When John Kerry ran for president in 2004, an effective Republican ad showed him windsurfing back and forth, never making up his mind about direction. Joe Biden may not windsurf, but he knows how to tack with the breeze.
He won the Democratic presidential primary as a centrist, beating socialist Bernie Sanders. Then, he tacked sharply left to lock up the party’s socialist wing. A month before Election Day, he tacked back to the center, distancing himself from radical policies such as defunding the police so as not to scare ordinary voters, who’d finally tuned in.
Now, in the Oval Office, he’s gone left again and is leading (if that is the right word) the most radical administration in our history. He and the Democrats are passing new laws so extreme that even former President Barack Obama could hardly have dreamed of them. Aside from the latest $1.9 trillion spending blowout, which Biden and Sanders tout as the most radical welfare restructuring in decades, Democrats aim to nationalize elections (sidelining the states), destroy right-to-work prosperity and freedom at the behest of Big Labor, welcome illegal immigration, and impose radical transgenderism nationwide.
As James Antle writes, decades of ideological sorting have made the Democratic Party a nearly homogeneous, left-wing body, disciplined, largely unified, and thus capable of ramming through wholesale change with only tiny congressional majorities.
Where is Biden in this? He’s not windsurfing, but, unmoored by conviction or principle, he’s floating gently down the left-wing stream, going wherever it takes him. His go-along, get-along demeanor makes him the opposite of Donald Trump, the ornery former president, but that’s perfect for the Left’s purposes; he’s a calm frontman for a radical government.
Few news organizations other than the Washington Examiner expend much time noting this, let alone opposing it. You don’t hear a peep of concern, for example, from the New York Times, which, as our cover story, “Bad Times,” by Ira Stoll, argues, has destroyed its ability to produce the high-quality journalism that once made it the most powerful news medium in the world.
Kyle Sammin writes that the COVID-19 vaccination program is showing the limitations of big government; and Andrew Bernard reports on Pope Francis’s historic visit to Iraq as that benighted nation emerges from the ashes of the Islamic State.
Life & Arts editor Park MacDougald reviews Count Down, in which he learns that Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper was not wrong about the danger to our precious bodily fluids, only in ascribing it to the commies rather than to toxins that surround us. Stefan Beck reviews Klara and the Sun, the latest novel from Kazuo Ishiguro, which grippingly probes the moral questions posed by artificial intelligence through the eyes, typically of this brilliant writer, of an unreliable narrator. Finally, Rob Long focuses his Long Life column on the questionable intelligence interpreting the embarrassing search terms people enter on their computers.
