Christmas is supposed to be a time to come together as a family — and as a nation — but this year, we’ve never been further from that ideal. It’s now a regular holiday tradition to moan about sharing a meal with family members who disagree with you politically. And if we can’t even spend amicable time with our own families, you can forget about charitable feelings toward our countrymen. Much of the blame lies at the feet of President Joe Biden, who entered office pledging to unify the country and proceeded to do anything but. Yet even amidst all the acrimony, there’s still a silver lining worth celebrating this Christmas.
Now, America’s bitter divisions didn’t start with Biden, but he exacerbated them at a time when America was desperate to come together. Rightly or wrongly, it’s undeniable that Donald Trump was perceived as a divisive figure throughout his presidency. Biden’s great appeal was his soothing, placid demeanor, which stood in stark contrast to Trump’s street brawler mentality. He pulled moderates and independents off the sidelines with the hope that he would return a sense of normalcy to the country. Biden won the White House because too many Americans naively believed that he would fulfill his pledge to “put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again.
Yet Americans no longer suffer any delusions on this front. If any doubt remains on whether Biden kept his unity pledge, a recent Pew Poll should put the debate to rest once and for all.
A solid 75 percent of Americans have little to no confidence in Biden’s ability to “bring the country closer together.” Upon taking office in 2021, nearly 50 percent were “confident” he could deliver unity— roughly the partisan breakdown. Today, that number stands at only 24 percent. Even a majority of Democrats — 58 percent ― no longer have faith in Biden.
Americans now understand that the pledge for unity was a lie. He didn’t tone down the “harsh rhetoric,” but ramped it up, calling half the country “semi-fascists” and potential “domestic terrorists.” Far from “lower[ing] the temperature,” he weaponized the federal government against his political enemies. His interest in “listening to each other” amounted to building a censorship regime that ensured Americans could only ever hear one side of the story. He cynically appealed to Americans’ sense of decency to disguise his true ambitions.
All of this was designed to initiate the most sweeping social engineering program the world has ever seen. Once in office, he — or his handlers and donors — couched a radical agenda in a language that Americans could understand: freedom, equality, individual rights, and basic human decency. (RELATED: HART: My 2023 Christmas List)
On day one, the neo-Marxist concept of “racial equity” was put front and center. The administration immediately began to “embed equity principles, policies, and approaches across the Federal Government.” In other words, initiatives that re-enshrined legal distinctions between Americans based on the color of their skin.
The idea that “equity” was really just about ensuring equality was aggressively laundered to the American public. America had treated people unequally for so long, we were told, that true equality could never be reached unless the government stepped to artificially level the playing field. On everything from hiring quotes to grant decisions and medical care, discrimination was justified in the name of justice and equality. They perverted these traditional American ideals in order to further an ideology actively hostile to them.
Alternatively, as debates raged over deviant school curriculum and child sex changes, the Biden administration couched its own radical position in the language of freedom and individualism. You see, allowing pornographic material in elementary school libraries is about maximizing freedom — just what the founders intended. The same goes for sex changes. Individuals have the right to live how they please even if they’re minors, never mind the irreparable harm and predatory gender industry. Curriculum curation and common sense laws against child mutilation are framed as a reactionary conservative threat to all freedom-loving Americans.
These linguistic shifts only scratch the surface of Biden’s disgraced unity push. They extend to nearly every facet of our common life, as Americans can seemingly no longer agree on what constitutes terms like “racism,” “harm,” “democracy,” or even the differences between men and women. Perhaps Biden and Co. really thought they could bring Americans together around these new definitions. But the broader indication of this poll reveals that no one is buying it.
Construction workers line up for pay beside the first Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, Manhattan, New York City, 1931.
The lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, a spectacle that’s been a holiday tradition in New York Cit for over 80 years. Though the first… pic.twitter.com/PKYWeyjc5b
— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) December 13, 2023
Wokeness — the broadest characterization of Biden’s ruling philosophy — fails to unite even when it’s framed within traditional American concepts. It might bully Americans into submission temporarily as it did in 2020, but it cannot unite in the long-term because it is inherently built on division: black vs. white, men vs. women, gay vs. straight. Citizens cannot share a common life on this foundation alone. (RELATED: 2 Dollar Gas And Cheap Trees? Trump’s Ghost Of Christmas Past Is Haunting America This Holiday Season)
As the novelty of linguistic trickery wears off, very few people find themselves truly behind the ideas that equality requires discrimination, justice requires multiple “restorative” tiers, that free speech requires censorship, or that tolerance requires repression. We might not all be able to articulate the distinctions with scholarly alacrity, but Americans have generations of internalized tradition that allows us to intuitively see through the bait-and-switch.
This warrants a cautious optimism this holiday season— something that conservatives are particularly guilty of overlooking. We are often quick to lament the decline in American values, in the liberty, equality and justice our forebears fought and died for. But this Christmas, let’s just take a moment to be thankful that American principles are more resilient than we sometimes fear.
This too shall pass. And we should not lose hope that one day soon we will all come together again.