What do you do when voters’ determinations don’t go your way? If you’re Joe Biden, you claim that democracy (as in representative government) isn’t democracy and promise a global summit to address it while condemning “nationalism” — i.e., the people’s expressed will to oppose globalism.
As the AFP reports, “Denouncing President Donald Trump as an affront to American values, Democratic candidate Joe Biden vowed Thursday that if elected he would hold a summit aimed at halting a backslide in global democracy” — an event he promised to hold within a year of taking office.
“The former vice president, who leads early polls for the Democratic nomination to challenge Trump in next year’s election, said his foreign policy would be ‘based on clear goals driven by sound strategies, not by Twitter tantrums,’” the news organ continued.
Biden made his comments in a low-energy (sleepy?), nearly hour-long speech at the City University of New York. “In it, the former vice president promised to restore America’s democratic leadership in the world and to work with our allies to tackle global challenges, from climate change to terrorism to nuclear proliferation,” Vox informs.
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He also had harsh words for Trump, telling the audience that the world sees the president “for what he is: insincere, ill-informed, and impulsive. Sometimes corrupt. Dangerously incompetent, and incapable, in my view, of world leadership and leadership at home” (video of full speech below), Vox also tells us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7uBlkqpMYA
In addition, Biden “chastised Trump for downplaying human rights and voiced alarm at the ‘rapid advance of authoritarianism, nationalism and illiberal tendencies around the world’ even among US allies, naming Hungary, the Philippines and Turkey,” writes the AFP.
Biden was referring to those nations’ nationalistic leaders: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Note here that while many leftists may want to lay the “blame” — as they would characterize it — for these nationalists’ ascendancy on the president, these men’s rises predated Trump’s.
Duterte assumed office June 30, 2016, when all the oracles thought Hillary Clinton would be our next president; and Erdoğan and Orbán took their nation’s reins in, respectively, 2014 and 2010, long before a President Trump was even thought possible.
As for Biden, his criticism actually reflects a lack of respect for the “democracy” he trumpets. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Erdoğan, Orbán, and Duterte were elected by their people, and the Hungarian enjoys wide support. This lies in stark contrast to the Saudi king Biden’s ex-boss, Barack Obama, bowed to or the fascist Chinese he pandered to.
Moreover, portraying the three leaders as of a kind is odd since they have little in common. Erdoğan is an Islamic supremacist who seeks to flood Europe with Muslim migrants and has supported demographic jihad, while Orbán is best known for opposing that migration and defending his continent’s Christian heritage. Duterte is a ferociously anti-Catholic oddball who has mocked Christian doctrine, has called God “stupid,” and isn’t keen on celebrating the upcoming 500th anniversary of Christianity’s arrival in the Philippines.
While this anti-Christian stance should suit today’s Christophobic Western leftists just fine, the world’s Bidens may paint these leaders all with the same brush because of a commonality they do share: nationalism. Overlooked is that what is thus termed today is actually man’s default; it is, after all, an extension of tribalism, which itself is an extension of family patriotism.
Of course, power seekers such as Biden will say anything, support anything, and oppose anything to win votes. Yet insofar as he really does find this human default odd, and leftists generally do, it’s because he’s imbued with that fashionable, ahistorical oddity called internationalism.
One benefit the Left enjoys is that since it controls the culture-shapers and debate-framers — the media, entertainment, academia, and most of big business — it’s very good at making radical changes quickly seem some new status quo. Thus have social engineers made “transgenderism,” something truly bizarre, de rigueur to the point where opposing it brings scorn and ostracism.
Likewise, the Left manages to treat a treasonous spirit’s deadly embrace — or internationalism, as some again call it — as obligatory. And while it had largely imbued the West, when people overtly express the historical norm that is love of national family, it’s not that leftists cast it as some atavistic regression.
No, going further, these con men extraordinaire behave as if it’s some unprecedented affront to common sense and decency.
Yet national-family love is normal, and the reality is that it is increasingly being chosen by the people. Anyone startled by this may as well be surprised when a mother prioritizes her children over others’ or when a tiny boy admires his daddy more than the bloke next door.
Call the people’s will the fruits of “democracy” — or of what the systems in question actually are, “republicanism” (as well explained here) — the truth is that leftists’ complaints about the undermining of it are pure projection. As with how the British people voted for Brexit but the statist pseudo-elites are stymieing it, their gripe isn’t with the thwarting of representative government.
It’s with representative government itself — when it doesn’t happen to represent their agenda.
Photo of Joe Biden: AP Images
