By Noah Rothman
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Joe Biden wasn’t long into his tenure before it became
clear that his administration was a spent intellectual force. Among the earlier
examples of Team Biden’s sputtering was its inexplicable decision to exhume
Barack Obama’s morality play, “The Life of Julia,” from its duly forgotten
grave.
The Bidenites’ version of this didactic story about a
woman’s relationship with the most important figure in her life, the state,
zoomed in on “the life of Linda.” Like Julia, Linda is cosseted by the
beneficent agenda contained within Biden’s unrealized “Build Back Better”
initiative. She, too, becomes a mother without any male figure in her life. She
earns the median local income as a unionized worker before the green economy,
child tax credits, subsidized day-care expenses, and taxpayer-funded community-college
tuition arrive to uplift her. Her golden years are spent in elder care
supported by expanded Medicare benefits. The only distinction between Julia and
Linda in their lonely lives is Linda’s identity as a racial minority — a trait
that left-of-center creatives seem to think suffices for character development.
Unsurprisingly, the campaign didn’t catch on. Like “The
Life of Julia,” which the Pepperdine Policy Review notes “was quickly
removed from President Obama’s official website, and to this day cannot be
found there,” Linda was quickly relegated to obscurity. She represented a sop
to an ideological project that the Biden administration had no mandate to
pursue.
President Biden owed his election to the narrow coalition
of voters who excised Donald Trump from the political scene while leaving the
GOP all but intact. Indeed, in the House, Republicans expanded their margins in
November 2020. Biden’s ascension stemmed from his willingness to buck the
progressive Left and from his not being Trump. But he was seduced by a cadre of
partisan historians who charmed him with the promise that he could become a
transformative figure. In the end, Biden got his wish.
***
Succumbing to the temptation to placate the rapacious
progressive-activist class, Biden stepped on the fiscal accelerator. He
approved $4.8 trillion of new borrowing in his first two years in office, and
flooded an economy already struggling to meet consumer demand with cash designed
to stimulate even more demand.
By the end of 2021, fiscal measures taken to ease the
pandemic’s effects caused inflation to spike. As consumers began to resent
their declining purchasing power, they were treated to a legislative bait and
switch: a green-energy spending binge marketed as the “Inflation Reduction
Act.”
Biden’s economic policies were designed for the few
against the many: The administration tried to reimpose a culture of
unionization the country had long ago sloughed off, curtailed domestic energy
production via executive meddling, and extorted seniors into subsidizing
Democratic constituencies by forcing retirement-fund managers to incorporate
“nonfinancial factors” into their investment strategies. But the economy was
hardly the only area in which Team Biden indulged their delusions and lost the
public trust.
***
From the outset, the Biden White House sought to do away
with what it regarded as the Trump administration’s undue hostility toward
immigrants. It struck from the books Trump-era border and immigration policies,
leading to an influx of over 10 million inadmissible aliens — a cascade no
nation could painlessly absorb. The menace soon became visible in every major
city in America.
That visibility was partly attributable to Republican
governors of border states who cleverly aided illegal migrants in getting to
their preferred destinations — places like New York City, Washington, D.C.,
Chicago, and even Martha’s Vineyard. Soon enough, Republican arguments against
unconstrained illegal immigration were finding their way into the mouths of
big-city Democrats.
Aided by a pliant press, Democrats were able to avoid
reckoning with the political liability that the border crisis had become under
Biden’s languid watch. By the time Democrats tried to force congressional
Republicans to take partial ownership of the crisis via bipartisan legislation,
the GOP already understood that Americans were in no mood for half measures.
Biden belatedly acknowledged the crisis at the border while demonstrating an
unwillingness to do much about it. Marginally effective executive action in his
last year in office only ratified the GOP’s oft-stated claim that the
foreign-migrant crisis was, in fact, a crisis.
Farther afield, hot wars in Europe and the Middle East,
with a third looming in East Asia, imperiled ever more American interests. Each
of these crises made it even clearer that Biden’s foreign-policy hands were out
of their depth.
***
The president’s pigheaded withdrawal of U.S. forces
from Afghanistan set the tone. The administration evacuated U.S. soldiers
before it exfiltrated civilians and our Afghan allies, gave up Bagram Air Base,
broadcast misleading claims about the security and accessibility of the U.S. embassy
in Kabul, and was forced to rely on the Taliban to provide security amid the
scramble out of the city’s civilian airport. That 13 American soldiers died in
the attack on Abbey Gate is a testament to the inadvisability of that plan.
America’s humiliation in Afghanistan was the prelude to many more debacles as
the international threat environment deteriorated during Biden’s tenure.
The president entered office possessed of the same
delusion that haunted his last three consecutive predecessors: the notion that
America’s sour relations with Russia were a result of presidential-level
personality quirks rather than conflicting permanent interests. Biden rewarded
Vladimir Putin’s military buildup along Ukraine’s border with bilateral
summitry, and he seemed genuinely surprised when Putin was not appeased.
Following that failure, the president made maximalist
rhetorical commitments to Ukraine’s defense but did not match them with action.
Biden dithered on the provision of weapons platforms to Ukraine when they were
needed most. He balked at letting Ukraine strike Putin’s staging grounds inside
Russia. Fearing that Biden would throw them under the bus, the Ukrainians
captured Russian territory as a hedge against the West’s instinct to freeze the
current lines of contact in place. Russia’s war was not contained. Today, it
spans multiple borders and features North Korean forces fighting on Russia’s
behalf.
Likewise, the president spent the first three years of
his tenure attempting in vain to coax Iran back into the defunct Obama-era
nuclear accords. As a bribe to Tehran, Biden made a variety of financial
overtures, the last of which — allowing Iraqi banks functionally to launder
foreign funds into Iran’s coffers — occurred less than three months before
Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
In the aftermath of that attack, Biden recalibrated his
Iran policies. (It turns out that the $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds that
Biden unlocked were fungible and could be applied to terroristic
activities. Who knew?) The president acknowledged the legitimacy of Israel’s
defensive war against Hamas terrorists, and he committed U.S. resources to
Israeli security. But the Biden team soon yielded to the fear that an
anti-Israel rabble at home, decrying the Jewish state’s defense of its citizens
and sovereignty, was a political juggernaut.
The administration did its best to coddle the antisocial
malcontents tearing up their campuses and terrorizing American streets. It
castigated Israel in public while encouraging it only in private. It floated
cease-fire deal after cease-fire deal and implied that the recalcitrant party
was the Benjamin Netanyahu government rather than the Hamas terrorists. It
froze weapons shipments bound for Jerusalem, and it insisted that Israel could
not go into southern Gaza, where the IDF eventually liberated some of its
hostages and took out Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
Blind to the fanatics menacing America’s Jews, the Biden
administration also lost sight of the goal: Israeli victory. In the process, it
stole from itself the opportunity to celebrate our ally’s successes.
There were more failures: impotence against a flock of
Chinese spy balloons infiltrating American airspace, bizarre tolerance for the
Iran-backed Houthis’ attacks on ships in the Red Sea, the closures or partial
evacuations of seven U.S. diplomatic missions for security reasons. And yet the
administration’s management of foreign affairs appears positively adroit when
compared with its approach to domestic cultural conflicts.
***
With the 2022 midterm elections safely in the
rearview mirror, major media outlets admitted, contra Democratic claims, that
violent crime in America was not actually down. But in America’s dark-blue
redoubts, more sympathy was expressed for lawbreakers than for their victims,
an outlook that seeped into the Biden administration’s thinking on crime.
For example, both Biden and Kamala Harris denounced the
“systemic racism” infecting America’s justice system upon Derek Chauvin’s
conviction for the killing of George Floyd — an outcome systemic racism should
have thwarted. Discretion became subordinate to an ideology in a hurry.
According to the New York Times, the task of Susan Rice, the head of Biden’s
Domestic Policy Council, was to ensure “that the new administration embeds
issues of racial equity into everything it does.”
In practice, “equity” meant indicting police accused of
extralegal violence in the court of public opinion, accusing states like
Georgia of seeking to revive Jim Crow–era discrimination via unexceptional
electoral reforms, and violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause
by applying racial preferences to the disbursement of taxpayer-provided grants.
Democrats on the state level went further still. California asked voters to
ratify an amendment to the state constitution allowing “diversity as a factor
in public employment.” The constitutional remedy was needed because
discrimination, positive or negative, on the basis of race, creed, or ethnicity
was already proscribed. Californians shot it down.
Public backlash also greeted the Biden administration’s
attempt to nationalize the Democrats’ municipal-level crusade against household
convenience. In the name of environmental maximalism, Democrat-led governments
at all levels sought to regulate into scarcity Americans’ dishwashers, plastic
shopping bags, air conditioners, and natural-gas-fueled ranges, and they went
to war against the combustion engines in their garages. The Biden White House
did its best to apply these mandates nationally, but the public would accept
only so much.
That was not the worst mania sweeping Biden’s party.
Biden soon tried to integrate social fads relating to trans athletes into his
administration. He didn’t stop with restoring Obama-era Title IX policies, some
of which robbed students accused of malfeasance of their due process rights. In
the last year of his term, Biden broadened the definition of sex-based
discrimination in Title IX to include “gender identity,” paving the way for
male school athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. The rule change
was a lightning rod. Only 26 percent of respondents in Gallup’s May 2023 survey
agreed with Biden’s policy. The Trump campaign and down-ballot Republicans
spent millions of ad dollars speaking to the nearly 70 percent who disagreed.
And while Democrats at the local, state, and national
levels were busy making voters’ lives measurably worse, the president seemed
fixated on issues of next to no import. “Biden says U.S. capitalism treats
workers, consumers like ‘suckers,’ ” Reuters reported in the summer of 2023. What sparked this
little tirade? The exorbitant cost of Taylor Swift tickets. Yes, seriously.
It was part of the White House’s brief but fiery
obsession with “junk fees,” but it didn’t lend to Biden the common man’s touch.
The Democratic Party merely seemed more than ever to be an exclusive lifestyle
brand, concerned with trivialities that do not touch the lives of many of their
fellow countrymen.
***
And then there’s the president himself: cantankerous,
quick to irritation and insult, incapable of living up to the grandfatherly
persona his image-makers cultivated for him. He surrounded himself with his
family members, who themselves became the targets of federal investigations and
prosecutions, undermining the Democratic Party’s claim that Trump was a special
kind of scofflaw.
Biden’s rapidly declining mental faculties were
self-evident long before a June 27 debate stole plausible deniability from his
apologists. But by then, it was already too late. Too many Democrats had
sacrificed their credibility on the altar of Joe Biden’s career.
So, what was it that did the Democrats in? Everything.
All of it.
Biden and his party spent the past four years giving
every voter in America at least one reason to gravitate toward the Republican
column. The Democratic Party’s accumulating failures and intrusions into
private affairs culminated in the restoration to power of a figure who was
twice impeached, became the first president to lose reelection in a generation,
and had been convicted of felonies. Kamala Harris’s attempt to fabricate “joy,”
only to fall back into Biden’s tired “fascism” attacks on Trump, underscores
what a struggle it was for her to escape the president’s gravity well of
failure. A more capable politician may not have fared better.
It takes work to alienate the diverse coalition Trump
secured for himself. The Democrats’ historic repudiation is a feat. Biden hoped
posterity would see him as an epochal figure, and he got what he wanted. The
GOP wouldn’t be where it is today without him.
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