Trump didn’t start the culture wars and Joe Biden will not end them

There’s a high-level, widespread, and persistent fantasy that a President Joe Biden will calm this country down.

High-level, in that liberal moderate writers like The Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk believe it, writing in a Nov. 7 column titled “America Won” that “Biden will assume it as a kindly grandfather who seems nostalgic for a calmer past.”

Widespread, in that suburban Republicans longing for the days of Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney repeatedly voiced hope the culture war would end and order would return to our streets if President Donald Trump would just leave the White House.

Persistent, because no matter how many hard-left personnel and policies Biden promotes and pursues over a term as president, the century-old political pipe dream of a “Return to Normalcy” will continue, propped up by the kind of media outlets and politicians who remember President Barack Obama as a great American uniter.

Biden made just such a move to the hard left this week, naming California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as his intended secretary of Health and Human Services — the kind of position most Americans could not name before President Barack Obama nominated Secretary Kathleen Sibelius to lead the largest expansion of government power into private lives since the Great Society. It’s also the kind of position that today’s Democratic Party will use to close churches, shutter businesses, and separate families in the name of Science.

Far from playing the “kindly grandfather” of high-minded fairytales, Biden’s pick has worked hard to establish a 33-year record on abortion, where he stands for taxpayer-funded child dismemberment until the moment of birth. His disdain for the lives of the unborn extends so far as to oppose punishing those who injure a pregnant woman’s child while committing a crime, and he’s been rated 100 percent by abortion extremists.

After 24 years in Congress, he continued his war as attorney general of California, The Federalist’s Madeline Orr reports, charging the activist who exposed Planned Parenthood’s disgusting organ negotiations, vying to force pro-life volunteers to promote abortion, and even targeting the long-suffering Little Sisters of the Poor.

What sort of culture war calming is this? Well, it isn’t any at all, and none should ever been expected by serious people. So why did anyone?

Essentially, a failure to comprehend the culture, its sacred importance to the American working class especially, and the very real war being waged on both that culture and those who hold it dear. It’s the same failure that caused so many to think Trump started the culture war when he simply dove right in.

Take, for example, the bald-faced lie that Obama was a unifying American figure. During his eight years in office, the left undercut the rights of the accused at colleges, promoted racial strife through “Black Lives Matter” mobs, assaulted trust in the police through the same, routed thousands of years of marriage law in the courts, targeted nuns in health policy, championed men’s access to women’s locker rooms with transgender policies, neutered the legislative branch through extra-congressional treaties and amnesty, and challenged the very idea of American citizenship as a privilege that must be legally earned. Is this unity?

Never forget that the same Obama so many seek to lionize as soaring above the viciousness of today’s politics chastised Christians at our National Prayer Breakfast for riding a “high horse” while churches burned in the Middle East, and finished his presidency with illegal aliens heckling him while somehow guests inside his White House. Is this soaring above?

So why did Trump’s four years seem so marked by cultural fighting? In short, because he actually pushed back on every front the left opened on Americans. While the Romneys and Ryans of the world wished to stick to entitlements, taxes, and the military, Trump didn’t flinch from battle in our sports, schools, churches and streets. No longer was the fight relegated to internet complaints about Christmas Starbucks cups. What for over a decade had been a one-way march against American culture was finally resisted — and became a real fight.

Finally, while the past year has truly exposed Democratic Party leaders’ view that religion is simply a traditional pastime, for many Americans, our culture and religion entwine with our families and patriotism at the center of our lives. And if Trump’s contribution to our defense can be cited on one more ground, it’s giving an example of fighting courage in the fray. This courage won’t be quickly lost.

Trump was elected president of the United States because he tapped into a growing rage building in the hearts of Americans who knew the political elites of both parties disrespect, resent, and even loathe them. In the years since, Antifa and Black Lives Matter have gotten a lot of energy out of their systems attacking civilians and police, but does anyone feel like that pressure building on the right has let off one bit?

No, Trump didn’t start the culture wars. And if it wasn’t understood before, let it be now: Joe Biden will not end them.