By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, April
27, 2021
That the Biden administration should
be incoherent is the least surprising development so far of
2021 — Joe Biden himself is generally incoherent on a personal level. Biden’s
incoherence is not (contra the popular right-wing talking point) mainly the
result of his advanced age or the state of his mental acuity — he has been a
little bit dim and a little bit all over the place for the entirety of his
very, very long career in public office, since he was a young man, because he
is a creature of pure self-serving opportunism without a moral center or real
principles.
It would be easy to call him a
weathervane, but a weathervane is anchored on something and centered. President
Biden is more like that plastic bag blowing around in American Beauty —
empty, lightweight, subject to the moment’s prevailing wind.
Because of this debility, President Biden
cannot manage a “team of rivals” the way more serious figures such as Abraham
Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt did in their respective times. This is a
particularly troublesome shortcoming in a president for whom FDR and his
administration are the guiding lights, even if the guidance derived from that
quarter is almost exclusively a matter of rhetoric and nostalgia.
Like the Biden administration, the
Franklin Roosevelt administration comprehended a genuinely diverse array of
political tendencies, from agrarian progressives (Claude R. Wickard) to
crypto-Communists (Henry Wallace) to Republicans (Henry Stimson), but its
members were obliged to take seriously the two great crises of the time
(depression and war) and were disciplined by the president’s own masterly — and
often masterful — leadership. As with the resolutely non-ideological (and effectively
nonpartisan) administration of Dwight Eisenhower after the war, the character
of the administration amplified the character of the man.
The Biden administration also is home to
quiet rivalries between its moderate-pragmatist elements (Janet Yellen, Lloyd
Austin), its hardcore left-wingers (Xavier Becerra), its amoral power-seekers
(Kamala Harris, in the West Wing, with the icepick), and its workaday crackpots
(Deb Haaland et al.). But the Biden administration does not have Franklin
Roosevelt at the head of it — it has the bad luck to be headed by Joe Biden,
who apparently believes that he can be Donald Trump when it comes to the
so-called war on drugs while being Patrisse
Cullors on police reform, and that he can be
the Ronald Reagan of a new Cold War with China while playing Woodrow Wilson’s
role in a new League of Nations. At home, he presents himself simultaneously as
the sensible pragmatist and . . . Santa Claus.
Unlike the Roosevelt administration, the
Biden administration does not bring a particularly intense focus to the great
crises of the time — in spite of its bursts of rhetorical vehemence. On the
matter of the coronavirus epidemic and its aftermath, the administration has
allowed itself to be pulled in six different ways by bureaucratic inertia,
narrow political self-interest, and competing approaches to risk-management; on
the matter of China, his administration lacks the intellectual rigor and moral
seriousness to disentangle the knot of economic and geopolitical factors that
actually shape our real-world relationship with the so-called People’s
Republic, which is quite different from both Washington’s rhetorical account of
Beijing and Beijing’s rhetorical account of Washington. Biden has access to
some excellent advisers on both of those issues, but all advisers can do is
offer advice. Biden makes decisions like a man who expects the music to stop
abruptly and fears that he will be the one left without a seat.
You can tell how much of this is
stagecraft requiring the suspension of disbelief. President Biden would have us
believe things that are logically incompatible, e.g., (1) that climate change
is one of the most important crises facing the human race, and (2) that John
Kerry should be entrusted with leading our response to climate change. John
Kerry should not be in charge of climate change — he should be in charge of
addressing the national debt, because the only thing in life he ever has had
much talent for is marrying money. (Mr. Kerry has married two heiresses; the
current Mrs. Kerry has married two senators — these are totally normal people
and not weird at all.) You don’t put John Kerry in charge of something because
you think it is an existential threat that requires a substantive response —
you put John Kerry in charge of something when you want self-regarding summitry
and highly refined New England umbrage. On that front, John Kerry always
delivers.
Unlike many of my fellow conservatives, I
think climate change is a real problem. But if I didn’t think it was a problem,
I’d expect it to become a cosmic crisis after putting it in John Kerry’s
portfolio. But from Joe Biden’s vantage point, John Kerry is a promising young
man.
It was not easy to take Joe Biden very
seriously as a candidate. It is impossible to take him very seriously as a
president. The Biden administration is like an angry chimpanzee at a chess
tournament — it isn’t going to win the match, but that isn’t what we should be
worrying about.
A little bit of incoherence is not
necessarily a bad thing in an administration, if it is the right kind of
incoherence: Often, successful political leaders do not seem to be operating
from any sort of grand plan because they are not operating
from any sort of grand plan, but rather are pursuing piecemeal reforms as
opportunities present themselves. There are worse ways to govern.
In U.S. politics, a president typically
gets to do only one or two big things — the really successful ones get two big
things done (Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and oversaw important changes in
economic policy), the moderately successful ones get one thing done (Richard
Nixon ended the Vietnam War, Barack Obama signed a health-care bill), and many
fail to achieve even one big thing. The ones who fail to put even one big thing
on the scoreboard aren’t necessarily bad presidents or failed leaders — Harry
Truman spent his presidency finishing up Roosevelt’s unfinished business, and
George H. W. Bush showed his quality in a foreign-policy crisis that forced
itself onto his agenda — though some of them surely must be understood as
failures. Donald Trump’s two big issues were trade and immigration, and he
achieved lasting reform on neither issue.
Pragmatism and compromise can be
expensive. George H. W. Bush broke a campaign promise (“read my lips”) in order
to broker a budget deal with intransigent Democrats holding the majority in
Congress, which was the right thing to have done as a matter of policy but
probably cost him reelection. (Democrats razzed him about it, but the people
who really carped most bitterly on the tax-pledge issue were Republicans led by
Pat Buchanan. The more things change . . . ) George H. W. Bush had a kind of
cultivated integrity that was not to be found in Barack Obama or Donald Trump.
He wasn’t an ideologue, and he wasn’t uncompromising — the coherence of his
administration was to be found in a set of very wide principles, liberally applied.
George H. W. Bush’s presidency was less shaped by what he thought his career
was about than by what he thought his country was about, and what he thought it
should be about.
But even the most successful presidents
are compressed in memory until they are as two-dimensional as a Herblock
cartoon. Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest peace-seekers of his time — he
talked constantly of peace, sought to make peace, entered into controversial
arms-control agreements, and even dreamt of developing an effective
anti-missile system and then simply giving the technology to the Soviet Union
and other countries in order to render our own nuclear missiles ineffectual
along with everyone else’s. But history will remember him as a warmonger, even
though he was remarkable among modern presidents for his disinclination to use
the war-making powers at his disposal. Our cartoon history cannot account for
the reality that the great military crisis of the second half of the 20th
century was resolved in no small part through the efforts of a celebrity
libertarian from California who used the words peace and peaceful 14
times in a short address at Eureka College in the second year of his presidency
— long before the war had been won.
But Reagan had an unusual political gift and
the benefit of being on the right side of the most important issues of his
time.
The difference between Biden and our more
effective executives may simply be that those other presidents knew what they
wanted and, for that reason, had some idea of what to do. They often did things
that were politically difficult rather than simply try to triangulate their way
into popularity. Because of the way history compresses things, it is easy to
forget that many Americans energetically opposed U.S. involvement in that
second European war (Roosevelt himself promised voters, “Your boys are not
going to be sent to any foreign war”) and that the New Deal, the most
significant political development between Appomattox and Pearl Harbor, was
bitterly opposed by many Americans. Ronald Reagan’s antagonists included an
American Left whose best minds were either pro-Communist or committed a nearly
religious belief in the moral equivalency between the United States and the
Soviet Union. Abolishing slavery was a distinctly minority enthusiasm in
Abraham Lincoln’s time.
What is remarkable is that while Lincoln,
Roosevelt, and Reagan were able to exercise leadership on genuinely
controversial issues, Joe Biden is overmatched by an issue about which there is
an effectively universal consensus regarding outcome: Nobody wants the
coronavirus epidemic to continue, and, aside for a few kooks in the “voluntary
human extinction” movement, there is no pro-coronavirus faction.
But on such practical matters as workplace rules relating to COVID-19, the
administration is unable to move forward in a direct and timely way. Faced with
the thorny cultural politics of vaccine refusal, President Biden’s big, bold
idea is . . . paid time off. It is remarkable how many social problems Biden
and Biden-style Democrats believe can be addressed with paid time off or higher
wages for government workers — paid time off is now, according to the Biden
administration, “infrastructure,” of all ridiculous things.
Perhaps President Biden can free-stuff his
way through the rest of the coronavirus epidemic. He stepped into a situation
that was about as encouraging as could be expected — the vaccines were
good-to-go and the economic recovery already was under way — but, even with
that great advantage, his administration acts as though it is in a constant
state of low-level panic.
And so expectations should be modest
indeed for the Biden administration’s work on the much more difficult issue of
China. The epidemic has been awful, but the virus does not have 350 nuclear warheads
and something north of $1 trillion of U.S. public debt in its portfolio.
And Xi Jinping is not looking for paid
time off.
In Closing
Any system
is inherently unstable that has no peaceful means to legitimize its leaders. In
such cases, the very repressiveness of the state ultimately drives people to
resist it, if necessary, by force.
While we
must be cautious about forcing the pace of change, we must not hesitate to
declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward
them. We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole
prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all
human beings. So states the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, which, among other things, guarantees free elections.
The
objective I propose is quite simple to state: To foster the infrastructure of
democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities,
which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to
reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.
This is
not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine
self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes
in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would
be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship
to democracy. Who would voluntarily choose not to have the right to vote,
decide to purchase government propaganda handouts instead of independent
newspapers, prefer government to worker-controlled unions, opt for land to be
owned by the state instead of those who till it, want government repression of
religious liberty, a single political party instead of a free choice, a rigid
cultural orthodoxy instead of democratic tolerance and diversity?
–Ronald Reagan, Speech to the British
Parliament, 1982
