Bob Lonsberry

Bob Lonsberry

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LONSBERRY: Biden Call For Unity Rings Hollow

Calls for unity without simultaneous offers of compromise are meaningless.

You can't say it's time to come together while simultaneously announcing an agenda and signing a slew of executive orders that slap the face of the people you say you want to build bridges with.

That’s what President Biden and the Democrats fail to realize. It’s not unity when you tell the other side to sit down and shut up, it’s oppression.

It’s not equality if Republicans aren’t equal, too.

It’s not one nation if Republicans and their conservative principles don’t have a place at the table.

If your agenda has no consideration for the priorities of the 74 million people who didn’t vote for you, then you have no moral right to speak of unity, as you are not practicing it. You are, rather, using it – your call for the nation to come together – as one more weapon to deploy against your opponents.

Feigned calls for unity – those unmatched by corresponding steps toward the center – are an insinuation that division arises solely as the result of your opponents’ actions. And that’s what President Biden and the Democrats have done since the election, they have used unity as one more club to bludgeon Republicans into silence.

To voice dissent is to divide, they claim.

               And so no dissent can be tolerated.

               “Disagreement must not lead to disunion,” the president said.

               But should it be given voice, it is decried – as it was in the inaugural address – as “racism, nativism and demonization.”

               Winner take all is not the spirit of unity, it is the spirit of conquest and vengeance, and it is the attitude of the post-election Democratic Party. Several Democrat members of Congress have described Republicans as white supremacists. One said they had to be “de-programmed.” Those who voted for the last president have been deemed “radicalized” and the word “terrorists” is thrown around.

All Republicans are responsible for the riot at the Capitol, but no BLM activists are responsible for the rioting and looting this summer?

               We’ve had a year of political violence, with city after city hit by progressive mobs and the Capitol desecrated by a conservative mob – and only the conservatives are to be condemned? Is that how the Democrats think we build bridges and meet in the middle?

               And, honestly, how does the president think union can come when his calls for it are tacked onto an address that calls fighting climate change and white supremacy the nation’s most significant of “the cascading crises of our era?” Climate change and the claim that America is structurally racist and rotten from head to toe with white supremacy are subjects upon which there is disagreement, passionate disagreement, and dismissing that disagreement as division and bigotry is neither fair no honest.

               And a president who declares, “We have to reject the culture that facts are manipulated and even manufactured” must be honest enough to recognize that making up facts is a specialty of his party.

               Unity comes when both sides give. When each side is honest enough to see its own weaknesses. Unity is the result of common cause – taking up issues important to both sides, not just one. Unity comes when both sides feel valued and respected, and like they have a place. But that is not what the Democrats offer. 

Submission is not unity, silence is not brotherhood, intimidation is not leadership.

And the Biden inaugural address was not a call to end the “uncivil war,” it was a call for Republican oppression, for a servile obsequiousness that presumes the enlightenment of the Democrats and the inferiority of the Republicans.

It was a swing and a miss. An opportunity lost.

You are not the president of all Americans when you embrace the agenda of just half of them. And you cannot build friendship and trust through insult and condemnation.

Nor are you a leader to brotherhood when you don’t challenge the rhetoric of division arising from your own party.

Brotherhood is a worthy and attainable goal. It arises from love of country and love of neighbor. Those things are personal values that can be reinforced through public example and encouragement. They arise from political action that is driven by love of country, not hatred of opponent.

But right now both parties know that they get more money and votes when they sell hate instead of love, vicious competition instead of civil cooperation. Any president would be naturally and regrettably slow to renounce the tribalism that put him in office.

Joe Biden got to give the big talk today because his party coalesced around hatred of a person, a party and a people. That’s just a fact. And that can’t be changed overnight.

But it can never be changed by continuing to practice my-way-or-the-highway politics.

The Republican Party should look at what it does or says that empowered the desecration of the Capitol. The Democratic Party should look at what it does or says that empowered the desecration of dozens of American cities last summer. Both parties should examine their hearts and their rhetoric. And both parties should put what’s best for the country above what’s best for the party. Whether the symbol is a Gadsden flag or a raised fist, both parties must be honest enough to acknowledge that they play with hate in order to advance their lust for power. They manipulate at least some of their followers through the purposeful promotion of separatism and bigotry.

That is true of both parties.

               And it is true of Joe Biden.

               No matter what he said at the inauguration.

Calls for unity without simultaneous offers of compromise are meaningless.

You can't say it's time to come together while simultaneously announcing an agenda and signing a slew of executive orders that slap the face of the people you say you want to build bridges with.


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