Joe Biden, the smiling figurehead who Democrats have nominated for president, closed his party’s virtual convention with a speech that proved two things about him.
The man can still ably deliver a well-written speech.
And he still has great message discipline.
Because he did what the other Democrats did over their four-day infomercial, make constant references to their own virtue and empathy, while portraying President Donald Trump as evil incarnate, a dark lord without virtue and without an empathetic bone in his body.
But through all that talk, Biden and the Democrats avoided saying anything about what many Americans are talking about now:
The violence, political and otherwise, plaguing American big cities run by liberal Democratic mayors.
The entire country sees the spiking street crime, the 50% increase in murders in some cities, looting in the downtowns, those news videos of people being pulled out of their cars and beaten, knocked out on the sidewalk, and cops pummeled in violent political confrontations.
Biden was silent about all that. I wish he hadn’t been. But he was. In his speech, Biden offered a thorough condemnation of Trump, and this memorable line.
“My father taught us that silence was complicity,” Biden said.
You’ve probably also heard the slogan “silence equals violence.” But my barber, Raffaele Raia, born in Naples, puts it this way:
“Chi tace acconsente. He who is silent says ‘yes’. The silence is the consent.”
Many protests have been peaceful. But many have not been. A cop getting his head thumped by a protester using a skateboard as a club isn’t a victim of a peaceful protest. The protests are no longer about the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
They’re also not about virtue or empathy. Yet in the midst of this, Americans are encouraged to apply virtue to politics.
But searching for virtue in politicians is childlike, like believing in fairy tales, pixies, or like hoping to find a purple unicorn who’ll be your friend forever.
Yet rather than search for virtuous purple unicorns, you might consider the words of Bostonian Henry Adams in “The Education of Henry Adams”:
“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man. Practical politics consists of ignoring facts. Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
Isn’t that what we’re seeing in our big cities, in Portland, Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago?
And isn’t that what’s being ignored?
This isn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about Democrats fighting themselves.
What you’re seeing are liberal Democratic mayoral administrations under siege by the hard left as Biden and the national Democrats seek unity.
Just before the Biden speech that was silent about violence, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a liberal Democrat and Biden supporter, defended having her police department keep protesters away from her Northwest Side home.
Her street is now a no-protest zone.
“I’m not going to make any excuses for the fact that, given the threats that I personally receive, given the threats to my home and my family, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that they are protected,” Lightfoot said.
“I make no apologies whatsoever for that,” Lightfoot said. “We are living in very different times and I’ve seen the threats that have come in, and I have an obligation to keep my home, my wife, my 12-year-old, and my neighbors safe. … I have a right to make sure that my home is secure.”
Yes, she does have a right, as a parent, as a citizen to protect her family. No one should have their family or home threatened. I know what that feels like.
Yet Lightfoot’s predecessor, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, had protesters in front of his house nightly. He didn’t use cops to clear them out. They even protested his children, at their schools, a former Emanuel aide told me.
If people want to protest, do it at the office, outside City Hall, not in front of the mayor’s home.
But many people without political power, in big cities, feel the same as the mayor now, only they’re not the mayor, they’re not a former vice president campaigning for president.
In some of the long-forgotten low-income neighborhoods, they’ve felt that way all their lives. Their children are shot off their porches. The surviving children suffer PTSD.
And now, in other neighborhoods, like the wealthy neighborhoods of downtown Chicago, condos are up for sale and flooding the market, after that second wave of looting in this summer.
But Biden and national Democrats can’t acknowledge any of it. They’re desperate to avoid it. They have nothing to say to it.
And the conflict inside their party rages on, out on the streets, where America can see it.
Trump will roll down that law-and-order road at the Republican virtual convention. He’s a politician, now, too. That’s what politicians do. Like wolves, they take advantage of weakness.
But Trump didn’t pave that road he’s on.
Biden and the national Democratic Party paved it for him, with silence that is consent.