Joe Biden’s inaugural address was dominated by calls for unity. But this seems naïve or even disingenuous to me, as the divide between Americans seems impossible to bridge. Our division now goes beyond the traditional stuff of politics—e.g., the tax code, how to reduce the national debt, the foreign policy best for America, etc.—to include things like abolishing the police, allocating voting rights based on race, and even attacking the nuclear family.
Given this state of affairs, on what could Americans possibly unite? We can’t even agree on who is to blame for the Wuhan Virus (or what it should be called), and the Left even wants to strangle the most American of our fundamental values: free speech. In today’s environment, I find the once insightful words of the late Christopher Hitches to be less insightful than they are obvious:
If you say you're a unifier, you expect and usually get applause. I'm a divider. Politics is division by definition, if there was no disagreement there would be no politics. The illusion of unity isn't worth having, and is anyways unattainable.
But to make matters even worse, Joe Biden might actually be dividing the nation even further while disingenuously acting under the banner of unification. How? Paradoxically, he could be doing it by waging a new, seemingly unobjectionable war.