By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
Joe Biden makes it too easy for the
comedians: Obviously hoping to dispel concerns about his age and his fitness
for the presidency, President Biden took a bicycle ride and cruised over to a
crowd of gawkers, and then promptly tipped over and fell on his patootie.
Biden has long been defensive about fitness — you’ll remember him challenging
that random guy in Iowa to a push-up contest. That’s not how you fix your
image, and, at Biden’s age, fixing his image is probably a foolish thing to
try, anyway.
Biden’s most bitter critics have a litany:
He doesn’t do evening events, he goes home to Delaware every weekend to rest
up, etc. Scandalous, I’m sure.
But those are the things I like about
Biden. Almost the only things I like about him.
Biden’s is a special case, because he is
so very old and so very manifestly frail, but criticizing presidents for their
leisure time has become part of the ritual of the imperator cult, and younger,
more robust men have been criticized for their down time and their recreation.
Before there was Biden, there was Donald Trump and his golf and “executive
time,” before Trump it was Barack Obama and his vacation days, and before that
it was George W. Bush and his vacation days. Trump on the
links, Obama at Martha’s Vineyard, Bush at the ranch, and Biden in Delaware.
I’ve been to Delaware, and I think I’d rather spend the weekend in Martha’s
Vineyard or clearing brush in the hot Texas sun with W. Your preferences may
vary.
This isn’t a particularly 21st-century
thing: Ronald Reagan was criticized for his down time and his apparently light
schedule. Republicans who lambasted Michelle Obama’s travel budget were echoing
Republicans in the 19th century who blasted Mary Todd Lincoln’s household
expenditures. (Lincoln got a lot of grief from members of his own party, since
Democrats weren’t being heard from that much on such issues, at that time being
busy in their vigorous defense of treachery and slavery.) Nothing new under the
sun, etc. Dwight Eisenhower had an extraordinarily eventful presidency, and he
had the political savvy to let America believe that he spent most of his time
playing golf. Do you remember that SNL skit in
which Reagan is the avuncular goof in public and the ruthless mastermind behind
the scenes? That was Eisenhower.
But, of course, Joe Biden is no Dwight Eisenhower
— although he is so very dust-fartingly agéd that he was a teenager during
Ike’s presidency. But there are parallels between the two presidencies —
important ones: The Covid-19 epidemic was not World War II, but it did involve
an extraordinary deployment of federal resources, heavy expense, and economic
disaster. Like Warren G. Harding after World War I, Eisenhower was a “return to
normalcy” Republican who helped the country to move on from World War II.
Eisenhower had planned the Normandy invasion, but when he left office in 1961,
military spending was lower than it had been when he assumed office in 1953.
($52.8 billion vs. $49.6 billion as Treasury runs the numbers.) There was even
a small budget surplus in the last year of his presidency — like every other
president, Eisenhower had no real control over spending, but he was a capable
politician who worked intelligently with congressional Democrats, whom he often
found easier to negotiate with than his fellow Republicans, who were, then as
now, impossible.
Joe Biden advertised himself as a “return
to normalcy” Democrat, but he has, so far, failed to make good on that promise.
He may prefer quiet weekends at home and an early bedtime (the wisdom of which
becomes clearer to me every year), but he hasn’t done the real political work.
Normalcy is an agenda, not just a lifestyle.
The relevant issue for Joe Biden is not
the depredations of age but his moral and political weakness — and these are
not new: Biden has been a coward for the entirety of his political career.
Biden may have some centrist instincts, but these are and always have been a
matter of political advantage-seeking than a matter of governing principle or
moderation in policy. He sets them aside when it suits. When Biden thinks
pretending to be Donald Trump will benefit him, he pretends to be Donald Trump;
when Biden thinks pretending to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will benefit him,
he pretends to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He’ll do populist-nationalist for
the Teamsters and he’ll do woke for the wokesters. Biden is a man who does not
engage in introspection, because there is no there there. There is, in the
midst of all that ridiculous posturing, no single sinew that serves no
political appetite of Biden’s, but is just Biden. One of the great ironies of life is that the more self-centered a man
is, the easier he is for other men to manipulate — a man without a real
foundation is easy to push around. If you’ve ever wondered why these Silicon
Valley billionaires with more money than Croesus and Paul McCartney put
together are so easily bullied into conforming with whatever silliness is
demanded of members of their class on any given day, that is it — they may be
excellent technicians, excellent managers, and excellent investors, but all
that “Let’s change the world!”
principles-and-purpose talk is just advertising: mission as marketing. They are
the hollow men, but stuffed with money rather than straw.
A return to normalcy would mean, among
other things, winding down and reversing the elevated Covid-era spending that
has supercharged the supply-chain problem and made it into an economic crisis
whose main manifestation — higher prices for energy, food, and consumer goods —
is very likely to be the undoing of Biden’s administration. Instead, Biden
proposes to entrench and expand that spending. A larger and more expensive
state is ground gained in the public sector’s war on the private sector, and
Democrats are not about to abandon those gains.
Inflation is the No. 1 issue right now
(and also issues No. 3, 4, 5, and 6), but it is not the only one. The cultural
radicalism of the Left, the socialist ambitions of Democrats in the
Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders camp, the corruption of important institutions
by narrowminded enforcers of petty political orthodoxies — these are all things
that Joe Biden as a Democratic president is positioned to speak to. Speaking to
them would do him some good. I hate the way in which clichés constrain our
political imagination, but those who talk of Biden’s need for a “Sister Souljah
moment” are not wrong to be thinking in that direction.
But Biden can’t do it. Archimedes once
said that if he had a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the
world. Biden as president of these United States has the longest lever in the
world, but he doesn’t have a place to stand. He is out there floating in space,
a man in zero political gravity.
Another dumb cliché of our political
conversation is the need for “unity,” but ignore that for a moment and consider
this from Ted Widmer, writing in That August
Journalistic Institution in
the closing days of the 2020 campaign:
Many
Americans remember the 1950s as a banal time of sock hops and drive-ins, but
the decade began badly, with a nasty war in Korea, constant friction with China
and Russia, and bitter sniping between Republicans and Democrats, who were no
longer interested in the consensus that had led America to victory in World War
II. In the final two years of Harry Truman’s presidency, the nation’s capital
turned angry and dysfunctional. Congress and the White House were at odds;
financial scandals plagued the administration; and an ugly new politics of
bullying, perfected by Repulican [sic] Senator Joseph McCarthy of
Wisconsin, was rising quickly.
To unite
the country, Eisenhower first had to bring together his own party, which was no
simple matter. A deeply conservative Ohio senator, Robert Taft, wanted the
nomination for himself. “Mr. Republican,” as Taft was known, held important
cards as a party insider, but he lacked charisma, and his cranky isolationism
put him at odds with the party’s more moderate wing, centered in New York and
New England. These East Coast Republicans gravitated naturally to Eisenhower,
whose sparkling résumé included stints as the president of Columbia University
and as NATO’s supreme commander.
No one
would call Eisenhower a scintillating speaker, and he looked older than his 62
years. But he understood that less could be more, and his calming speeches
stood in sober contrast to the heated rhetoric of the times.
But it wasn’t just style and rhetoric. As
Widmer notes, it was policy, too, including policy
compromises that so irritated the Right that one might reasonably argue that the modern conservative
movement in the United States was at least as much about opposition to
Eisenhower and Republican moderation as it was to progressivism at home and
socialism abroad. “Our principles are round,” William F. Buckley Jr. wrote,
“and Eisenhower is square.”
(Eisenhower’s great sin, as far as
post-war conservatives were concerned, was his part-and-parcel acceptance of
the New Deal. Only a few decades later, the great champion of conservatism in
the United States would be Ronald Reagan, a Republican who described himself as
a New Deal Democrat, a lifelong FDR man alienated by the radicalism of his
party in the 1960s. In 2016, most conservatives linked arms with Donald Trump,
who not only accepted and celebrated New Deal and Great Society entitlements
but refused even to consider reforming them, no matter their ruinous financial
cost. As with Biden’s daft drift left, Trump’s welfare chauvinism was mainly a
matter of moral cowardice and political self-interest, but the fact that
defending progressive entitlements is how one panders to conservatives in
2022 says a great deal about how the movement that calls itself “conservative”
has changed.)
What Biden needs is some real
conservatism.
There is a theoretical side of
conservatism (read your Mises!) and there is a folkish conservatism, too, and
the two are sometimes at odds. The theoretical side of conservatism prioritizes
free markets and free enterprise, small government, scrupulous constitutional
interpretation, etc. The folkish side of conservatism understands that there is
a relationship between stability and prosperity, hence the traditional — but
now almost extinct — conservative aversion to radical social change and radical
political change. Sometimes, there are radical policy shifts in response to
emergencies (real and imagined), and the conservative habit is to undo these
and restore the status quo ante once the emergency has passed.
The progressive tendency is just the opposite: It is Robert Higgs’s Crisis
and Leviathan, with progressives ready to take any emergency as an occasion
to saddle up and ride Leviathan onward toward utopia. Biden came into office
with the country’s politics even angrier and dumber than usual as a result of
the Trump experience, and with the economy and a good deal of government in
disorder in the aftermath of the Covid epidemic. The most important work that
Biden could have done would have been the work of undoing, but he does not have
it in him to resist the rage-addled utopians around him — neither them nor the
self-interested chiselers who use progressive moral crusades to fill their own
pockets and to create sinecures for their allies and benefits for their
dependents, which is what that expansion of the federal machine is really all
about.
Does Joe Biden take a lot of naps? I don’t
know. Winston Churchill did, and he never challenged anybody to a push-up
contest. (Maybe a drinking contest.) Dinner at home with the family and bed by
nine isn’t exactly a political agenda, but I’ll vote for it 19 times out of 20.
If anything, I wish Biden were more retiring
than he is. The last thing we need is another swaggering buffoon in the White
House. Give me the hardheaded competence of a taciturn Puritan such as Calvin
Coolidge any day over the bumbling grandiosity of a Barack Obama or its echo in
his elderly epigone.
The trouble with Biden is what he is
doing, not what he is not doing — or, looked at another way,
the problem with Biden is not with what he is not doing but with what he is not
undoing.
Speaking of Dumb Criticism . . .
As you can probably tell from reading this
newsletter, I enjoy my friend and former National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg’s Remnant podcast. Bearing in mind the maxim that one
should criticize in private and praise in public, I will take issue with one
tiny little thing that isn’t really specific to Jonah, but something that he
gave a pretty good example of in his weekend podcast.
Jonah, like me, is a critic of Joe Biden
who also thinks (let me put some words in his mouth) that Donald Trump was a
wretched weaselly bumbling immoral ignoramus who, morally and intellectually
speaking, would have to ride a hot-air balloon straight up for an hour and a
half before he rose to the lowest gutter in New York, who is about as
well-suited to the presidency as I am to dancing in the Bolshoi ballet.
Naturally, every time Jonah criticizes
Biden, he hears from the usual chorus of morons: “Why’d you vote for him, then,
huh?” Which, as Jonah explains, he didn’t. As to the broader line of criticism
— that having opposed Donald Trump for being a creepy little moron who tried to
stage a coup in 2020 means that Trump’s critics are somehow morally responsible
for the multitude of dumb and wrong things Biden has done and can reasonably be
expected to continue doing — Jonah offered a lengthy, intelligent, logically
sound response, which you should listen to, but which I will summarize:
Choosing someone to do a job is not a preemptive endorsement of everything he
does in that job thereafter. Even partisan Democrats who voted for — donated
to, campaigned for — Biden are not morally responsible when Biden does
something wrong or something with which they disagree. (We could stand to hear
a little more from those disappointed Democrats.) Both parties sometimes
resemble criminal conspiracies, but politics is not in fact a criminal
conspiracy in which every conspirator is liable under the law for every crime
committed by every other conspirator.
The thing is, almost nobody really
believes that A-B line of criticism.
The argument that Jonah describes is made
in earnest by a very small number of genuine morons and by a considerably
larger number of people speaking in bad faith. Jonah observed that he is used
to getting that sort of stupidity on Twitter, but was disheartened to get it
from within the Dispatch, the publication he founded a while back.
He shouldn’t be surprised — every comments section in the whole of this fallen
world looks about the same, from National
Review to the New York Times: There is some good and
useful conversation happening among intelligent and responsible people, and
there is the digital version of a bunch of monkeys masturbating and flinging
poo at one another in the zoo. You get a different mix of thoughtfulness and
poo-fullness in different publications. It is amazing to me (but not
surprising) that the founders of Twitter got private-plane rich by saying: “You
know what would make the comments sections better? Getting rid of the content!”
The Internet makes all of us stupid in
ways, and it hits intelligent and sensitive people harder than it does morons
and the insensate, who are more difficult to make a dent in. You get a weird
interaction between well-known public figures such as Jonah, who writes under
his own name and thinks about things, and people whose words and affect are
shaped by anonymity, urgency, and immediacy. Because of the social nature
of social media, that conversation looms larger in our consciousness than it
should. As observed by Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, one of the few members of
Congress whom I do not wish to see driven into exile:
Political
Twitter isn’t real. Only 22 percent of Americans use it, and more than
half of that 1/5 never follow politics on Twitter. The vast majority of traffic
on Twitter is driven by well under 2% of the public. And yet politicians –
again, left and right are barely distinguishable – in seeking to cater to this
tiny minority and the algorithms that drive addicted-engagement.
Political
algorithms run on rage.
Nobody
goes viral for making a good faith argument.
Nobody
goes viral for admitting there are policy trade-offs.
My criticism of Jonah isn’t what he said
so much as the fact that he said it — I don’t think that this sort of thing is
worth 15 minutes of his time. Of course, it’s his time, and he can do whatever
he wants with it, but I think that we sort of pollute ourselves and the
discourse by spending so much time thinking about and responding to
these morons, miscreants, and bad-faith actors. I think that they rub off on us
in both subtle and unsubtle ways. And by spending so much time and energy on
that tiny little slice of the conversation, we elevate it — and its values and
its style — far above where that sort of thing would otherwise sit in our
common life.
I am sure that I am guilty of this myself
at many times and in many ways — in fact, I’ll give you an example immediately
below — and I have seen this very often in friends who are a little more
sensitively constituted than I am, who get so worked up by Twitter, the
comments section, etc., that they come to believe that this is 98 percent of
the conversation rather than the 2 percent that it is. But, of course, it is
difficult not to be affected, especially when the conversation is about you
personally.
The solution, of course, is contempt. And
by that I do not mean a haughty intellectual posture (though, sure, yeah,
guilty as charged) or irrational dismissiveness or pseudo-Nietzschean arrogance
or anything like that, but rational dismissiveness. My
neighbors once shared with us a very amusing post on NextDoor in which some
well-meaning busybody began his advice with the immortal words: “I’m not a
neurologist per se . . .” I’m pretty good on a few subjects,
but if I started lecturing my friend the orthopedic surgeon on orthopedic
surgery, I suspect that he wouldn’t even bother laughing at me — he would just
be confused. We understand that dynamic in almost every sphere of life except
politics, because we get confused about what democracy means: Democracy means
one vote is as good as another, but it doesn’t mean that one thought, one
sentence, or one point of view is as good as another. It doesn’t even mean that
one voter is as good as another, only that we have agreed to give each vote
equal weight as a procedural convenience.
(The fact that those equal votes
are based on unequal values is where democracy gets kind of
interesting — de jure equality has a complicated relationship
with de facto inequality.)
Contempt is a natural — and good —
byproduct of a rightly ordered understanding of public life and the hierarchy
associated with it, as much as we good democrats and egalitarians instinctively
resist any acknowledgement of hierarchy. Some things — and some ideas, and some
writing, and some morals — really do belong at the bottom of the pile. And,
with all due concern for Christian charity, so do some people.
(Put an asterisk next to “Christian
charity” if you like, but Jonah Goldberg, who describes himself as an “Upper
West Side demi-Jew,” exhibits more of that than most political commentators
do.)
So, a plea to political writers and
pundits and such: Try not to spend so much time responding to Twitter and its
ilk. You may be well-intentioned, but you aren’t doing the world any favors.
More Monkeys
And now, let me set aside my own advice. I
was thinking about particularly rank comments sections and took a peek —
against my better judgment — at the Washington Post, specifically
at the comments at the bottom of a Jennifer Rubin column. (Related to points
above: There’s plenty to criticize about Rubin, but she doesn’t write the
comments.) The first one that caught my eye:
When the Republican Party has spent the
past 75 years supporting candidates who advocate racist, xenophobic, misogynist
policies and oppose environmental protection and public health programs, etc,
etc, — then support for candidates who are election deniers is just another
evolutionay adaptation in the Party’s nihilistic, anti-democractic agenda.
So, there’s regular illiteracy (I didn’t
fix anything), and there’s historical illiteracy, too: If racism is your master
criterion, then consider that 75 years ago, the nation was looking forward to
the presidential election of 1948, in which Democrats divided their votes
between Harry S. Truman, who had joined the Ku Klux Klan to advance his
political career, and Strom Thurmond, a vile racial opportunist who broke with
the mainstream of his party and ran as a segregationist “Dixiecrat” insurgent,
while Republicans backed Thomas Dewey, a New York governor whose hallmark
accomplishments included signing the first state law prohibiting racial
discrimination in employment — way back in 1945, when Democrats following
Franklin Roosevelt were busy herding Americans into concentration camps because
of their ancestry.
Outrage is intoxicating, and, like all
intoxicants, it makes you stupid.
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