Leftism

Looking Back on the Biden Ten Year Plan

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(An Ode to Lionel Shriver)

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Back in 2021 President Biden reiterated that his proposals, unprecedented in scope and expense, represented an investment in the future with extraordinary returns that could only be evaluated over the longer, e.g., ten- to fifty-year time horizon. This perspective coincidentally facilitated claims it was paid for without new taxes, while postponing an evaluation of actual returns beyond his term in office, even if he should run and win a second term in 2024 at 82 years old.

Saving American Democracy

But it’s now a decade later and Biden is still in office. Well, not exactly in  office, as he had been replaced by a hologram in late 2021, addressing the American people from  his estate  in McLean Virginia, purchased for $50 million cash (before GSA improvements). Following FDR’s precedent people were told that changing leaders in the midst of a crisis, and these continued to accumulate over the decade, was dangerous.

Besides, he had run virtually unopposed in the 2024 election after all those registered Republicans within a half mile of the Capitol on January 6,th 2021 had been arrested, tried, convicted and jailed for “terrorism and crimes against the State,” after which Republican voter registration plummeted.

The expanded Supreme Court, 29 Justices to accommodate race, ethnicity, gender, etc., had finally ruled on the legal concept of “disparate impact,” concluding that everything from global warming and COVID 19 to voter identification, rent collection, college admission requirements and even law enforcement represented illegal racial discrimination. The expanded Court then called an indefinite recess during the construction of a new edifice to house it.

There was really no point in holding a faux election in 2028 in any event. The progressive campaigns to eliminate the electoral college and voter ID laws to prevent “voter suppression” had both been successful, and the ongoing COVID lockdown still allowed mail-in ballots under the rules in place in 2020, so there was no need to go through the motions. The New York Times and the Washington Post, the only remaining Party sanctioned newspapers, simply announced “the will of the people.” By now, 2031, most people have long since forgotten the promises of that Biden Ten Year Plan.

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“Good Union Jobs”

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Biden, and other Democrats, like to talk about “good union jobs.”   Unsurprising–what is a little surprising is how many conservative commentators have picked up on the same phraseology: for example, when talking about the impact of Biden’s pipeline shutdown, I’ve hear them talking about “union jobs lost” rather than just about “jobs lost.”

I’m not opposed to unions (private-sector unions, that is), they can serve a useful purpose. But they do add a certain rigidity to business operations and to compensation and promotion decisions. They are not for everyone, and there are a lot of people who have excellent jobs that have nothing to do with unions.

Democrats like to talk about unions, I think, partly for reasons of nostalgia but primarily due to the inherently collectivist worldview of the Dems: they would rather think in terms of categories of people than of actual individuals. The old feudal idea of “no man without a master” resonates with them, I think, although they would phrase it differently. And, of course, they view unions as excellent sources of campaign funding.

Conservatives/republicans mindlessly echoing this phraseology and implicitly the worldview that underlies it.

The Politician as Bully

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Peggy Noonan, in a WSJ column which is actually worthwhile (rare for her these days, IMO) writes about aspects of Andrew Cuomo’s behavior which she says demonstrate a deep weirdness:

The culture of his office was rife with fear and intimidation. A victim: “It was extremely toxic, extremely abusive. If you got yelled at in front of everyone, it wasn’t any special day. .  .  . It was controlled largely by his temper, and he was surrounded by people who enabled his behavior.” Everyone feared retaliation for speaking out, so they didn’t.

But there is deep weirdness beyond that. He ordered one aide to memorize the lyrics to “Danny Boy.” She testified he “would pop out” of his office and ask her to start singing. A footnote says it was not the only time the governor asked her to sing. The aide found herself writing to a former staffer, “He just asked me to sing Bohemian Rhapsody so. We aren’t far off from a bedtime story.” He asked her to do push-ups in front of him…

I was reminded of a passage in one of the Hornblower novels in which the protagonist, as a new midshipman, finds himself on a ship with a sickly and disconnected captain and a midshipmen’s mess ruled by a bully, Simpson.

Simpson had apparently always been an ingenious tyrant, but now, embittered and humiliated by his failure to pass his examination for his commission, he was a worse tyrant, and his ingenuity had multiplied itself. He may have been weak in mathematics, but he was diabolically clever at making other people’s lives a burden to them. As senior officer in the mess he had wide official powers; as a man with a blistering tongue and a morbid sense of mischief he would have been powerful anyway, even if the Justinian had possessed an alert and masterful first lieutenant to keep him in check while Mr. Clay was neither…

Significantly, it was not his ordinary exactions which roused the greatest resentment — his levying toll upon their sea chests for clean shirts for himself, his appropriation of the best cuts of the meat served, nor even his taking their coveted issues of spirits. These things could be excused as understandable, the sort of thing they would do themselves if they had the power. But he displayed a whimsical arbitrariness which reminded Hornblower, with his classical education, of the freaks of the Roman emperors. He forced Cleveland to shave the whiskers which were his inordinate pride; he imposed upon Hether the duty of waking up Mackenzie every half hour, day and night, so that neither of them was able to sleep — and there were toadies ready to tell him if Hether ever failed in his task.

Noonan:

Here’s my thought when I finished the report. As America becomes stranger and our culture becomes stranger, our politicians become stranger. As their power increases (I can close a whole state down; I can close a country!) so do the stakes.

As politicians gain more and more power…especially arbitrary power…the kind of people who become politicians changes.   Francis Spufford, in his book Red Plenty, writes about those who sought and achieved power in the Soviet Union.   He notes that:

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Over – Under

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The descent into senility on the part of the so-called President Joe Biden seems to be accelerating, or so I presume from frequent scans of that news media which has not gone completely bonkers. Honestly, about the only regular mainstream establishment news outlet I check frequently is the British Daily Mail in spite of all it’s many sins, including apparently allowing semi-literate teenage interns to write the headlines and photo captions, an unseemly devotion to the regular goings on of flashy semi-celebs like the Kardashians and Megan “Royal-Wrecker” Markle, and having the execrable Piers Morgan on staff they do cover US-based political stories without any particular fear or favor. In  other words,

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Quote of the Day

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The Antiplanner:

Despite continued and growing preferences for single-family homes, a web search for “single-family zoning” reveals enormous animosity to such housing. Like the animosity to the automobile, this comes from a minority of people who refuse to recognize that Americans not only want but are better off in single-family homes and automobiles.
 
People should be allowed to choose to live in single-family or multifamily homes based on the actual costs of such housing, not costs that are artificially inflated by planning regulations. People should also be allowed to choose to live in single-family neighborhoods, protected by either deed restrictions or zoning, if they prefer such neighborhoods. Free-market advocates who want to “restore property rights” by abolishing single-family zoning are falling into a trap set for them by the central planners who want to ignore people’s preferences and cram more families into multifamily housing.