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. They stop time’. Thus ‘each one of the members of the Senate is going to be judged by history on where they stood before the vote and where they stood after the vote’.

Pretending America is still in Lyndon Johnson’s administration addresses none of the country’s problems

What makes these bills a defining test of who we are as a people (you know the impassioned president’s emphatic rhetorical drill, Obama microwaved to lukewarm: ‘it’s about all of us. It’s about the people. It’s about America’) are efforts by red-state legislatures to install what Biden calls ‘Jim Crow 2.0’. In other words, Republicans are returning the US to the period following the Civil War and before the civil rights movement, when restrictive Southern laws effectively denied black citizens the vote. Talk about turning back the clock! For since the 2020 general election, red states have variously: limited the number of ballot drop boxes (for submitting absentee/mail-in ballots) and/or restricted their use to certain times of day, reduced early voting, cut the period for requesting absentee ballots, prevented absentee ballots from being sent to the entire electorate automatically, tightened voting by mail and brought back lynching.