Biden hoped to be a peacemaker. Now, he knows he must be a warrior.
Two ideas about how to move the United States back to normal, less acrid politics have warred with each other ever since Donald Trump rode division and resentment to power. On one side were calls for big-hearted efforts at reconciliation and mutual understanding. On the other was an insistence that the extremist virus had to be contained before anything better was possible.
President Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday was about many things, especially a furious energy that countered talk about the limitations of his age. But above all, it marked the final collapse of the reconciliation strategy. It was an acknowledgment that sermons about putting aside our differences are out of touch with the country we have become.
It’s hard to imagine a more reluctant convert to the warrior class than Biden. A champion of bipartisanship, the veteran of 36 years in the Senate loves few things more than reminiscing about past friendships with some of his most reactionary colleagues. He proved that a degree of bipartisanship is still possible, earning crossparty support for his big infrastructure and technology investment programs. These and other Biden measures pushed huge sums into Trump-supporting states and counties.
None of this breached the barricades built out of mutual suspicion because you can’t reconcile with those who have no interest in civility or dialogue.
Hopes that Trump would fade away were stillborn. He is more radical and dangerous than ever. Immediately after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, one Republican leader after another disowned him. Then came silence and, after that, surrender.
There could be no better example of the futility of outreach than the fate of the tough bipartisan border bill that Biden and his party negotiated with Sen. James Lankford, a conservative stalwart from Oklahoma.
Lankford could only sadly nod in agreement when Biden in his address described the measure as “the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen” and touted its endorsement by the Trumpfriendly Border Patrol union. Under orders from Trump, Republicans killed the concessions they had once demanded.
So Biden the peacemaker gave way to Biden the scrapper on behalf of a threatened democracy. He reached for the most dramatic metaphor available to him in expressing just how irreconcilable our differences have become. “Not since President Lincoln and the
Civil War,” he declared, “have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.”
The models for Biden’s war strategy are Harry S. Truman, who spoke relentlessly but cheerfully of a “do-nothing Republican Congress,” and Theodore Roosevelt, who declared in accepting the Progressive Party’s 1912 nomination: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Truman won. Roosevelt lost that time, but his progressive politics would shape the future.
A strategy of warfare requires tactical decisions. Rallying Democrats was the first priority of his speech, but Biden made two of his other top objectives obvious. He intends to fight hard for the kinds of Republicans and independents who rallied to Nikki Haley’s candidacy by making clear that he will stand up for Ukraine’s survival and stand strong against Vladimir Putin’s threats. His pointed contrast of Trump with Ronald Reagan reminded many Republicans of a heritage their soon-to-be nominee would squander by “bowing down to a Russian leader.”
Biden’s emphasis on reproductive rights, including in vitro fertilization, also appeals to a large share of middle-of-theroad and even moderately conservative suburbanites, particularly women, who see radicalism in the drive to upset the old status quo on abortion access.
Pundits frequently deride policy proposals as “laundry lists.” But offering detail about what government could do to ease the day-to-day problems of the non-affluent — from health care to child care to the curse of “junk fees” and “price gouging” — is popular with the many voters who long to escape the trenches of our cold civil war.
It’s a vision of a politics that refocuses on the everyday.
Biden finds his comfort zone in compromises over infrastructure bills and budgets. He’ll have to live the next eight months far from that happy place, doing battle against the forces of “resentment, revenge and retribution” that make the approach to public life he loves impossible.