OPINION:
President Biden’s summer of rage started with two divisive speeches highlighting the dangerous core tenets of the far left’s electoral strategy and governing philosophy. Rather than uniting the nation’s caustic political divisions, Mr. Biden has been an adversary to American amity during his time in the White House.
The president on May 19 told the Morehouse College commencement: “You started college just as George Floyd was murdered, and there was a reckoning on race. It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you.”
He then asked: “What is democracy if Black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leaves Black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a Black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”
Leave aside that according to FBI data, 89.3% of Black men are killed by other Black men or non-White perpetrators. Leave aside his misinformation about voting rights and other issues as well. It was a speech that made it clear the president and his party want young Blacks to hate this country.
Then, at an NAACP dinner in Detroit, the president doubled down on discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion policies as a “core strength of America.” He also compared supporters of former President Donald Trump to segregationists.
The 20h-century political philosopher Aurel Kolnai famously called National Socialism, the ideology of the Nazis, a “backward leap across the ages.” His most famous writing, “The War Against the West,” was intent on alerting powers like the United States about Hitler’s impending assault on Western humanism and democracy.
Kolnai saw how what he called the “religion of race” was being used to justify totalitarianism.
He also believed correctly that the utopian messaging, like we often hear from today’s Democrats who attack American exceptionalism, is the underpinning of totalitarianism. As Kolnai posited about the dangers he saw rising in 1930s Germany, “there is no being in oneself, only a being for one another or against one another.”
In their recent book “The Wisdom of Our Ancestors,” Graham James McAleer and Alexander Rosenthal-Pubal explain Nazism through Kolnai’s interpretation as reducing “persons to elemental forces and rid[ding] them of will, thought, autonomy,” and therefore agency. That is essentially what makes each individual unique and therefore powerful in a free society.
It is undeniable that fascism and socialism seek to deaden those aspects of our humanity.
Democrats today use the religion of race differently than the National Socialists of a century ago. While leftism is primarily still driven by wealthy White elites, the division created by leaders like Mr. Biden is intended to help expand state domination over people rather than racial purity.
Mr. McAleer and Mr. Rosenthal-Pubul propose that Nazism “was not built on nation but race,” manifesting itself as a tribe with imperial designs.
The twin obsessions of the left that have reinforced each other over the last five decades — race and welfare — are incompatible with constitutionalism, morality and liberty. Too many Democrats have already acquiesced to this dangerous shift in tone driven by their party elites and their largest donors.
Like Marx’s attempts at a total upending of societal norms and a rejection of Judeo-Christian moral principles, or President Barack Obama’s charge that we “begin again the work of remaking America,” Kolnai suggested that this religion of race is “not so much a reawakening of bygone things as the creation of new things in the spirit of a total inversion” or reversal of pluralism.
It is destructive to liberty and democratic society as well as a form of tyranny that could end up subjugating racial or religious minorities.
Racial minorities are being subjugated by the left through welfare, public housing and other government programs. Democrats have now ensnared millions of illegal immigrants in this control scheme. For religious and political groups, the increasingly evident two-tiered justice system, militant cancel culture and government regulations that strip away religious liberty protections are the principal vehicles to exact compliance.
Mr. Biden’s rhetoric is not the ramblings of an old man. The people who are writing these speeches know what they are doing. The roots of this rhetoric are tied to some of the worst attempts to control humanity and the most dangerous political ideologies the minds of men have ever conceived.
As polls show Blacks and Hispanics showing greater independence from Democrats, expect that the religion of race will be preached at greater volume.
Will there be another incident this summer that will allow the left’s professional protestor ecosystem to foment outrage and riot as they did in 2020? Will we see a rise of the next Black Lives Matter from the Marxist funders of the Democratic Party? No one can say, but it remains a dangerous moment for our nation and the president is more than willing to stoke the flames.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV.
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