After a chaotic four years, President Biden wants to voters to believe he’s governing as a unifier while actually governing as a hard partisan. For Democrats, that tension doesn’t pose much of a dilemma because the corporate press will uncritically permit Biden to sell his leftism as unification. It’s false advertising.
Biden set the tone for his term with a milquetoast inaugural address that pledged to “lower the temperature.” For many in this exhausted and divided nation, that was probably a welcome message. But it’s merely cosmetic and Biden proved that right away.
Among his flurry of executive orders were measures to implement “equity,” redirecting the federal bureaucracy towards a fringe leftist goal. Biden immediately signed another order legally redefining biological sex to include gender identity, an action with sweeping consequences for women’s sports, locker rooms, shelters, and much more.
The administration also indicated it would swiftly roll back the Mexico City Policy reinstated by President Trump, which bars foreign aid from organizations that perform abortions. From his newly implemented immigration measures to the 1776 Commission to the National Labor Relations Board, Biden is hardly governing as a temperature-lowering unifier—beyond aesthetics, at least.
The president campaigned on policies that even McClatchy said “would likely be considered radical if they had been proposed in any previous Democratic presidential primary.” That’s not a recipe for creating an administration capable of healing the country’s divisions.
This is interesting because Biden is one of the few remaining Democrats willing to cooperate with Republicans—or even entertain the notion they aren’t all bigoted fascists. Part of the problem is that Democrats have genuinely lost touch with how polarizing their agenda is, thanks to their rapid lurch leftward.
Cultural leftism is now entirely mainstream in the Democratic Party and the corporate media. As a consequence, policies aimed at “equity” or changing the definition of sex just don’t strike journalists and Democratic operatives as radical. Their spectrum is out of whack with the public’s. Decisions like the transgender executive order aren’t even cynical ploys to appease the base. It’s just what Beltway Democrats actually want.
The unity branding is both politically expedient in an exhausted country and rooted in ignorance. Democrats know a wide swath of voters wants Washington to function better but their agenda is so radical (that’s not my judgement, it’s McClatchy’s!) that it’s completely impossible for them to unify the country on a policy level.
There are some genuine radicals in the administration that know they’re radical and don’t mind if we know either. But the establishment Democrats Biden is populating his administration with are too out of touch to understand how radical their cultural ideology is out of coastal enclaves.
It’s the media’s job to hold Democrats to account when they engage in false advertising. Because, however, the corporate press shares the same cultural ideology as the Democratic Party, they’re in no position to do this since they don’t see that ideology as radical. It’s perfectly mainstream from their vantage points in coastal newsrooms.
That means Biden and his administration have four years to package far-left policies with branding that makes them more politically palatable while also shifting the Overton Window. The cultural left’s monopoly on our institutions is wreaking dangerous consequences that make our existing divisions much deeper, alienating Americans made to feel like extremists and bigots for disagreeing with radical leftism.
