Resist Joe Biden?

After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, I wrote a column for the Washington Examiner (also published on Power Line) about how conservatives should respond to and cope with the Obama presidency. It was a high-minded piece that included such advice as “pray that President Obama achieves greatness in office” and “don’t assume that Obama is always wrong,”

The column wasn’t easy for me to write. Not after witnessing the way Democrats and media treated George W. Bush for eight years. However, I believed what I wrote and tried to follow my advice during the Obama presidency.

Twelve years later, I believe conservatives should take a very different approach to the Biden presidency. The notion of Biden achieving greatness in office is too absurd to pray for. We should hope, more modestly, that nothing terrible happens on Biden’s watch. If something terrible happens, that would be bad for our country.

We should also hope that Biden’s presidency is unsuccessful because if Biden is successful, that too would be bad for America. Biden and his team want to transform America radically. If they succeed, America will be weaker, poorer, less safe, less well-educated, less patriotic, less free, less fair, and less colorblind (and therefore more racist).

These are the stakes. They require forceful (but non-violent), relentless (but lawful) opposition to Joe Biden. In that sense, they call for something like resistance.

I also believe that conservatives should always presume that Biden is wrong. That presumption should be rebuttable. If examination of a particular Biden policy or personnel move shows it to be meritorious, we should, of course, conclude that it is.

But there are good reasons why the presumption should always run against Biden — why he should never be given the benefit of the doubt.

One is that this is how Democrats, the media, and Never Trumpers treated President Trump. They resisted him at every turn and slandered him with the worst kind of unsupported and untruthful accusations — most notably colluding with Russia.

In our system, both sides must play by roughly the same rules. Otherwise, the opposing side gains an unfair advantage and, eventually, subdues the other.

But this isn’t the main reason why Biden should never get the benefit of the doubt. The main reason is that he doesn’t deserve it.

This is true at many levels. Biden doesn’t deserve it because he has been wrong so often in the past, and on the rare occasions when he was right, he later changed his position. Thus, it’s sound to presume, rebuttably, that Biden is wrong about whatever issues arise during his presidency.

It’s also sound to assume this because Biden isn’t very smart. He had to resort to plagiarism in law school and in his first run for president. He’s never been able to talk coherently without a teleprompter (and sometimes even with one). He says stupid things, particularly about race. To my knowledge, he’s never had an original idea.

None of this is true of Barack Obama. His intellect may be overrated, but it is way above average.

Biden is also a liar. We can’t assume the truth of anything he says.

Nor can we assume its sincerity. Biden will say whatever he thinks is convenient at the moment. That’s one reason why he has changed positions so often.

Finally, circling back to where I started, the current incarnation of Biden is hard left — harder left than Obama presented himself during his presidency. Thus, we should presume that whatever he favors is bad for the country from our perspective.

We see Biden’s hard leftism in his plans for transforming America’s suburbs in accordance with the demands of the race-mongering left, for example. Biden has promised to go even further in this regard than the Obama administration tried to do. We see it in his early sub-cabinet nominations..

Any conservative who hasn’t seen it yet, will see it very soon in Biden’s executive orders.

Nonetheless, I still intend to follow some of my advice from 2008. Even after the way Trump’s opponents treated him, we still must be honest in our treatment of Biden. We must not invent things. We must not lie.

If we conclude Biden is right about something, we shouldn’t say he is wrong. And, in the unlikely event that the “something” is a matter of major importance, we should say he is right.

Am I, then, recommending that we resist Joe Biden? Certainly not in the sense of armed or violent resistance. Readers can decide whether the recommendations above amount to “resistance” in some weaker sense.