President Biden kicked off his 2024 reelection campaign with a rousing speech at Valley Forge. And it was a good speech.
As expected, Biden focussed on Trump as a threat to “American Democracy.” “Democracy itself,” Biden railed, “will be on the ballot in 2024.” As usual, I focussed on the much more important philosophical content of his speech. And as expected, Biden reaffirmed his and his party’s reactionary recasting of America’s Founding and fundamental ideals. And he did it by, despicably, channeling George Washington.
In 1776-77, George Washington and his rag-tag Continental Army were facing, Biden correctly observed, “the most powerful empire in existence in the world at the time” while lacking “blankets and food, clothes and shoes.” And what were they enduring unimaginable suffering to fight for?
Their mission, George Washington declared, was nothing less than a sacred cause. That was the phrase he used. A sacred cause. Freedom, Liberty. Democracy. American democracy.
America’s “sacred cause,” according to Biden’s historical revisionism, was Democracy. Yes, he mentions freedom and liberty. But left unqualified, those terms are meaningless. Was he referring to individual liberty, or collective “liberty?” Keep that question in mind.
Leaving no doubt about his theme, Biden continued. “Valley Forge,” Biden said, is
“the very site that I think every American should visit, because it tells the story of the pain and the suffering and the true patriotism it took to make America.” Pain . . . suffering . . . patriotism—for and to what? Biden leaves no doubt:
Today, we gather in a new year, some 246 years later, just one day before January 6, a day forever seared in our memory because it was on that day that we nearly lost America, lost it all.
Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? I mean it.
This is not rhetorical, academic or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.
And it’s what the 2024 election is all about.
The choice is clear.
My emphasis.
Freedom and liberty, according to Biden, is the right to vote. Nothing else. Is this really what Washington, and Americans, risked all to fight for? This is as despicable a smear of America’s revolutionaries as one can imagine. What’s missing from Biden’s conception of “America’s sacred cause?”
After a long and mostly true diatribe against Trump and his MAGA supporters, Biden returns to his philosophical thrust:
They made their choice.
Now, the rest of us, Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans, we have to make our choice.
There’s that word again . . . choice. What’s Biden’s choice? Hint: it’s no better than Trump’s.
I know mine, and I believe I know America’s.
We’ll defend the truth, not give in to the big lie.
We’ll embrace the Constitution of the Declaration, not abandon it. [sic]
We’ll honor the sacred cause of democracy, not walk away from it.
Today, I make this sacred pledge to you: The defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.
America, as we begin this election year, we must be clear: Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.
Note Biden explicitly ties “your freedom” to the ballot box. Sound familiar? Biden is reaffirming his stated belief that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” From which all of our other rights flow. Let that sink in.
Yes, we’ll be voting on many issues: on the freedom to vote, and have your vote counted. On the freedom of choice.
The freedom to have a fair shot.
The freedom from fear.
And we’ll debate and disagree.
Without democracy, no progress is impossible. Think about it.
The alternative to democracy is dictatorship. The rule of one, not the rule of we, the people.
That’s what the soldiers of Valley Forge understood.
Did they?
James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” listed the three forms of tyranny that the Constitution was meant to protect against. In Federalist #47, Madison explained:
The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
My emphasis. The one (monarchy), the few (aristocracy), or the many (Democracy, or “the rule of we,” in Biden’s words) are the three forms of tyranny Madison, and the Founders, feared. Note Madison’s precision. Tyranny is tyranny, even if elected. Madison understood the totalitarian possibilities of democracy. The Founders didn’t vew democracy as “America’s sacred cause.” They saw democracy as something to be protected against.
Thus, while Trump may represent the tyranny of “the one,” Biden chooses the tyranny of the many.
Biden goes on to define his concept of Democracy
Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind, to be who you are, to be who you want to be.
But those freedoms are not yours by unalienable right. They are permissions at the mercy of the ballot box—which means, the mercy of the state. “The fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” Remember that the elected Biden administration tried to make an end run around the First Amendment by bullying social media into “moderating” their content to the government’s liking. Remember the Twitter Files.
Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change.
Democracy. Democracy is how we open the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, not notwithstanding our mistakes.
But if democracy falls, we’ll lose that freedom, we’ll lose the power of we, the people, to shape our destiny.
“We, the people,” Biden explains, distorting the American understanding of that term, is where our freedom resides—with the collective, i.e. the state, not with the individual. If we, the people, decide that you don’t have freedom to speak your mind, then you don’t. It’s “we, the people,” that shapes “our” destiny. Where does that leave the freedom of we, as individuals, to shape our personal destinies?
The following statement rings hollow in the shadow of Biden’s “democracy [as the] America’s sacred cause”:
And look at what these [foreign] autocrats are doing to limit freedom in their countries.
They’re limiting freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble, women’s rights, LGBQ rights, people are going to jail. So much more.
Note that Biden condemns those freedom limitations by autocrats. They’re not elected, after all. He doesn’t condemn those limitations as such. No surprise. Biden,being elected, feels no compunction to limit our freedoms at will, like by bullying social media, forcing us to pay off others’ student loans, imposing vaccine mandates, outlawing “dark money,” and other rights-violating initiatives. Biden nails shut the coffin of Americanism near the end of his speech:
That’s why he doesn’t understand the most fundamental truth about this country.
Unlike other nations on Earth, America is not built on ethnicity, religion, geography.
We’re the only nation in the history of the world built on an idea, not hyperbole, built on an idea.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal.
It’s an idea, declared in the Declaration, created in a way that we’ve viewed everybody as equal and should be treated equal throughout their lives.
The Founders never viewed everyone as equal, except in a very specific and delimited respect. Note where Biden stops in his quote from the Declaration of Independence. Here is what the relevant part of the Declaration says in full:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .
Why does Biden stop short of mentioning the “unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness?” The Founders understood that rights are natural endowments of every individual human being—that is, derived from man’s nature and his relation to broader nature—that these rights precede government.
Biden talks about America’s sacred cause, but never mentions America’s actual sacred cause. Nowhere does Biden mention inalienable individual rights. In fact, the word individual isn’t even mentioned.
America is not a Democracy. It is a Constitutionally limited Republic in which people can abide by the majority because their inalienable individual rights are shielded from the majority’s power. No, President Biden, America is not a country in which “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” You’ve got it exactly backwards. The fundamental inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and property are the rights from which the right to vote flows.
Misreading another American concept, Biden concludes:
In the cold winter of 1777, George Washington and his American troops to Valley Forge waged a battle on behalf of a revolutionary idea, that everyday people like where I come from, and the vast majority of you, not a king or a dictator, that everyday people can govern themselves without a king or a dictator.
“Self-government” fundamentally means the individual’s right to self-govern his own life. That is where the Declaration’s equality comes in—equality of rights to individual freedom of action in shaping his own life. It is from this moral concept of equality of individual self-government that the broader concept of political self-government in the democratic sense comes from. It is a limited democratic process, a process that forbids the majority from voting away the rights to “freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble, women’s rights, LGBQ rights.” Remember that the Democratic Party was founded as the party that believed that a majority could vote a minority into slavery
There you have it. Biden and Trump are fraternal twins. Both favor tyranny, with Biden’s the most dangerous form because of people’s vague understanding of genuine Americanism. The Democratic Party, founded in 1828 on a pro-slavery platform, has always rejected the American concept of Constitutionally limited rights-protecting government. Now, in 2024, the Democratic president has reaffirmed his party’s reactionary, anti-American philosophic heart.
Related Reading:
Joe Biden—the Real Protégé of Jefferson Davis
Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right.
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson
Brad Thompson on “the unidentified, unacknowledged union of proslavery and progressive thought.”
America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters
Senator Mike Lee is Right: America ‘is not a Democracy’
Constitutional Republicanism: A Counter-Argument to Barbara Rank’s Ode to Democracy
Mesmerized by Elections, the NJ Star-Ledger Forgot that Tyranny is Tyranny
The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur
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