Joe Biden is now the president, and there’s nothing Republicans can do to change it. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s imagine what the next four years will be like in a best (realistic) case scenario for a person who wished the 2020 election had worked out differently.
Biden has done a lot of virtue-signaling in his career, and he surely will do a lot more during his presidency. He must. That’s almost all his party cares about anymore. Their top three priorities from greatest to least are virtue-signaling through weird symbols and gestures, then controlling the everyday lives of middle-class taxpayers, then earning the approval of foreigners.
But the good thing about virtue-signaling is that the negative consequences are fairly minimal. Appointing a transgender woman as the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, one who has proven to be, at best, a mediocre public administrator, wasn’t an existential crisis for the nation. It made transgender people happy, and even though Democrats pretend they know how to “follow the science” (despite transgender people getting sick like every other person), it makes little difference otherwise.
So, Biden will do more of that, but hopefully, with his eye on reelection in 2024, he will refuse to act on the Left’s little fantasies of free health insurance for illegal immigrants, universal income for the lazy, and open borders for the world’s destitute. Enough of the country, still (thankfully), doesn’t want those things. Ideally, when his circus-show Cabinet tries pursuing these things, he’ll say no.
Meanwhile, Republicans need to get over what happened on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. A handful of people died, and all of them were supporters of Donald Trump. Yeah, it was bad, but it wasn’t exactly 1992 in Los Angeles. The vast majority of Trump’s mob simply showed up to smoke marijuana and make fun of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They took selfies and made noise. The damage was relatively minor when you consider that up until then, we had gone through seven months of Black Lives Matter and antifa riots with burning buildings and widespread vandalism, looting, and violence, all encouraged and excused by Democrats.
An end needs to come to the GOP’s self-flogging. Trump is out of office, and moving on isn’t difficult. He showed them how to energize millions of voters, old and new, and showed that the news media doesn’t have to set the terms of debate. They can learn from it and get ready for 2022, when they have a chance to take back the House, the Senate, or both, and shut down any other crazy thing that Democrats are hoping for.
Back to Biden, his presidency can go one of two ways. He can hand the keys to the nihilist left wing of his party so that white voters spend the next four years checking their privilege, or he can do what he said he wants to do. He can lead a productive government that really does flatten the number of deaths from the new coronavirus, that pushes middle-income earners up, and that confronts China as our ultimate adversary.
That’s the best we can hope for.
