Biden’s Unity: Obey Me or Else

Biden’s Unity: Obey Me or Else
President Joe Biden speaks during the 59th inaugural ceremony on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2021. (Patrick Semansky/Pool/Getty Images)
David Landau
1/27/2021
Updated:
1/27/2021
Commentary

The week after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, people are still wondering whether he was sincere in his call for unity.

Why would anybody wonder? Of course he was sincere.

As it happens, however, “unity” is not an American virtue. We’re not a unitary society but a pluralistic one.

Almost everywhere in history, the unitary leader has told his or her people: Obey me, or else. That was the precise meaning of Biden’s talk.

In defining the crisis of American society, our president named a trio of elements that he portrayed as threats to the republic: the pandemic, the riot at the Capitol, and the rise of extremism. He suggested that those elements have put the United States in as perilous a place as it has ever been.

Do you really think, Mr. President, that your difficulties measure up to JFK’s in 1961? Or to FDR’s in 1941? Not to mention Abe Lincoln’s in 1861?

Of those earlier crises, the most proximate to ours is Lincoln’s, because it concerns division in our own society.

Lincoln had thought about this problem for a long time. Decades before his first Inaugural, he had said the United States could never be destroyed from without, only from within.

When he mounted the Inaugural platform on March 4, 1861, Lincoln spoke about a crisis of “great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.”

It was not a band of marauders with whom Lincoln had to deal. It was a self-proclaimed confederation of seven Southern states, about to become 11, which had broken their tie to the Union while remaining geographically attached to it.

The audience for Lincoln’s Inaugural included people in the rebel states. The new president was acutely conscious of those people, and he took care to speak to them. Unlike Biden, who would one day hector his audience about what “we must” do, Lincoln used the phrase “we must” only once, in an anguished final plea. “I am loath to close,” he said. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”

Biden’s Inaugural talk, when you listen to it, encloses you in a leaden atmosphere that gives no vision of anything different—for he uses a society-speak from which none of us today can escape.

But in Lincoln’s talk, we can find another vista. The new president speaks about his constitutional duty to keep the Union together: “Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it so far as practicable, unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means ...”

My rightful masters, the American people—how quickly the phrase comes and goes! But it restores to us what we’ve been missing from Uncle Joe.

Biden’s “unity” is an import from societies that run on mandates. Lincoln’s plea on behalf of Union is an argument for consensus.

Lincoln doesn’t stigmatize his opponents. He hardly criticizes them. The closest he comes to arguing is to tell the rebels: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.”

Lincoln’s manner of speaking was commensurate with his ambition: to be president of all the United States. Biden’s unity promises to be achieved by pushing out the people he dislikes. Unity lives by its own extremes. That’s why it has no place in the United States.
David Landau is an author and a contributing editor to the Impunity Observer. His latest book is “Brothers from Time to Time,” a true story of the Cuban revolution.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.