I’ve noted that President Joe Biden steers his administration using his rearview mirror. Whatever President Donald Trump did, he’ll do the opposite. He talks about the future but seems to spend most of his time looking behind him rather than ahead.
You might assume this is a good idea, an instinct for self-preservation, because the president is an old-school Democrat heading a new-school socialist revolution. And such revolutions have a strong track record of displacing their leaders ruthlessly. Biden doesn’t want to find himself stumbling out of the White House one day crying, “Et tu, Kamala?”
But his backward glances aren’t the furtive and alarmed type that keep a weather eye on impending danger. Rather, they are focused and sustained, as though the president was reading a map. He uses the past as an inverted guide about what to do next. He wants, where possible, to create a carbon copy of the policies of his good friend Barack Obama — see Iran; sucking up to — but even more than that, he is determined that whatever Trump did, he’ll do the opposite.
Lend an ear, and you can hear Biden mumble, “Trump cut taxes big time, so I must raise them as never before. He slashed red tape, so I’d better tangle business up in that stuff again. He wanted ‘energy dominance,’ so I’m going to kill fossil fuels. The orange man’s signature policy was to stem illegal immigration, so I’ll encourage it — maybe I can get to two million illegal immigrants in my first year, a big-time achievement. Trump investigated the origins of the Wuhan flu, so I’m going to shut that down; uh-oh, the evidence is too strong, I’m going to have to restart that line of inquiry. Trump took us out of the Paris accords, so I’m rejoining. The same goes for the World Health Organization.” And so on and so on.
Biden is betting that since he ran as the not-Trump candidate, he must reverse what Trump did. But this is a problem because although America wanted to get rid of Trump — the crude, bullying, often brutish man — it liked many of his policies. That’s why it gave Republicans more seats in the House in the last election and would have allowed the GOP to keep its Senate majority if Trump hadn’t narcissistically turned the Georgia runoffs into a protest vote about alleged voter fraud.
The country likes lower taxes, unshackled businesses, cheaper gasoline, and less reliance on overseas pariahs for energy. It likes border security and legal, rather than illegal, immigration. It likes law and order. It wants the truth about the pandemic’s origins. And it knows the WHO is in the pocket of our enemy, China. Biden’s policies on all of these and many other issues undermine the nation he leads. He wants to do the opposite of Make America Great Again, which was not only Trump’s slogan but also was Ronald Reagan’s before him. Our new president has his own MAGA idea: Make America Goofy Again.
It’s goofy to ram through an agenda that weakens this wonderful country, stokes inflation to vaporize wealth, saddles our children with massive new debt, and subordinates national interests to those of foreign nations, including those that wish us harm.
The question of why the Left wishes America harm is a knotty one. Biden, bless him, is just along for the glory. His agenda is not something he believes in, for there is no evidence that he believes in anything very much. His agenda belongs to the Left that put him in power and tolerates him only as long as he does its bidding.
That leaves a genuine conundrum. Does the Left start from the position of wanting America to fail and then, as a consequence, oppose any policy that will make it strong and successful, such as lifting the burden of taxes and bureaucracy from business, unleashing entrepreneurship, and protecting the Bill of Rights’ freedoms under the rule of law? Or is the Left’s hope that America fails — and its efforts in government to make that happen — the result of an ideological hatred of markets, wealth creation, opportunity for all, and freedom under the law?
Which came first: Hatred of success or hatred of America? Put it another way: Is left-wing ideology the cause or result of wanting America to fail? For some on the Left, it’s almost certainly the former. For others, it’s the latter. It’s what used to be called a nice question, but it certainly isn’t a pleasant one.
