Do you want America to be transformed? If, like me, you’d welcome (among other things) more public politeness, less disingenuous political debate, and an end to the slander that this country is systemically racist, then perhaps you’ll answer “yes.” But I bet you agree that those would be restorations, not innovations, a revival of lost qualities that made America more admirable decades ago than it is now.
That’s not what Joe Biden has in mind when he promises to “transform” this great nation as president. He’s thinking, if the rusty turning of his mental cogs can be described thus, about transformation along lines proposed by the Left. He won the Democratic primary as a centrist alternative to the whackos onstage with him, but then tacked sharply toward them to scoop up Bernie Sanders’s socialist supporters. Now, he’s confirmed that new direction — also that he’ll follow rather than lead his base — by picking Kamala Harris as his running mate.
She’s one of the nastier pieces of work among Democrats, which is a high bar. Her demagogic presidential run, venomous questioning of Brett Kavanaugh at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and unprincipled embrace of extreme policies such as socialized medicine and the Green New Deal — she dropped them when she saw they were unpopular — all suggest she’ll make our politics uglier if given the chance, and our governance more detached from the founding principles that brought the brilliant successes of our past.
This week’s magazine, a Democratic convention special issue, focuses on the policies of the Left, and on Biden’s presidential agenda in particular. Damir Marusic looks into what we can expect from Joe’s foreign policy; it will be deliberately more ameliorative than Trump’s, but will it be more effective?
Nic Rowan examines the dilemma Biden faces in policies that his administration, should voters grant him one, will adopt toward religious faith, and Catholicism specifically. As President Barack Obama’s Catholic sidekick, he could privately oppose his boss’s anti-Catholic policies (taking nuns to court to force them to pay for abortifacients and contraceptives, for example) knowing he’d be ignored. But at the top of the ticket, he’ll have to embrace policies handed to him by his intolerant secular masters in the party base.
Joe Simonson lays out the contours of Biden’s economic policies. Biden’s approach will be essentially the one Obama took, with lamentable results, in 2008. The Obama recovery was among the slowest on record. Unemployment stayed high — remember the “summer of recovery” that was forecast year after year after year? — with key voter groups’ anger over slow growth bought off with costly federal subsidies. There will, of course, be less pressure on China and, inevitably, higher taxes.
Rounding out our coverage (aside from all the other great features, columns, and Life & Arts coverage), Robert Showah takes apart the Democratic myth of the “rigged” Senate and shows how it’s really no more than a flimsy excuse for removing checks and balances upon which our republic was built.
