Joe Biden’s Sudden Onset Fanaticism

Listening to Joe Biden declaiming against the “human garbage” who voted for Trump, declaring American whites to be “systemically racist,” and supporting the transgendered lobby’s definition of “gender,” some may wonder whether our outgoing president really believes what he’s saying. Did Biden conveniently change his views once in office or while running for the presidency in 2020; or has he really been converted to the woke left during his four years in office? Certainly, there isn’t much in his previous 50 years in politics to suggest such a dramatic conversion; and Biden, who has never been known for deep principles, simply moved ideologically along with his party.

When the Democrats were a working-class party with a segregationist wing, Joe was quite happy to fit in. He even cultivated segregationist Democratic allies and boasted of how Delaware “was once a slave state.” When many Democrats supported a more vigorous use of the death penalty, Joe was for that as well. But since 2020 he has taken the position of his leftward moving party by loudly opposing capital punishment. While he has been consistent in his championing of a “woman’s right to choose,” in this matter he has represented what has become the consensus in his party. 

What all this shows is that Biden has been an opportunistic career politician. Although he has manifested an embarrassing tendency to fabricate imaginary experiences and rarely sounds intelligent, he has prospered by following the Democratic Party line. This has made him a “safe” politician for party bosses while earning him the support of the predictably leftist legacy media, which have properly viewed Biden as an accommodating vehicle for their projects.

But there may be more to this story. One may notice how Biden has acted as a lame duck president, since Trump’s triumph on Nov. 4. He has become fanatically devoted to what, in his case, may have begun as an assumed role. Indeed, he’s been racing against time with breakneck speed to enact all the programs of the woke left. Whether it’s trying to push the appointments of leftist federal judges through Congress, working to protect the right of biological males to use girls’ locker rooms and compete in women’s sporting events, forbidding offshore drilling, commuting the death sentences of rapists and murderers, or awarding the Medal of Freedom to George Soros, Biden in the last stage of his presidency has become an embattled promoter of leftist agendas. All of this is to be seen as his “legacy.”

His actions, in my view, are not those of a thoroughly unprincipled head of state. They are the frenzied measures of an ideological zealot as he is leaving office. What began in Biden’s case as opportunism may have become a passionate commitment.

I’m put in mind of this possibility after researching a much-vexed historical question: When exactly did Hitler become fanatically and even genocidally anti-Semitic. Most of the reliable scholarship I’ve seen on Hitler’s disastrous fixation locates its beginnings in the spring of 1919, with the suppression of the Bavarian Communist Republic (Räterepublik), centered in Munich. Hitler observed the murderous activities of this radical regime and then witnessed its later downfall.

Contrary to long established misconception, based on Hitler’s rewriting his biography in Mein Kampf, the later German tyrant had not become anti-Jewish while living in Vienna as an impoverished artist between 1909 and 1913. Brigitte Hamann shows this was not at all the case in her detailed study, Hitler’s Vienna. Nor is there any indication that Hitler’s parents were anti-Jewish (their closest family friend was a Jewish physician). Moreover, during World War I Hitler served as a soldier under a Jewish officer, with whom he got on quite well.

According to the German historian, Ralf Georg Reuth, even the report that Hitler turned against all Jews, after witnessing the short-lived Communist regime in Bavaria, which was overseen by Jews, requires clarification. Reuth shows that Hitler was generally sympathetic to the Communist rule in Munich. In fact, he didn’t protest its activities until Bavarian military units appeared to put it down. According to Reuth, Hitler became an anti-Semite to win support from anti-Bolshevik nationalists, some of whom were then deploring the predominance of Jews in Communist uprisings. Hitler opportunistically took the most extreme position on this issue, at least initially, to protect himself from the charge that he and some of his war comrades had actually supported the Communist side in Munich.

But it made no difference how Hitler arrived at his anti-Semitism. Once he embraced it and used it to rise politically, he lived and breathed it. He also reconstructed his own past to make it reflect this professionally useful fixation. No, I am not comparing Biden (whom I admit to disliking) to a mass murderer like Hitler. But we may conclude that because someone takes a position initially out of opportunism does not mean that it could never become something more intensely believed.  This in my view may be the case with Biden.

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