Pillar Three: Act the peacemaker in the culture war. If Joe Biden won a mandate for anything in November 2020, it was to restore some normality to American politics. Biden can claim some limited success here. The COVID pandemic has abated; COVID-emergency measures can be relaxed; children have returned to school. But the Supreme Court’s activism on gun rights and abortion has now reignited the culture wars that Biden was elected to calm. Biden has an opportunity to position his party as the party of social peace against Republican cultural aggression.
But there are three culture-war issues that Biden has not calmed—indeed, that his administration has in some ways inflamed. The angriest of those flash points is crime. At the beginning of the pandemic, Americans raced out to buy millions of guns supposedly to protect themselves from one another. Instead, they are horribly harming one another. The years 2020 and 2021 saw a generational surge in violent crime, made worse by the 40 million new guns bought in those two years.
The United States desperately needs now to empower police and local law enforcement to restore order. The Supreme Court’s gun jurisprudence has made it harder to protect the public from violence. But raising the consequences for carrying a firearm in public within whatever regime of legal permission the Court still allows is possible. Law enforcement is mostly a state and local matter, but Biden can talk about it. And he can make clear that states that experiment with constitutionally compliant versions of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg–style stop-and-frisk laws to check for illegally carried weapons will not face federal legal challenges.
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