Is the Demise of the Biden Administration Greatly Exaggerated?

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

A couple of prominent Biden critics on the right have penned interesting articles today on the troubles of Joe Biden and why we should see the administration as being in its death throes.

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Former PJ Media columnist Roger Kimball wrote “The Great Unraveling” over at Spectator USA. Kimball wrote that “the Biden administration is an unmitigated disaster unfolding in real-time. It is a disaster fully owned and operated by the people that brought you the hysteria of NeverTrump and, as a part of that long-running entertainment, told us repeatedly [indeed, ad nauseam] that with the installation of Joe Biden the ‘adults’ were back, America was back and ‘normality’ was back.”

Not to be outdone, NROs Jim Gereghty wrote “A Flailing President Is a Failing President.” Geraghty wrote, “Every politician walks into office with an enormous, and probably unrealistic, sense of his own ability to persuade others. But with each passing week, the gap between the president that Joe Biden thinks he is, and the president that he actually is, grows a little bit wider.”

Is Joe Biden really failing already? He’s only been in office for about eight months. Isn’t there still plenty of time for Biden to turn it around?

The short answer to that question is “no.” The Biden Disaster has been in the works for 50 years. It started with a warped worldview by leftists that the U.S. was the source of all the world’s problems — war, famine, pestilence, racism. Later, homophobia, sexism, Islamophobia, and transphobia were added.

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Biden absorbed the leftist critique of the world but rejected much of it for the bulk of his political career. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was seen as a reliable moderate politician — anti-busing, pro-business, pro-military.

But as his career stalled out, he realized that the way to rise in the Democratic Party is to latch on to the hard left and hold on. It was obvious as far back as the 1990s where the Democratic Party was headed. As the party got more radical, Biden lurched left with it. He had the disadvantage of running for president in 2008 against the one person who could have beaten him and everyone else: a black senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.

In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton’s turn as the radicals were fully in control. But the 2020 Democratic primaries were the last gasp of the “mainstream” of the party. Main Street Democrats in the south and Midwest just couldn’t stomach Bernie Sanders — someone Donald Trump would have made mincemeat out of. And they wanted to win. They chose to go with the inoffensive grandpa figure of Joe Biden — at least for four years.

Related: Here’s How We Know Joe Biden’s COVID Response Has Been a Failure

Joe Biden is already a failure as president because the ideology he serves has no conception of what is happening in the real world. The simple fact is that people do not act as radical orthodoxy says they should. They aren’t motivated by what the radicals believe they should be motivated by. The radicals can’t imagine what blue-collar Americans really want. It is beyond the ken of their understanding. White, lower-middle-class men may as well be from another planet.

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Radicals have no understanding of heartland values or the way heartland voters think. Most of us don’t get up every morning thinking of ways we are going to oppress blacks or women or other minorities. Indeed, most of us don’t even think of people in terms of race. Most of us take people one at time, as they come at us. Like all humans, we’re too quick to judge and have prejudices and biases. That doesn’t make us evil. It makes us human.

Trying to blame the problems in America and the world on white, heteronormal, capitalist men and posit solutions based on overcoming fictitious or imaginary enemies is a recipe for disastrous failure. In that sense, Joe Biden can’t help himself.

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