Biden's soul-of-the-nation speech - initial thoughts

 He could have easily planted his feet on solid ground and stayed there. After all, he had an abundance of legitimization for his basic point to work with. Alas, he chose to engage in dirty pool instead.

It should have been a moment when he could look like he was doing the responsible thing. The MAGA movement has of late confirmed what has been obvious to some of us since the summer of 2015: that it is antithetical to the political and foundational framework of this nation. The figure at its center has shown himself to be completely off the rails with his insistence that either he be instantly reinstated as president a new election be held  and has shown that he's not even sharp enough not to give away the game when he mentions the classified documents being "in cartons" before FBI agents arranged them on the carpet for photographing. 

His drool-besotted leg-humpers have shown that no amount of outrageous behavior will motivate them to cut ties with him. Of course, there's the Proud Boys/Oath Keepers/4chan/Qanon level, but also pundits and politicians with a veneer of respectability that, while nearly impossibly thin, allows them to get published in venues such as The Federalist, American Greatness and Townhall and also hold high office in our nation's capitol. They have so convinced themselves - and apparently a majority of Republican voters - that they are the true stewards of the conservative mantle that attempts to point out the true lay of the land get crowded out on the public's radar screen.

Theirs is a shortsighted vision of what victory looks like. As I put it in a June piece over at Precipice entitled "In Pursuit of a Conservatism That's Not Spiritually Ugly," 

Trumpists think it’s possible to stomp every last human being who embraces collectivism, identity politics, climate alarmism or militant secularism to any degree into the dust and be done with them. 

That’s not only impossible, it’s an undesirable thing to aim for. 

Another tenet at the core of real conservatism is a belief in love that is rooted in a Judeo-Christian understanding of the purpose for which human beings were made. 

It comes down to the question of what conservatism is striving for. To couch it in terms of majorities in the legislative and executive branches of government, or eradication of DEI departments in the nation’s universities and corporations is to take a woefully shortsighted view of what it is we’re undertaking.

For one thing, assuming the kind of victory Trumpists envision were possible, what would they do with all the progressives they had stomped into the dust? These are people who have demonstrated fierce determination in pursuit of their vision, and they would not fade away quietly. We already see that with the ferocity with which they’r responding to the Dobbs decision.

We all have to live on the same planet and in the same country. We can't ignore the question of how we're going to do that.

But Biden came close to framing a mirror-opposite vision when he veered into a defense of the the progressive agenda, an addendum to his primary message that was not at all necessary:

Trump and the MAGA Republicans “promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence,” he said. They “are determined to take this country backwards.”

“Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love,” he said, referencing the social issues that Democrats have looked to place front-and-center for voters this fall.

That's just plain dirty pool. Slimy, scumbag-level opportunism. Actual non-Trumpist conservatives generally put a transcendent order, a design to the universe that comes from a sovereign God, at the core of their worldview. Biden is here trying to conflate a thousands-of-years-old understanding of human sexuality and what a family is with authoritarianism and the stoking of violence. 

Then again, ol' Joe's style has always involved an ample share of opportunism.

So in a moment in which he had the chance to bring clarity to the present set of circumstances, he went instead for muddying the waters in the name of advancement of his political brand.

That seems to be all anybody knows in terms of making pronouncements these days.