Ha ha. Who didn’t already know by April Fool’s day that President Biden had “tamed” the left—though “tamed” hardly seems like the right word—by giving it everything the left has ever dreamed of getting from an American president?
The announcement in Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress of another $1.8 trillion in new spending and tax credits, bringing the total since this president took office to some $6 trillion, shows that the liberality with which he is handing out borrowed or imaginary money—all the taxpayers’ money having long since been spoken for—to every favored constituency and pet project of the left is not letting up any time soon.
Yet it suits the Post, like the rest of the media, to pretend that, at some level anyway, the old rules of politics still apply, that the left can have been only temporarily placated by such largesse and that, somewhere, sober and responsible politicians are still arguing—as they have done for centuries—about what priorities should obtain in the allocation of scarce resources.
It’s as if neither the media nor the politicians themselves have yet noticed that we are living in a new political world where everybody but a few malcontents appears to have agreed that resources are now, if not unlimited, to be treated as if they were.
Well, it used to be so, but I’m not so sure it is anymore. And the feebleness of the pretense that all the new benefits are to be paid for only by “the rich,” and by the discovery of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes hitherto uncollected by an underfunded and lackadaisical IRS, suggests that Biden, or whoever is doing his thinking for him these days, doubts it too.
In other words, it’s obvious that he’s just going through the motions of the old politics.
Surely, after the blowout spending and ballooning deficits of the decade since Obama made that promise, not even the most credulous of his then vice-president’s supporters in 2021, in the media or out of them, can believe in his merely pro-forma reiteration of such promises?
I don’t know whether or not Dick Cheney has ever confirmed or denied that he told Paul O’Neill back in 2004 that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” but every president since then has behaved as if that were the case.
But for Biden to pretend, after all this time, to think deficits do matter, and must be paid for, looks like mere superstition, a verbal oblation to the Gods of Fiscal Prudence in whom neither he nor anyone else any longer believes.
The comparison was with 1972, when the Democrats had held up the painted devil of Richard Nixon—the original of the even more luridly sketched Devil Trump—as a reason for supporting the radical corrective of George McGovern.
In the event, of course, the Democratic left—perhaps in the light of how that election had turned out for them—tamped down the revolutionary rhetoric long enough to nominate the alleged moderate Joe Biden and then managed, by hook or by crook, to get him elected.
But Swaim may have been onto something all the same.
Except that it wasn’t so much Trump’s alleged “right-wing extremism” that licensed the left-wing extremism of the Democrats. Rather, it was the proof he gave, or seemed to them to give, that the old rules of politics no longer applied.
In his speech, Biden didn’t quite dare to abandon all pretense of fiscal responsibility, but he showed—as he has done since taking office—that that pretense is now utterly hollow.
By the old rules of politics and of economics he might be expected to pay a heavy price for that bet on a brave new world of unlimited abundance, so we’ll soon see whether or not those rules really continue to apply.
