Biden’s cognitive dissonance

President Joe Biden’s address announcing his decision not to seek reelection may also represent the current American mind—one conflicted and lacking in philosophical consistency.

President Biden praised Thomas Jefferson as the man who “wrote the immortal words that guide this nation,” referring to the Declaration of Independence. Yet, he then misquoted the document, stating, “We hold these truths to be self-evident. We’re all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.”

Missing are several key words found in the actual declaration, perhaps most notably “men,” as in “all men are created equal.” Such an omission seems intentional, since to speak in ontologically clear terms regarding human anthropology goes against much of what the contemporary left stands for. It also proves problematic with the Democratic Party’s rallying around the now presumptive presidential nominee, female Vice President Kamala Harris. (All of this, of course, aside from the fact that to speak of “men” in the declaration was to speak of all human beings as equal in their possession of natural rights.)

The crux of President Biden’s speech involved his stepping aside to save “democracy.” Yet, he extolled many of his own perceived accomplishments throughout the bulk of his speech. If he was so successful, why does our democracy still need saving? One assumes he referenced what he describes as the threat of former President Donald Trump, but that was not entirely clear. Moreover, where has the democratic process been in the selection of Harris to take Biden’s place?

At a deeper level, President Biden conflated “democracy” and “republic,” a conflation with big implications. He closed his speech by recounting the story of Benjamin Franklin in 1787 telling a passerby that the Constitutional Convention had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.”

A republic, or a representative democracy, is where a sovereign people exercise power through their elected representatives. This was the ideal for national government promoted by America’s Founding Fathers. A pure democracy, which the founders feared, is not the same as a republic. One can read the history of ancient Athens, as the founders did, to see the troubles with a pure democracy. To expect the president to make such a fine distinction in his address is probably too much to ask, but should it be? Great American presidents are often great teachers, and a lesson was missed in President Biden’s address.

Thus, when President Biden stated that in America, “the people” rule, he was correct but did not properly or constitutionally qualify the statement. President Biden and the Democratic Party have long eschewed small-r republicanism in favor of a more purely democratic government, seen in many state-level reforms in solidly blue states (like the ballot initiative), in the advancement of the large—and unelected—federal administrative state, or even in the calls to abolish the Electoral College. All this, of course, while they also often look to the unelected judiciary to solve problems or for presidential executive orders to create laws without ever being decided by Congress. Neither of the parties is above such double-mindedness (though in different ways and for different purposes on the political right), but President Biden’s address provided a glaring example. Here again, the contradictions abound.

Ultimately, President Biden’s references to America’s Founding Fathers (in addition to mentioning Abraham Lincoln), his mangled quotations from the Declaration of Independence, and his retelling of Franklin’s “republic” story demonstrate a lingering, though attenuating, attachment that the American people hold to their founding principles and history.

Just as the progressive era zealots learned in their push to overturn the constitutional order, Americans still today remain at least emotionally tethered to their founding identity. Many Americans (though the number is steadily decreasing) still hold to what James Madison in The Federalist Papers called a “reverence” and “veneration” for the Constitution, and they still exercise a lukewarm “political religion,” as Lincoln put it, for the laws, especially the supreme law of the land. Such “mystic chords of memory,” to use another of Lincoln’s phrases, provide hope if we can only recall them, accurately, to our collective public consciousness.

Ultimately, President Biden’s speech serves as a representation of a broader culture that still retains a remnant of attachment to its founding ideals while at the same time not matching its walk with its talk. Such is the moral conundrum America finds itself in today exhibiting cogitative dissonance between principles grounded in an objective, created order and the promise of majoritarianism and progressive historicism.

President Biden and his speechwriters, while emphasizing democracy, would have benefited from acquainting themselves with the most famous observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville. Not only would Tocqueville help them grasp a more accurate understanding of the democratic experience in America, but he would provide them with the gift of perspective—one that may help many Americans now in this cultural moment.

In the closing to his introduction in Democracy in America, Tocqueville explained that his work was an attempt “to see, not differently, but further than the parties.” Americans would do well to see beyond the current political parties, follow the breadcrumbs left in Biden’s speech, and look back to the Declaration of Independence and the “laws of nature” for guidance, which, as Christians understand, are laws themselves grounded in the truth of “nature’s God,” the Biblical Yahweh—“the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God” (1 Timothy 1:17).