How long will Joe Biden be able to resist the far Left’s demands? The effort by the social-justice Left to mau-mau the president-elect is escalating as he lays the groundwork for his administration.
Already, left-wing Democrats are calling on him to forgive student loans with the stroke of a pen. This would be an illegal expenditure not approved by Congress, and it would send a message that Biden will be radical and can be pushed into policies that he knows should be rejected. The question is, does he want to be radical, or will he honor the mixed mandate that voters dealt him in last month’s election?
The far-left group Justice Democrats is among those grousing that the Biden administration-in-waiting is already too “corporate-friendly” just for having chosen Democratic Rep. Cedric Richmond (who enjoys oil industry support) as an adviser. Such personnel choices, the group complained in a social media statement, “will not help usher in the most progressive Democratic administration in generations. … [Biden] will risk quickly fracturing the hard-earned goodwill his team built with progressives to defeat Donald Trump.”
The Left is angry, and Biden’s victory did nothing to fix it. Despite so many promises that Trump’s exit would restore normalcy as left-wing rioting simmered down, liberal extremists are going back to the same intimidation tactics in order to get what they want from his administration. For example, in Los Angeles, Black Lives Matter-LA and other activists have been barricading Mayor Eric Garcetti inside his home for nine days running. Viewing Garcetti as too supportive of the police, they have been banging pots and pans and forming non-socially distanced throngs throughout his residential neighborhood since Nov. 24, as a protest against his potential appointment to the Biden administration.
The Left is also determined to rewrite the history of election 2020. What actually happened was that voters elected Biden, the man, but punished Democrats as a party. The main reason they did so was the radicalism of the party’s message. Promises to defund the police and spend $100 trillion on fanciful and alarmist policies to combat global warming, alongside implicit (and even explicit) support for rioters, are not that popular.
The Left is in denial about this. A coalition of four far-left groups released a memo blaming piddling technical campaign issues for congressional Democrats’ drubbing. For example, they claim that Sarah Gideon lost her Senate race in Maine (by 8 points) because she failed to use the words “jobs” and “economy” in the text of her Facebook ads. We also hear she didn’t kiss enough babies.
The Left’s problem is that the voters rejected radical policies. Even in California, they voted directly against two of the Left’s model proposals (in the form of ballot propositions) for labor markets and racial justice. Even rank-and-file Democratic voters rejected radicalism — recall the almost-panicky haste with which they turned to Biden’s moribund campaign when it appeared that Sen. Bernie Sanders might actually become the nominee.
The radical groups blithely ignore this. They declare that “Biden has a mandate to govern” and call upon him to “act like it by wielding his power decisively.” One especially egregious proposal is that Biden should “use executive power in the Treasury to shift financial flows from fossil fuels to climate solutions.” This sounds a lot like the Obama administration’s illegal operation to bankrupt gun shops, coal mines, fireworks vendors, and other “undesirable” employers by threatening the banks with which they did business.
If Biden wants a successful presidency, he will ignore the nattering of the far Left and stand by his promise, made in his victory speech, to be a president for all Americans. “I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but unify,” he said, “who doesn’t see red states and blue states, only sees the United States.”
We know that such comity can stretch only so far, and it is clear that Biden will enact and enforce some liberal policies. But he ought to view the closely divided House and Senate as an opportunity rather than an obstruction. If he can only manage to ignore and resist the pressure that leftists apply, Biden will be better positioned than any recent president to take on a managerial role and govern more or less according to a steady bipartisan consensus. That’s the outline for the best version of his presidency.
