Tom Woods:

Joe Biden keeps saying he wants to “unify the country.”
Sure he does.
His vision for “unifying” the country calls to mind the neoconservatives’ stance on promoting democracy abroad: it’s democracy if our guys win.
Likewise, it’s “unifying the country” if we all unite around the Establishment.
Not to mention: how exactly does Biden or anyone else propose to “unify the country”?
How do you “unify” (1) people who, like Ludwig von Mises, point out that the idea of liberty is, in its origins, a Western one, with (2) people who consider the West a great oppressor?
How do you “unify” people who think society ought to be able to run its affairs without the patronizing intervention of Ivy League intellectuals, and people who believe in the top-down management of society?
How do you “unify” people who want to suppress dissident voices with people who are dissident voices?
At this point, calls for “unity” are just low-IQ boilerplate.
And incidentally, which side is trying to get people fired and their lives destroyed for wrongthink? Which side condemns half the country as backward rubes? Seems like it would take some real nerve for the very same people to call for unity.
You first, pal.
And the fact is: they have zero desire to “unify” us.
Our friend Dave Smith pointed out an absolutely typical example the other day:
ABC reported that a 24-year-old Black Lives Matter protestor was killed after being hit by a car that plowed into a group of protestors.
Here’s their summary on Twitter:
“A young protester has died from injuries she suffered when a luxury car plowed into her and another woman during a Black Lives Matter protest Saturday on a Seattle freeway that has been shut down for days due to the civil unrest, police said.”
Any indication in there that the driver was black? Because he was.
Here’s Dave’s comment: “Race is only relevant when it will heighten racial tensions, so ABC doesn’t mention that the driver was black. They do, however, give you the critical detail that it was a luxury car.”
Does that kind of reporting seem designed to “unify” America?
And in case you’re wondering: it’s not just the Twitter summary. The entire article failed to mention the driver’s race, thereby leaving people to presume that interracial strife must be at the root of the incident.
Want to unite around reason and good will? That’s easier said than done in our public square these days.

Biden and every other Democrat accuse Trump of dividing the country. Which is a true yet irrelevant statement. The idea of “unity” presupposes there is unity, as in agreement, when there clearly is not unity. Not a single president in my lifetime (which goes back to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who divided his own party on civil rights, and then divided his own party differently on Vietnam) has been a unifier, except perhaps for Jimmy Carter in that two-thirds of the country agreed he did a horrible job as president.

The only way you can unify the country is by getting the political minority to agree with the political majority, or vice versa. And when will that happen?

Jonathan V. Last appears to believe that the Republican Party has been irreparably damaged by Donald Trump:

I had a lovely email exchange with a reader the other day who was making the case that while yes, Donald Trump is evil, unified Democratic control of the government would be at least as bad. And that in the post-Trump future, while the Democrats spin off into woke socialist land, the Republicans will once again become responsible, classical conservatives who can be trusted with power because the party will be retaken by grownups such as Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.
He may well be right.
But it seems to me that this scenario is a low-probability event.
Let’s stipulate that the most likely outcome for the medium-term future of American politics is awful. We’ll probably get some version of Don Jr. squaring off against AOC in 2024. That’s because the science is settled: We live in the worst possible timeline.
But to think that the Republican party will walk away from where it is now, you have to believe a few things that seem unlikely.
For starters, you’d have to believe that Donald Trump is going to disappear and decline to exercise any dynastic ambitions. This would run counter to information already in evidence about the Trump family.
Next, you’d have to believe that there were places in the party for non-Trumpy, non-conspiracy crazy, non-nationalists to get footholds. Well, here is a fun fact from Dave Wasserman: When Trump took office there were 241 R’s in the House; 115 of them have resigned, been defeated, or retired/are retiring.
What’s left of the elected party will be the Trumpiest parts.
The biggest factor, though, is what Republican voters actually want. And the evidence keeps piling up that the Republican party today is reasonably representative of voter preferences. Nearly half the GOP is against wearing masks in public. Less than half of Republican voters say they would get a COVID-19 vaccine. Then there’s the Q-Anon believers who keep winning primaries. So far, they’ve gotten 600,000 votes.
On the one hand, 600,000 is a small fraction of the 330 million people in America. But on the other hand, these folks are just getting started and have only gained entrance to a handful of primaries so far.
Here is a useful comparison. If you a Republican, ask yourself how pernicious you believe the Squad’s influence is within the Democratic party.
Now understand that come January, Q-Anon believing House members will likely outnumber the Squad.
So that’s the Republican side of the ledger. Come 2021, is this Nikki Haley’s party? Or Father Coughlin’s?

All interesting points. But what happens if indeed Biden becomes president and, as always happens, drags the most reprehensible elements of his party into power with him?

Stanley Kurtz explores one issue:

President Trump had a great riff at his rally the other day in Phoenix. It was all about “abolish,” about how the Left wants to abolish the police, ICE, bail, even borders. Trump’s riff is effective because it is true. The Left has gone off the deep end, and they’re taking the Democrats with them.

Well, there’s another “abolish” the president can add to his list, and it just might be enough to tip the scales this November. Joe Biden and the Democrats want to abolish America’s suburbs. Biden and his party have embraced yet another dream of the radical Left: a federal takeover, transformation, and de facto urbanization of America’s suburbs. What’s more, Biden just might be able to pull off this “fundamental transformation.”

The suburbs are the swing constituency in our national elections. If suburban voters knew what the Democrats had in store for them, they’d run screaming in the other direction. Unfortunately, Republicans have been too clueless or timid to make an issue of the Democrats’ anti-suburban plans. It’s time to tell voters the truth.

I’ve been studying Joe Biden’s housing plans, and what I’ve seen is both surprising and frightening. I expected that a President Biden would enforce the Obama administration’s radical AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) regulation to the hilt. That is exactly what Biden promises to do. By itself, that would be more than enough to end America’s suburbs as we’ve known them, as I’ve explained repeatedly here at NRO.

What surprises me is that Biden has actually promised to go much further than AFFH. Biden has embraced Cory Booker’s strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call “little downtowns” in the suburbs. Combine the Obama-Biden administration’s radical AFFH regulation with Booker’s new strategy, and I don’t see how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves. It will mean the end of local control, the end of a style of living that many people prefer to the city, and therefore the end of meaningful choice in how Americans can live. Shouldn’t voters know that this is what’s at stake in the election?

It is no exaggeration to say that progressive urbanists have long dreamed of abolishing the suburbs. (In fact, I’ve explained it all in a book.) Initially, these anti-suburban radicals wanted large cities to simply annex their surrounding suburbs, like cities did in the 19th century. That way a big city could fatten up its tax base. Once progressives discovered it had since become illegal for a city to annex its surrounding suburbs without voter consent, they cooked up a strategy that would amount to the same thing.

This de facto annexation strategy had three parts: (1) use a kind of quota system to force “economic integration” on the suburbs, pushing urban residents outside of the city; (2) close down suburban growth by regulating development, restricting automobile use, and limiting highway growth and repair, thus forcing would-be suburbanites back to the city; (3) use state and federal laws to force suburbs to redistribute tax revenue to poorer cities in their greater metropolitan region. If you force urbanites into suburbs, force suburbanites back into cities, and redistribute suburban tax revenue, then presto! You have effectively abolished the suburbs.

Obama’s radical AFFH regulation puts every part of progressives’ “abolish the suburbs” strategy into effect (as I explain in detail here). Once Biden starts to enforce AFFH the way Obama’s administration originally meant it to work, it will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround. They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing. The latter, of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.

That’s all bad enough. But on top of AFFH, Biden now plans to use Cory Booker’s strategy for attacking suburban zoning. AFFH works by holding HUD’s Community Development Block Grants hostage to federal-planning demands. Suburbs won’t be able to get the millions of dollars they’re used to in HUD grants unless they eliminate single-family zoning and densify their business districts. AFFH also forces HUD-grant recipients to sign pledges to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Those pledges could get suburbs sued by civil-rights groups, or by the feds, if they don’t get rid of single-family zoning. The only defense suburbs have against this two-pronged attack is to refuse HUD grants. True, that will effectively redistribute huge amounts of suburban money to cities, but if they give up their HUD grants at least the suburbs will be free of federal control.

The Booker approach — now endorsed by Biden — may block even this way out. Booker wants to hold suburban zoning hostage not only to HUD grants, but to the federal transportation grants used by states to build and repair highways. It may be next to impossible for suburbs to opt out of those state-run highway repairs. Otherwise, suburban roads will deteriorate and suburban access to major arteries will be blocked. AFFH plus the Booker plan will leave America’s suburbs with no alternative but to eliminate their single-family zoning and turn over their planning to the feds. Slowly but surely, suburbs will become helpless satellites of the cities they surround, exactly as progressive urbanists intend.

If America’s suburban voters understood that all this is what Biden and the Democrats have in store for them, it could easily swing the election. That means President Trump now has another “abolish” to add to his list: Joe Biden and the Dems want to abolish America’s suburbs.

There’s just one hitch. Incredibly, although AFFH is arguably Obama’s most radical initiative, Ben Carson’s HUD has still not gotten rid of it. Instead, Carson suspended enforcement of the rule early on and then tinkered around for three years trying to come up with a replacement. What Carson has developed so far is something you might call “AFFH lite.” While this possible replacement removes many of the regulation’s excesses, Carson has so far retained the most egregious feature of AFFH. He still wants to use HUD money to gut suburban single-family zoning. How Carson can even think about taking this stance in the face of President Trump’s explicit directive to reduce and remove excessive federal regulation is a mystery.

It will be very tough for President Trump to make a political issue out of Biden’s housing plans so long as his own cabinet secretary is talking about killing suburban single-family zoning with AFFH. I think Carson’s wobbling on AFFH explains a lot about why Democrats have become so bold with their plans to undo suburban zoning. If even the Trump administration goes along with federal attacks on suburban zoning, the Dems figure they’ve got political cover. Time was when Obama administration officials would turn somersaults to deny that they were going to control suburban-zoning decisions, even when it was obvious that this was their plan. Now, Biden and Booker are remarkably open about their desire to densify the suburbs and get rid of single-family zoning.

The Democrat war on the suburbs is a golden gift to President Trump, but he won’t be able to make use of it until he throws over Carson’s AFFH lite and completely guts Obama’s wildly radical regulation. Then Tump can go to town on Biden and the Dems for making war on the suburbs.

If there were ever proof that Biden has shed his centrism and been taken over by the Left, this is it. Biden got the nomination by declining to endorse the most radical plans of his rivals. But take a look at Biden’s housing plans and it’s clear that he is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Left. Progressive urbanists’ long-cherished dream of abolishing the suburbs is now within reach. With AFFH restored to its original form by a President Biden, enforced to the hilt, and turbo-charged by the Booker strategy, suburbs as we know them will pass from the scene.

With them will disappear the principle of local control that has been the key to American exceptionalism from the start. Since the Pilgrims first landed, our story has been of a people who chose how and where to live, and who governed themselves when they got there. Self-government in a layered federalist system allowing for local control right down to the township is what made America great. If Biden and the Democrats win, that key to our greatness could easily go by the boards.