Daily Archives: January 19, 2021

President Donald Trump is leaving office with a higher approval rating and the Republican Party on better footing than after President George W. Bush exited the office in 2009, when the younger Bush saw historically low ratings.

According to RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls, Trump is moving out of the White House with a nearly 40 percent approval rating overall. Bush enjoyed just under 30 percent of Americans on his side at this same point in his presidency.

One recent poll by the Pew Research Center made headlines this month. It was conducted in the aftermath of the attacks on Capitol Hill and showed Trump on his way out with the same approval rating as his last Republican predecessor, at 29 percent. Yet the poll is an outlier among seven other surveys conducted entirely in the aftermath of the latest Capitol riots, showing Trumps approval well above 30 percent. The most recent poll included in the RealClear average, from Rasmussen and conducted Jan. 11-14, shows Trump with a 48 percent approval rating.

At the same point in Bushs presidency, days before the incoming Democrats inauguration, the outgoing president also saw a poll illustrating public support below the outgoing average at 22 percent, still far lower than the survey results from the Pew Research Center released on Trump Friday.

The ousted one-term Republican has also left his party in better shape than it was in when he took office, transforming the GOP into an increasingly multi-racial, working-class party and with Democrats holding razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate after capturing the White House.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will now preside over a 10-vote majority, compared to a 79-vote majority as Bush left office in 2009. In the Senate, Democrats now hold a majority merely because they control the White House. Vice President Kamala Harris will be the tie-breaking vote in a 50-50 Senate where West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin looms large and has a red-state constituency to satisfy.

In 2009, Democrats held a 59-41 majority and the chambers two independent members caucused with the Democrats. Democrats later claimed a 60-40 supermajority once then-Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter switched parties early in the Congress.

For all the negative headlines about Trump, its clear the president remains far more unpopular in the media establishment driven by beltway narratives than in the rest of the country.

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Trump Set To Leave Office With A Higher Approval Rating Than Bush - The Federalist

Until recently, worrying about the power of large corporations was the lefts job. It makes sense. Conservatives have historically been champions of the market, and large corporations have usually stayed out of the culture wars. They once reflected American culture, rather than shaping it. Big government was always the bigger threat to our liberty.

Now, as social media giant Twitter bans the personal account of the president of the United States and even deletes tweets from @POTUS, the account owned by the U.S. government, one is forced to wonder who is more powerful, Washington or Silicon Valley? Twitter, acting in routine combination with Facebook, now claims the power to decide whether the people should be able to read the words of their own government.

Although it was published in September, Allum Bokharis prescient book, #DELETED: Big Techs Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election,explains how the relationship between corporate power and the American people has changed for the worse. As Big Tech companies have grown to monopoly strength, they have abandoned what pretenses they ever held of neutrality and are now, in Bokharis telling, trying to determine the results of the nations elections.

Companies typically have profit as their goal. That tends to mean they stay out of politics, reflecting a broad middle ground designed to alienate the fewest people and get business from the most.

But the customers of Facebook, Twitter, and Google are not you; you and your personal data are their product. Their customers are the advertisers to whom they sell that data. That, combined with their internet oligopoly, creates weird, never-before-seen incentives. They have no need to care about your opinion. Instead, they will use their power to shape it.

Bokhari lays out the rise of Big Tech in 16 briskly paced chapters, beginning with the close relationships between tech leaders and the wing of the Democratic Party concentrated in New York, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley. There has always been a revolving door between industries and the branch of government that regulates them, but the growth of government regulation, coinciding with the consolidation of power in a few left-leaning constituencies, elevated the practice to a high art.

During Barack Obamas term of office, Bokhari found that 55 employees from Google alone joined the administration, while 197 government employees left to join Google. Other tech companies could not compete with Googles numbers, but the pattern was the same. And it still is. Kamala Harriss brother-in-law is Ubers top lawyer. Her former press secretary is a senior communications manager at Twitter. A former senior counsel in her Senate office is now a lobbyist for Amazon. The list goes on.

The revolving door is not, as was once the case, an expedient alliance between regulator and regulated that, if morally fraught, at least makes business sense. The Big Tech-Big Government alliance is different. They have the same goalsmolding people into a more leftist mindsetand share a common culture. Young, highly educated, wealthy, and above all liberal, they all hold a similar vision for the country and the world, one often at odds with American tradition and history.

That convergence of vision is not necessarily a conspiracy. For many, it is likely the predictable result of living in a bubble. If nearly all of the people you talk to and work with every day hold similar views, it is natural to believe they represent a majority of the country. People who hold contrary opinions seem weird and aberrant.

For more culturally isolated people, any variance from their version of the mainstream is bizarre, even sinister. It becomes hard to imagine and benign motive for disagreement. Those who do become a threat to be converted or, failing that, isolated and made irrelevant.

How do they isolate ideological foes? Bohkari discusses the ways social media networks flex their monopoly muscles. First, they work with leftist activists to identify the serial misinformers and right-wing activists, as one leaked memo described them. Using outside watchdogs to validate their own views leads to a far harsher application of the rules to right-wing accounts than to any other. Left-wing activists have to work a lot harder to get banned in the social media echo chamber.

When the banned join another fledgling social network instead, they are doing what all of the libertarians say they should. Dont like Twitter? Join another network. Or start your own! But the story of Gab, a competitor to Twitter, shows the market failure in that scenario. Because the first big names to join the site were far-rightists banned by Twitter, the whole network was smeared as a home for racist trolls, not fit for decent folks.

Whether that is true or not when it is first uttered, it soon becomes true as regular users leave the site rather than be accused of consorting with racists. Apple and Google, which control 98 percent of mobile downloads, banned the Gab app from their respective download stores after pressure from the same radical groups. The free-speech alternative withers and dies.

The monopoly two-step played out again this week. Twitter purged thousands of pro-Trump accounts and the left-libertarian response has been, So what? If you dont like it, join Parler. But that same day, Google eliminated Parler, the latest Twitter alternative, from the Play Store and the other half of the duopoly, Apple, quickly followed suit.

Ro Khanna, a member of Congress, even called for Amazon to force Parler out of its web services arm, so that even if you could figure out how to download it, it would not function. Amazon gladly complied, carrying out the suppression of ideas that Khanna and the rest of Congress could not. The apps owners are currently looking for a new host.

The strategy to maintain the monopoly works because many of the first people banned by Twitter were pretty awful, and a site that features them as its leading lights will be seen as a reflection of that. Bokhari underplays this problem at times. He is right to mock Facebook and Twitters characterization of Alex Jones and Laura Loomer as dangerous, and to scorn how they call their censorship efforts by the Orwellian title of trust and safety.

But even if those efforts are unjust, the people at whom they are directed are often deeply unpleasant. Jones is not maybe a loon, he is definitely a loon. That doesnt mean he should be silenced by Big Tech, but lets not pretend hes not deeply unpleasant in his own right.

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union used to stand up for free speech even for people who were, in their view, wrong and bad. The ACLU even suggested this week, haltingly, that Big Tech may have gone too far. But that sort of broad-minded liberalism is on the decline.

Part of the problem is that in the past, we feared only that the government would trample on free speech. No one else really had the power to do so. We mostly won the battle against state censorship, but now corporations have grown so powerful that they are better able to suppress speech than the government. Its a new problem that requires new solutions, before unelected tech oligarchs control the flow of information for the entire country.

This book focuses on the threat to Trump, but Big Tech, having accumulated power, will not use it only against him. New political opponents will emerge and the same justifications will be given for silencing them.

People are growing wise to the problem, though, and the politicians on the right who once praised men like Mark Zuckerberg for their entrepreneurial spirit are now waking up to the danger they pose. Many accepted, or even celebrated social media companies banning Jones in 2018, but that tip of the wedge has now widened into more overt restrictions on conventional right-wing opinion, first blocking the New York Post, a venerable mainstream news daily, because it posted a story critical of Joe Bidens neer-do-well son, and now banning the president of the United States.

How much more control will social media companies seize now that Trump has lost his re-election bid? Their fear of right-wing populismnot helped by the disgraceful riot at the Capitol last weekwill surely cause them to clamp down harder. They will certainly not surrender their power, not when the Biden administration will be packed with like-minded progressives who support their efforts.

These new malefactors of great wealth are as dangerous as any government censor. The next decades will require us to grapple with that.

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How Big Government And Big Tech Conspire Against Voters - The Federalist

There are a hundred reasons why nuclear energy can play a massive role in the future of American power and prosperity.

It creates high-paying jobs better than any other energy source. Its fuel sources are abundant. It fuels NASAs most innovative projects. It offers a solution to conservation concerns without devastating the economy. And despite its sensationalist image, it is far safer than fossil fuels, and about the same in safety as solar and wind.

Nuclear provides 55% of our countrys clean energy, and about 20% of our power, and its one of the most reliable generators that we have on the grid today, says Dr. Rita Baranwal, who this month completed her tenure as assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy in the Trump administration. Our reactors in the U.S. avoid putting out 470 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. That number is equivalent to removing 100 million cars off the road.

But the field has been in a hard spot for decades. With high degrees of government regulation and small amounts of government investment, reactors have been shut down across the country, destroying jobs and energy.

The last four years, however, have seen early signs of what might just be a fission renaissance. After being slashed by President Obama in favor of more image-friendly and less efficient sources, the Trump administration has ramped up American investment in nuclear energy.

When the president took office in 2017, he ordered a review of nuclear energy policy, and he said that he wanted to begin to revive and expand our nuclear energy sector, Baranwal told The Federalist. And so he issued an executive order, promoting energy independence and economic growth, and that included the recognition that nuclear energy is a clean baseload power source thats very important to overcoming our environmental challenges.

These changes, and the increases in funding that have come with them, have resulted in groundbreaking accomplishments in American nuclear energy that have hardly received the coverage they deserve.

The Federalist spoke with the recent assistant secretary about the frontline of these changes and how they can shape the future of American power. While there are far too many new policies to entirely capture in one article, what follows are three major concrete improvements and why theyre so important.

Miniaturized fission plants are smaller, safer, cheaper,and now far closer to being a reality.

This September the design for a Small Modular Reactor (SMR), designed by NuScale Power, gained approval from the federal government. Its the first such reactor to be approved, ever. Small reactors like NuScales offer the possibility of fundamentally changing the economics of nuclear power.

While fission plants pay off in the long run, they have immense upfront costs that other energy sources just dont experience on the same scale. Today, starting a commercial fission plant is something of an Odyssean task requiring decades of paperwork, miles of land, and billions in investment. These smaller reactors could change all of that.

They can be factory-built and assembled on site much faster than these larger gigawatt-scale reactors. And so part of what we have seen with the cost overrun and the schedule delays will not be experienced with SMR or microreactor deployment, Baranwal said.

The mass-produced nature of these small reactors creates a wallet of benefits. The plants can be built far more cheaply while retaining the same safety guardrails of a larger plant. Once installed, each 100-megawatt plant would cost around $500 million to construct but generate $1.3 billion in sales and create 7,000 permanent jobs, according to a study on the design.

After providing $400 million in funding for NuScales sea-changing project according to Baranwal, the first-ever such plants will receive final approval for construction this year.

In addition to creating new sizes of plants, the last four years have seen huge strides in developing the next generation of reactors.

After three decades passing without the construction of a single new large commercial reactor in the entire country, two brand new ones part of Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia are now nearly complete. Theyll pave the way for more next-generation plants across the country, Baranwal says.

The completion of Vogtle Units Three and Four in Georgia, which had been supported by the DOE, are using AP1000 technology, which is the most advanced light water reactor system that has been licensed by the NRC, she said. Those units are the first new large-scale reactors to be built in the United States in more than three decades and theyre scheduled to come online in the next two years a very, very exciting time.

Additionally, the administration has approved and funded designs in even newer tech via the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.

(The program) focuses DOE and nonfederal resources on constructing advanced demonstration reactors that are affordable to build and to operate, Baranwal explained. So in October of 2020, we awarded the first tier of awards and that was $160. million in initial funding to Terrapower and X Energy as private-public partnerships. The intent is to build two advanced nuclear reactors that can be operational in the next five to seven years. Thats the top tier.

The public-private partnerships, when complete, will mark some of the most advanced fission technology ever built.

Investment hasnt only focused on near-term wins, like the first-ever approved Small Modular Reactor and the first new large reactors built in 30 years. The DOE has funneled funding to a set of long-term projects aimed at furthering fission energy science for decades to come. These changes can speed up not only the innovations noted above, but more futuristic aims as well.

Perhaps most important of these is the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR), the scientific project called by Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette key to revitalizing the nuclear industry. The facility, which began development in 2019, is an achievement Baranwal is particularly proud of.

Itll be a one-of-a-kind sized user facility, and it is, its going to be vital to our U.S. nuclear industry in that its going to ensure that we have the infrastructure thats necessary to support long term development of advanced nuclear technology, she said.

The facility will allow American companies to test their most advanced tech without surrendering their designs to Russia or China, both of whom currently possess advanced similar test reactors.

Nuclear energy in America certainly still isnt at its peak. But the groundswell of new research and development offers a hopeful sign for an energy source, which more and more Americans are seeing as an important part of the countrys future.

I think we have laid some really good groundwork, and those projects need to continue for the next four years, said Baranwal. And we will start to see the benefits of these programs that we have launched over the past year and a half, past two years, very soon.

Jonah Gottschalk is an intern at the Federalist. He studies Modern History and International Relations at the University of St Andrews.

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The Nuclear Energy Tech Of The Past Four Years Will Blow Your Mind - The Federalist

The left's 'both sides' media critique is extremely dangerous both because it's deeply flawed and because it's fashionable in corporate media circles.

The Politico newsroom melted into predictable chaos after Ben Shapiro guest-authored its sacred Playbook newsletter on Thursday, one day after MSNBC host Chris Hayes did the same. The Online Left used that juxtaposition to rail against the both sides ethos they believe dominates the corporate press, which equates mainstream conservatives with mainstream progressives.

This, they say, is at the root of the medias failure. Hayes may be an ideologue, but Shapiro, the argument goes, is a reckless disseminator of bigotry and disinformation.

Its certainly true that conservative media is populated by some grifters, and theyre truly a scourge. Shapiro is not among them, and leftists able to make it past the medias caricature of him should understand that. Id argue Hayes is absolutely worth listening to as well, despite him spreading his fair share of bad information.

Its natural, of course, for progressives to have an unfavorable perspective of Shapiro and a favorable one of Hayes. When the corporate press is run by domineering millennial journalists absolutely convinced of the progressive-or-bigot binary, thats how you get the discord at Politico. When decent people read coverage that implies theyre bigots, well, thats how you get Donald Trump. And thats how people radicalize.

A tweet Shapiro posted amidst the uproar captures the dynamic impeccably. He wrote:

My point: conservatives believe that Leftists want to ostracize them as evil, and then shut them down

Politico staff: conservatives ought to be ostracized as evil and then shut down

Whats useful about that point is that illustrates our cultural impasse. The cultural leftthose who run our newsrooms and boardrooms and writers roomslargely refuses to accept that any conservative is not personally driven by or responsible for promoting bigotry. Because theyre our cultural gatekeepers, this has created a bitter ideological monopoly in the ruling class and sown immense discord. Thats why these newsroom skirmishes are important flash points.

The Daily Beast published a story headlined, Matthew McConaughey Keeps Flirting With Alt-Right Darlings this week, impugning the unusually thoughtful actor because he sat down for interviews with Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. The progressive-or-bigot binary means ideologically homeless thinkers like Rogan and Peterson, both of whom are liberal on a whole lot of issues, are smeared as alt-right. This is made even more dangerous given that Big Tech takes its censorship cues from the corporate media, along with the soon-to-be-ruling party in Washington.

The lefts both sides media critique is extremely dangerous both because its deeply flawed and because its fashionable in corporate media circles. This is the key trend to watch as Joe Biden assumes office.

Theres nothing I can write here that will convince the cultural left that Shapiro is a perfectly reasonable, decent human being, or that it will benefit all of us to give him a mainstream platform that allows our political discourse to reflect a realistic version of the country. Thats another conversation entirely, and its a difficult one.

The corporate press should know, however, that by disenfranchising Shapiro, theyre not disenfranchising the Nazi scum who actually despise him. Theyre disenfranchising a wide swath of the country, and that wide swath of the country is hearing about it. Its what makes this new crop of aggressive, unpolished Republican lawmakers attractive. For some people, its also what makes fringe voices attractive.

But even thats not really the best reason the corporate press should welcome Shapiros contributions. Hes worth listening to because hes smart, reasonable, and decent, and even people who hate everything about him should at least be able to concede hes hardly a bigot.

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Politico's Ben Shapiro Freakout Is An Illustration Of A Much Bigger Problem - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist Senior Editor Chris Bedford and Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky discuss the Senates upcoming impeachment trial and what it means for the future of the GOP.

To believe, one, that you can just fire Donald Trump and this is all over and then everything goes back to normal the way it was, like George W. Bush years, is really naive, Bedford said. To think that Washington can make this decision and just change the way the entire GOP voter structure and even donor structure, to a point, is incredibly hubristic.

Jashinsky also noted that the Democrats attempts to exploit impeachment as a means for political gain will not sit well with voters who are attached to Trump more than the Republican Party.

Theres just a huge chunk of this country now that is so exhausted and disgusted by the lefts attempt to take and to seize this monopoly on speech, Jashinsky said. I really think one of the enduring legacies of Trumps moment in our politics is going to be that there was an awakening on that; not just among the Republican Party, not just among the MAGA base, but much more broadly in society.

Read more of Bedfords coverage of the GOPs approach to impeachment here.

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A Second Trump Impeachment Ensures The GOP Will Never Be The Same - The Federalist

MSNBCs Joy Reid, joined by her colleague Nicolle Wallace, called for the de-Baathification and scouring of the current Republican Party following four years of leadership under President Donald Trump.

I wonder if you have thought through kind of how Republicans begin what someone on my team earlier today called de-Baathification of the Republican Party? Reid asked Wallace on Wednesday night, likening the GOP to Iraqs Baath Party and suggesting Republican influence and ideology needs to be eradicated from American society the same way Iraq sought to remove the Baath Party influence from its own politics.

During de-Baathification in 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq ordered that all public-sector workers associated with the party were to be stripped of their jobs and banned from future public-sector employment. That transition government also offered rewards for information leading to the capture of senior members of the Baath party and individuals complicit in the crimes of the former regime.

Reid also questioned the role of NeverTrumper Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in the future of a GOP scrubbed of Trumps influence and supporters, celebrating the representatives letter calling for Trumps impeachment.

I wonder if Liz Cheney, her statement being the thing that Republicans used the Democrats used, sorry to explain why they needed to impeach Donald Trump, is there a little wing of the Republican Party that you think can do this sort of de-Baathification of the party? And can it work at this point? Reid asked.

Wallace agreed, echoing Reids points about Cheney and saying the Republican Party needs to be reevaluated because it is top to the bottom corrupted by Trumpism.

I think the challenge is that the rot is from the grassroots all the way to the presidency. So the rot is at every layer, Wallace said. You can call it rot because its now criminal sedition. But there are people that supported it from the grassroots all the way up through to the White House.

What became clear to me today is that whatever party Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney think theyre in, it isnt the same party that Don Jr.s going to run under. So I think you see the beginning of the end of one banner flying over Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. That banner will not be the name of the party that describes both of them years from today, Wallace concluded.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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MSNBC's Joy Reid Calls For 'De-Baathification' Of The GOP - The Federalist

President-elect Joe Biden has spent a better part of the last 16 months calling for unity and healing. Although some of his cabinet picks and early policy proposals have cast doubt on the authenticity of that objective, it remains a noble goal.

We do need unity right now. No, not the faux unity that comes from one half of the country either meekly surrendering its principles or by being effectively silenced by its opposition, but sincere unity a reaffirmation of our founding principles; a recognition that violent extremists must be routinely condemned no matter their self-identified political affiliation; and a commitment to defending the U.S. Constitution.

Bidens inaugural address wont mean much in the long run if his calls for harmony and reconciliation arent followed by actions that prove his sincerity. Still, his first speech as the 46th president of the United States is a one-time chance for Biden to set the initial tone for the next four years.

If Biden and his transition team possess the wisdom, theyll have revisited two particular inaugural addresses given in dire moments in Americas past. The words of Thomas Jefferson in 1801 and Abraham Lincoln in 1865 are invaluable to our present national crisis, and it would be prudent for the president-elect to ponder them and their calming influence on the nation.

Jefferson gave his first inaugural on March 4, 1801, in the tense aftermath of a bitterly contested rematch of his 1796 loss to John Adams. At the time, many international observers Great Britain chief among them expected the young American republic to devolve into violence and dissolution. Instead, doubters were shocked when Jefferson succeeded Adams in the first peaceful transfer of power from one party to another in the nations history.

To great surprise, Jefferson didnt seize the opportunity to proclaim a partisan political victory or seek vengeance on the Federalists who stymied him for years. Instead, he reminded the citizenry that political parties did not define them, exclaiming, We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. Indeed, they were, first and foremost, Americans.

The first duty of government, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, is to protect the peoples rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, natural rights that are fragile if not defended vigilantly. In the troubled time we live in just as in 1801 and 1865 politicians will be tempted to erode or curtail these rights instead of upholding them. Biden should enlist, as Jefferson promised, all the wise counsel and prudent advice he can get in this critical effort:

To you, then, gentlemen, who are charged with the sovereign functions of legislation, and to those associated with you, I look with encouragement for that guidance and support which may enable us to steer with safety the vessel in which we are all embarked amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world.

As more than 77 million Americans voted for a candidate other than Biden, the president-elect must internalize and embrace Jeffersons reminder that a democracy is only as virtuous as it provides the same rights and protections to all its citizens regardless of whether they are in the majority:

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

As Jefferson articulated in his first inaugural, during the next administration, repairing our local, familial, and religious associations must be an essential part of calming the temperature of the nation. Furthermore, just as religious tolerance must be a bedrock of our society, political tolerance is equally important to domestic tranquility:

Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.

Finally, Jeffersons first speech as president contains one of the most eloquent and succinct mission statements for what government should do, and what it should leave alone. Its a message as relevant today as it was 220 years ago:

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

After four years of Donald Trump everywhere, all the time, unavoidable, and all-encompassing, Biden should take the closing sentiment of Jeffersons first inaugural to heart: Upon securing law, order, and due process for the American people, the state should leave its citizens alone. In an ideal outcome, Americans across the country would forget Biden was president until a major public address or if, heaven forbid, Biden must lead America during a major war.

Sixty-one years after Jefferson was tasked with uniting Americans, Lincoln faced an even greater challenge. Lincoln gave his second inaugural on March 4, 1865, more than three years into a bloody civil war that had already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men.

His speech contains fewer than 700 words and likely would have taken just eight minutes to deliver. Like the even pithier Gettysburg Address, Lincoln once again proved he could convey grand ideas with poignant brevity. With a few carefully chosen words, Lincoln laid the foundation for the long, hard road back to peace.

As with Jeffersons defeat of Adams and the Federalists, Lincoln didnt use his inauguration to gloat in the coming demise of the Confederacy or to be overly jubilant in recent Union victories. Instead, the address took on the tone and effect of a sober yet soothing sermon rather than a typical political speech.

Early in the address, Lincoln recalls how few predicted the full, true, terrible nature of the Civil War. Its a chastening passage for us to reflect on in the wake of the capitol Riots of Jan. 6, an event we now know could have been marred by far more bloodshed:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.

It is the closing of Lincolns second inaugural, however, that we must reassert, and that Biden must strive to live up to above all. Given our current tribal, identity-based, grievance-driven politics, and our ongoing battle with COVID-19, Lincolns peroration must be the guiding light that shapes the hearts of the American people as well as those who have been elected to represent them:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nations wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

One thing Americans can agree on right now is that the country is hurting, frightened, and wary of what the future holds. And yes, asking Biden to emulate American titans like Jefferson in Lincoln is, admittedly, a daunting request.

To be sure, even if Bidens inaugural rises to even a modicum of the gravitas, dignity, and equipoise of two of our greatest Founders it wont restore Americas promise overnight, nor be a guarantee that Biden will continue to operate in accordance with the Constitution.

Yet, if he learns from the examples set by Jefferson and Lincoln, he has a chance to remind the vast majority of Americans those who are willing to listen and want their country to succeed that we can live amongst our fellow citizens as brothers and peacefully air our ideological disagreements without shedding any more precious American blood.

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What Jefferson And Lincoln Say About National Unity In Dark Times - The Federalist