Biden’s Own GoalsBiden’s policies may well precipitate a once-in-a-century political reversal.
By Lewis M. Andrews
March 23, 2022
Ironically, President Joe Biden’s post-election progressive turn seemed to inspire many people to reject far-left policies. Who would have guessed on the eve of Biden’s inauguration that, one year later, parents across the country would attend local school-board meetings to challenge critical race theory? Or that, sensing their constituents’ anger at progressive spending proposals like the Build Back Better bill, a record number of Democrats would be retiring from Congress?
Only months after the end of the 2020 campaign, medical researchers who had previously deferred to government Covid guidance began confessing their long-held reservations. At the same time, academics like Williams College political scientist Darel E. Paul and NYU Stern professor Jonathan Haidt began ramping up their attacks on “woke” ideology. And though a fearful MIT administration still withdrew its invitation for geophysicist Dorian Abbot’s lecture on the excesses of diversity policies, he gave the same talk at Princeton, where thousands eagerly registered to hear it.
Even within the notoriously liberal entertainment industry, entertainers’ reluctance to sound politically incorrect has softened considerably since Biden’s sharp left turn. While comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, Mel Brooks, and Chris Rock had previously concluded that woke culture made it all but impossible to poke fun at progressive sensibilities, Bill Maher has done just that on his nightly Real Time show, to the apparent delight of studio audiences.
To give President Biden sole credit for growing public defiance of progressive thinking would, of course, be an exaggeration. Any self-righteous political philosophy held by only seven percent of registered voters will inevitably inspire popular pushback, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. But by promoting left-wing economic and environmental policies from the very beginning of his administration, Biden effectively, if unintentionally, exposed their harmful consequences to even the most casual observers.
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It also has not helped progressivism’s cause that, from the very beginning of his administration, the president’s instinctive response to any policy failure has been to fabricate blatantly transparent lies, like the claims that Build Back Better is completely paid for, our Afghanistan withdrawal was a great success, spending more on social programs will tame inflation, and Russian sanctions were never meant to deter the country from invading Ukraine.
Whatever progressivism’s shortcomings before Biden’s support, it at least benefitted from the appearance of being an idealistic crusade—a sincere, if misguided, attempt to compensate for past racial injustices and to preserve the natural environment for future generations. But once a prevaricating president became the movement’s best-known advocate, its standing with the public inevitably suffered.
As Larry Kudlow recently put it, “What the President is doing is devastating…. the collapsing popular opinion of Biden’s character and honesty [has completely undermined] confidence in his agenda.”
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/bidens-own-goals/
