Biden’s remarks are a sad reflection on his own inability to comprehend the country he once led.
Former President Joe Biden returned from the political afterlife on Thursday during a Juneteenth observation service at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Galveston, Texas. There, he insisted that all his political adversaries were burning with outrage over the event over which he was presiding.
The millions of Americans who went blissfully about their day without any knowledge of Biden’s address or the circumstances that have supposedly filled them with resentment might be shocked to learn that they secretly harbor racial hatred in their hearts.
During the service, Biden hailed “the events of Juneteenth,” which are “of monumental importance to America.” And yet, to this day, “some say to me and you that this doesn’t deserve a federal holiday,” Bidne insisted. “They don’t want to remember,” he added, “the moral stain of slavery.”
It’s not at all clear who Biden is indicting here. The convenient foil he is summoned for himself describes few, save the provocateurs and professional cynics who populate, and are largely exclusive to, online forums.
America should have at least one federal holiday commemorating emancipation. If that’s not going to be Emancipation Day, which celebrates the signing of the Compensated Emancipation Act in 1862 on April 16, it might as well be Juneteenth. This day memorializes the spread of emancipation to the farthest reaches of the former Confederacy, a little over two months after the surrender at Appomattox.
But this holiday, which was once exclusive to Texas and portions of neighboring states, is still new to much of the country. In 2021, when Biden made it a federal holiday, just 37 percent of Americans even knew what it was. In their understandable ignorance, many Americans could be confused for thinking that sidestepping Emancipation Day in the effort to celebrate Emancipation is a contrivance. That is confusion, not racism.
States can have their own holidays, too. No one would say that a lack of proper national appreciation for Evacuation Day — the day on which British troops finally left Manhattan Island about 18 months after the surrender at Yorktown — means that most Americans don’t care about the Revolutionary War. It just means that they’re not aware of the rather arcane aspects of history that are of profound local importance to New York and New Jersey but have little relevance outside it.
Biden’s goal, sordid though it seems, was to imply that his fellow countrymen are bigots. His enlightened actions and the contempt they supposedly generate are illustrative of the degree to which he represents the salvation of the national soul — something Biden invoked often during his tenure in the Oval Office. He reflected on his own uncommon wisdom several times during this convocation.
Biden resurrected an old, lost argument from his time in the White House when he attacked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, although not by name, for trying to “erase history from our textbooks and classrooms,” and he castigated Donald Trump, also not by name, for restoring the names of military forts with named for Confederate military officers. Of course, Biden got this all wrong, too.
Biden’s characterization of Florida’s elementary and high school curriculum would not be recognizable to anyone who doesn’t get their news from NAACP press releases. National Review called the allegation that Florida Republicans are whitewashing the history of slavery a “smear” with ample evidence in support of that contention. If Biden and his backers are content to stand by the lie, having had ample time to correct their error, that should lead objective observers to conclude that the dishonest party here isn’t the GOP.
As for the renaming of U.S. forts, the Pentagon has done something rather clever. It is reverting the names of American military installations from generic stuff like “Fort Liberty” back to a more recognizable form: Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Benning, etcetera. But it is not rechristening these forts to honor the traitors who fought against the Union. Rather, it is renaming them to memorialize American heroes who just happen to share the same surname.
Fort Bragg is no longer named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Instead, it commemorates the service of Private First-Class Roland Bragg, a U.S. Army paratrooper who earned the Silver Star for his exemplary service during the Battle of the Bulge. General Henry Benning is to be forgotten in favor of Corporal Fred Benning — a recognition of his impromptu command of his machine-gun company during the Argonne offensive in World War 1, for which he earned the Distinguished Service Cross. Colonel Robert Hood has replaced John Bell Hood as Fort Hood’s namesake, another recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross for service in the First World War. Fort Robert E. Lee now honors Private Fitz Lee, an African-American Buffalo Soldier and a Medal of Honor-winning hero of the Spanish-American War. And so on.
This is what you might call a compromise. Indeed, it is the best sort of compromise, insofar as it enrages maximalists on all sides of the issue who are enlivened by cultural conflict and domestic disunity. If Joe Biden finds himself in the maximalists’ camp, that is more a reflection on him than us.
It is also indicative of why his administration was a little-loved and short-lived. The president and those around him made a sport of antagonizing their political adversaries, robbing themselves of the ability to craft a broader political coalition in the process. They thought they occupied the culture’s commanding heights and could dictate terms to everyone else — precisely the sort of delusion that convinces its sufferers that compromise is both pusillanimous and unnecessary.
Biden is still fighting those old fights, but his opponents long ago abandoned the field in pursuit of grander objectives. Biden’s remarks are a sad reflection on his own inability to comprehend the country he once led. They certainly reveal a level of contempt for his neighbors that is, at the very least, unbecoming in a president. It’s no wonder he isn’t one anymore.