Once an immigrant, now a citizen. The American Revolution attracted me as a child from a corrupt and oppressive culture. I saw America's founding fathers as freedom fighters.
Freedom is an idea I thought it was magic at age 7. Never had I heard of such a personal autonomy-based idea. This transformed my life.
First American colonies were rooted to the earth, tethered to a mad king. They were willing to risk being labelled traitors and having their lives upended for self-determination. That vision guided everything I've done since coming to America, including "The Song of the Human Heart" and The Foundation for Human Belonging.
What I marvel at now, 35 years later, is not the document that marked the founding of our nation, as it fails to give human dignity to all. What I marvel at is the interest it took to get there — the raw, dazzling, multicolored curiosity it required for individuals to believe they might be more. It was their dream.
Joe Biden's "Soul of a Nation" speech lacked this intrigue. No cultured interest about what divides our country. There was no vision inspiring people to seek a common human belonging. President Biden's comments drummed the language of conflict, entrenched in harsh polarities that allow no oxygen for common ground, a fundamental foundation for peace-building.
What profoundly troubled me in hearing President Biden give his “Soul of a Nation” speech wasn’t that he didn’t grasp what extremism meant. I’ve been hearing his and his cabinet’s errors on that all along.
Just before his address, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, "When you are not with the majority of Americans, it is extreme." Extreme thinking. It's "extreme" to think otherwise. Having a different opinion than Democrats is suddenly "extreme."
Our political leaders are still misinformed about extremism and ideological warfare 20 years after 9/11 and a year after Biden gave Afghanistan to the Taliban. They were too lazy to understand Islamist extremism then, handing over a nation and our allies' fate to those we went to war with, and they're too unwilling to study extremism now.
Neither Trump nor Biden understood what extremism was. If they did, they wouldn’t have been soft to the emergence of supremacist organizations on one hand, and soft on Antifa on the other hand. At this pace, Biden's unwillingness to lead on human dignity could turn the Democratic Party into a racist group.
Modern extremism is a complex issue. It needs a clever fix. In my speeches on combating violent extremism, I often start with a statistic on extremism's rise and diversity over the past 40 years. The statistics show that extremism is increasing in frequency and brutality, and ideologies are overlapping. The situation is getting more intricate, therefore we're running out of time.
It seems too many of our elected officials, influencers, and commentators don't realize what's going on, because else they wouldn't engage in the same practices that produce the problem, pushing us deeper into a spiral of distortion. You don't need to be an extremism expert to recognize that President Biden's dog whistle mobilizing his followers against 74 million Americans is abysmally hazardous. These 74 million Americans have questions we should perceive as an opportunity to have a curious discourse.
Instead, Biden dug in and became the monster he portrays Trump as. Trump made many blunders, but he didn't kill democracy or imperil American lives for safety.
This is a perilous method to lead people; it drives our constitutional republic to civil war, which every extremist organization wants. In the meantime, it ostracizes, marks, and triggers self-censorship among those unwilling to speak out or engage in public discourse.
President Biden's "Soul of the Nation" speech dimmed the lights on what little democracy we have.
The preceding is a summary of an article that originally appeared on THE FEDERALIST.
