Tempering our talk, saving our country
The thing is Joe Biden doesn’t have to be Ronald Reagan – a superb politician blessed with an abundance of personal magnetism – to look good against Donald Trump.
He just has to be competent. Their first (and maybe last) presidential debate showed why: the president ranted and raved, harassed and interrupted, looking about as presidential as Moe Howard at a pie fight. As for the Democrat for president, he occasionally lashed out but for the most part kept his head, smiled, and went about his business.
Score a big one for the former vice president.
Last week at Gettysburg, Biden went beyond merely being there, however. In the age of division, he delivered a speech that was Reagan-like: a fulsome tribute to American national unity.
Surprise! He took his theme from Lincoln, whose November 1863 Gettysburg speech reframed the American experiment in self-government.
The former senator and veep said: “For President Lincoln, the Civil War was about the greatest of causes. The end of slavery, widening equality, pursuit of justice, the creation of opportunity, and the sanctity of freedom.
“His words would live ever after. We hear them in our heads. We know them in our hearts. We draw on them when we seek hope in hours of darkness; ‘Four score, and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’… Here, a president of the United States spoke of the price of division, and the meaning of sacrifice.
“[Lincoln] … taught us this, a house divided could not stand. That is a great and timeless truth. Today, once again, we are a house divided, but that my friends can no longer be.”
From this point, Biden launched an attack on American disunity (without ever uttering Trump’s name) and harkened back to days of yore when bipartisanship was possible.
Now, in the sweep of American history, the periods of true national fusion have been far less conspicuous than we’ve been led to believe. There were certain moments in the early days of the Republic – we’re eyeballing you, James Madison – and there is always the example of World War II.
But even during the war for national existence against Japanese treachery and Nazi butchery, there were political, cultural, and racial divides. Just ask Jackie Robinson of baseball fame about the latter and Franklin Roosevelt about the former.
FDR was forever looking over his shoulder during the war at the political opposition.
This wasn’t a bad thing. Political differences are the meat-and-potatoes of democracy. It’s not a democracy without differences of opinion. Democracy is about speaking out, disagreeing, running for office. Anything short of this no democracy. Democratic politics is not about holding hands and playing patty cake.
But it’s not designed as a zero sum game either: heads I win, tails you lose. We vote, we don’t threaten or disdain one another. We don’t brandish guns, we brandish ideas and electoral coalitions. We don’t coalesce in trenches with members of our team only, but we mingle and mix in the marketplace, well, of democracy.
At Gettysburg, Biden said, “Too many Americans see our public life, not as an arena for mediation of our differences, but rather they see it as an occasion for total, unrelenting, partisan warfare.”
He continued, “Instead of treating each other’s party as the opposition, we treat them as the enemy. This must end. We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in this country. A spirit of being able to work with one another. When I say that, and I’ve been saying it for two years now, I’m accused of being naive. I’m told, ‘Maybe that’s the way things used to work, Joe, but they can’t work that way anymore.’ Well, I’m here to tell you they can, and they must if we’re going to get anything done.”
For most of our history, we Americans have fought a winning battle against disunity. We are a big country composed of an array of interests. Many are the times when those interests have been in conflict with one another. Indeed, this has been the rule rather than the exception.
A natural tendency to fly apart, however, is mitigated by leadership that recognizes, at least rhetorically, that the membrane of our nationhood is thin, sometimes exceedingly so. The failure of national leaders to tamp down the fires of disunity can have the most grievous consequences. To encourage those fires is a betrayal of a sacred national trust.
Something dark is taking place in the country, Biden said at Gettysburg. “I’m not talking about ordinary differences of opinion…. No, I’m talking about something different, something deeper.”
“… We must seek not to have our fist clenched, but our arms open. We have to seek not to tear each other apart, we seek to come together. You don’t have to agree with me on everything, or even on most things, to see that we’re experiencing today is neither good nor normal.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.