The Biden Fantasy Of Love, Compassion, And Harmony– Will You Be My Friend?

Machiavelli and Henry Kissinger were both down-to-earth realists who understood that national self-interest, decisively and irrevocably stated, was the only geopolitics that made sense.  The very intimation of  accommodation or compromise signaled weakness, irresoluteness, and lack of political spine.  Once one’s enemies got a whiff of wobbly intent, they would pounce.

Richard Nixon was successful in his overtures to Russia and China not because he wanted to make friends with them and to reason together, but to state unequivocal national positions and to negotiate the best possible arrangement with formerly implacable enemies.  His was not a policy of accommodation but negotiation though strength and resolve.  It worked, and although the Cold War continued for more than a decade, it was thanks to Nixon and Kissinger that an international door was opened without letting the cat out.

Ronald Reagan was equally determined to promote American interest without compromise.  “Mr. Gorbachev”, he said in Berlin, “tear down this wall”.  Reagan’s dramatic increase in America’s military might was designed not only to strengthen our national defenses, but to intimidate the enemy and force him to spend beyond his means.  Reagan called Russia’s bluff and a corrupt and crumbling regime completely collapsed.

Donald Trump was even more explicit in explaining America’s geopolitical interest – America First.  Although he was criticized by the Left for arrogant intolerance, international bullying, and playground tactics, he only echoed the words of his predecessors – only by operating from a position of strength can one further national aims.

Jimmy Carter, one of the most unpopular presidents in recent years governed on a platform of understanding, compassion, and tolerance – so much so that most voters thought he was abjuring American greatness, and exchanging a heroic, strong, militant exceptionalism for a pusillanimous moral one.  

We will do the right thing, he preached to our amoral, Machiavellian enemies who salivated at the prospect of easily taking over America’s interests.  He hectored Americans for their wastefulness, individualism, and selfishness, told them to wear sweaters and turn down the heat, and became a caricature of failed moral idealism

Enter Joe Biden who believes in the progressive Utopian fairy tale lock, stock, and barrel.  In his first hundred days, he has opened the southern border to all comers, reconfigured the fiscal environment to redistribute wealth, welcomed every possible sexual orientation, opened the treasury sluice gates to redress every evil that threatens social harmony, good, and international peace, and made it clear to all that no holds would be barred to create a greener, more inclusive, and more tolerant world.   

To no one’s surprise, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and renegade Islamic terrorist movements were delighted.  Although Biden got on his pulpit and called the Turks and Chinese genocidaires, Erdogan and Xi simply chuckled and went about their business. Turkey is essential to any resolution of Middle Eastern conflict, and China owns the US.  Both Presidents, Machiavellian to the core, know that Biden’s sanctimonious posturing meant absolutely nothing.  Nothing at all.

Similarly, there is no way that corporate America and Wall Street will lie back and be undone by Biden’s punitive regulations and taxes.  Nor will the ‘One Percent’ who dominate American policy, society, and politics applaud Biden’s misguided, naïve, and historically ignorant moves to divert private money into corrupt, inefficient public spending. 

Nor will ordinary Americans sit still for rising gas prices thanks to Biden’s stifling of America’s innovative energy sector, or for the swelling of welfare roles and public dependence thanks to his come-one-come-all border policy.  Nor will traditionally conservative Americans let progressives’ condemnation of whites, lionization of blacks, dismissal of biological sex and encouragement of sexual choice stand. Biden’s call for compassionate policing resulting in the defunding of the police, a dramatic reduction in force, and a consequent increase in crime, will result in citizen anger, hostility, and political action.

Biden has preached a gospel of unity, but in these hundred days has added to divisiveness, not reduced it.  His progressive flacks have gotten even more than they had hoped for.  Their own bitter, intractable demands for a new economic and financial order, a reconfiguration of social norms, a cancellation of history, and a capitulation to foreign interests have been met – all in the ironic, deliberately disingenuous name of compassion, inclusion, and respect.

The reality of a Biden administration is just now sinking in.  Many if not most of those who voted for him were voting against Donald Trump; and the Democratic vilification of the former President thanks to the complicity of major media framing him as a modern day Beelzebub, an evil man who had to be cast out, worked; but now that Americans see just how revolutionary Biden’s claims are, just how dismissive of foundational principles, private sector vitality, and social order, they wonder what they have done.  The midterm elections of 2022 cannot come soon enough.

Human society and civilization have never been ruled or governed by ‘compassion, love, and harmony’.  Human nature has never changed since the emergence of homo sapiens; in fact long before that.  We are a naturally self-interested, self-protective, territorial, defensive, and aggressive race.  It is competition that has produced progress and allowed the most productive, creative, innovative, strongest, and most entrepreneurial to thrive.  

While progressives insist that together we can create a better world and reach Utopia, conservatives know better.  History is on their side.  Conflicts, territorial disputes, disagreements over religion, philosophy, and culture have always characterized us and always will.  Standoffs or monopoly only have resulted in peace.  

Pax Romana was only possible because of Roman military might and disciplined administrative control.  The Soviet Union and the United States were at peace because of a nuclear standoff.

Russia, China, and Iran are already on their way to achieving their imperial designs; and Biden’s everyone-else-first international policies will simply help them along.  There can be no moral leadership in an amoral world, and America, which  persistently believes that there can be, will come out second.  

We are quickly losing our status as a premier nation, losing ground especially to China, but also to Russia.  Other nations are unimpressed by this chaotic, unchecked undoing of traditional religious and social values.  What American progressives see as the way to a New World, most others see as a degradation of a once unified, strong, and principled nation. 

Will you be my friend, Biden asks?