Joe Biden’s Civil War re-enactment

We can’t blame American progressives for yearning to relive the civil rights movement. Those were heady days. Opposition to segregation — real ‘structural racism’ — placed you conspicuously on the proverbial right side of history. Joining the cause was like shooting up moral heroin.

So maybe it’s predictable that when talking up his two voting rights bills in Atlanta last week, Joe Biden evoked the 1963 bombing of a black church in Alabama and MLK’s storied march in Selma two years later. Yet it’s one thing to wax nostalgic, quite another to insist that it’s still 1965 — much less 1865. Biden’s speech recalled a Civil War re-enactment, with polyester Union uniforms and Springfield musket replicas whose dummy cartridges poof pale smoke.

Owing to two disobliging Democratic senators, both federal power-grab acts are probably dead, but the grandiloquent speechifying in their support is bound to live on. Biden claimed that the vote on this legislation would represent one of those ‘moments so stark that they divide all that came before from everything that followed.