
https://youtu.be/78BFFq_8XvM
Speaking about culture, Zizek spared no criticism of the millennial leftism advocated by the Ocasios-Cortezes and Ilham Omars that seeks refuge in the micro causes of identity and the moralisms of politically correct thinking. According to him, this leftism is a form of political withdrawal, impotent moralism, “of marginal narcissism.” In the past, the idea was to change the world. Now, the revolutionary desire is to change the words, the pronouns, the genres, the bathrooms.
From any perspective, Uncle Joe, as well as the entire Democratic Party, is on the left of the old Stalinist Zizek. When George Will — who was once known as the dean of the conservative columnists — praises the moderation of someone more radical than Zizek, this must be understood as a sign that conservatives have lost the culture and political wars and the Republican establishment has lost its shame.
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