Democrats Deny Economic Reality at Their Own Peril

T hat there exists such a yawning chasm between the substance of the daily news and the continuing political obsessions of the Democratic Party remains one of the least remarked upon and most mystifying phenomena of the age. Day in, day out, we are treated to breathless, ESPN-style updates on the current state of the Democrats’ sprawling, unsolicited “Build Back Better” agenda, and yet almost nobody seems to have inquired seriously into why, given the real problems that are afflicting our economy, and given the public’s obvious indifference toward the package, the party has remained so monomaniacally focused on passing it.

“By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse,” Senator Joe Manchin observed this morning. “D.C. can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.” But, of course, “ignoring” this “economic pain” is precisely what “D.C.” is doing. Having won both runoff elections in Georgia, the Democratic Party came into power this year with a long wish list of policies, and it has spent every second since attempting to pass those policies without any real justification beyond its own, increasingly unhinged, ambitions. On the rare occasions when Democrats are willing to acknowledge reality at all, it is invariably invoked as a foil. On Morning Joe today, America’s hapless transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, presented voters with a terrific example of this proclivity, when he farcically attempted to blame both our labor shortages and our supply-chain issues on a lack of affordable child-care options. Speaking for all of us, Mika Brzezinski said, simply, “I don’t understand.”

Parvenu mediocrity that he is, Buttigieg is particularly dreadful at this game. But he is by no means alone in playing it. For months now, almost everyone within Democratic politics has been playing a preposterous game of Mad Libs in which all the participants are obliged to pretend that whatever is currently dominating the news is making the perfect case for the things that they want to do anyway. (“America’s milk shortage is a problem, but it’s nothing that universal pre-K can’t fix!”) In March, the Democrats managed to parlay this ugly habit into a $2 trillion “COVID-19 relief” bill that, by an astonishing and fortunate coincidence, just so happened to contain a whole host of unrelated measures that the party had coveted for decades. Now it is the turn of the protean “Build Back Better” agenda, which, amazingly enough, seems to be both the culmination of years of Democratic wish-casting and the well-tailored answer to all of our contemporary problems. Who knew that Joe Biden could be so prescient?

Or, for that matter, that he could be so shameless? In a statement on this morning’s inflation numbers, President Biden promised that “reversing this trend is a top priority for me,” before proposing ridiculously and dishonestly that a spending spree the size of two New Deals would help him achieve that goal. The rote repetition of absurdities has long been a penchant of Biden’s — his two stances on the inflation question this year have been to insist that it is not happening, and then to maintain that, if it is happening, the best way to counter it will be for the federal government to shovel trillions of additional dollars into the economy — but, for its sheer audacity, this took the cake. Apparently, it is Biden’s steadfast belief that he must under no circumstances take any of the steps that might help us escape from our predicament — increasing domestic oil production, say, or waiving the Jones Act — and that he remains duty-bound to obsess over a set of radical, unnecessary policy proposals that would, quite obviously, make our situation worse.

After last week’s electoral rout, Representative Abigail Spanberger (D., Va.) griped that “nobody elected” Biden “to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.” She was right. But does Biden know that? And do his colleagues in the Democratic Party — including Joe Manchin, who despite talking a good game has yet to prove that he is anything more than a posturer? For half a century now, Joe Biden and his ideological bedfellows have rhetorically pitched themselves as the pragmatic protectors of the middle class, while dismissing their opponents as dramatic, luxuriating dilettantes who believe that politics is a mere abstraction. With their insistent dismissal of the crisis before their eyes, such talk looks increasingly to have been a con — and one for which, before too long, the Democrats will pay a keen and colossal price.