The vice president joins a long line of liberals hoping to wring political benefit out of emergencies.
America has endured remarkable hardship over the past year-plus: in the toll of coronavirus itself, in the social and economic costs of lockdowns and restrictions, and in the political disruptions caused by both. We have only just begun to return to normal life, and to restore some of what has been lost over the past year — that is, what can be restored. It ought to be a time of recuperation, and of patience.
Unless you’re Vice President Kamala Harris. In a speech yesterday, Harris said she sees an opportunity in America’s emergence from coronavirus:
As we emerge from the pandemic, I believe that we are at the start of a new era. I believe that we have a unique opportunity now to shape our nation’s future, to transform how we live, how we work and how we vote for the better. . . .
. . . . I know this past year has been marked by pain, so much pain for so many, including and in particular members of the AAPI community when we saw the targeting, when we’ve seen the hate, when we’ve seen the viciousness of it all. And we all see that. And as a member of this community, I share in that outrage and grief. And I believe we have an opportunity now to turn that pain into action, to turn that pain that righteous anger, because of the injustice of it, we have an opportunity to turn that into power, into power. The work to transform our nation’s future. And it is what I call American aspiration. It is the ability to see what can be unburdened by what has been. . .
Conservatives often complain about the curious desire and habit of those on the left to leverage incidents of crisis for maximum political advantage. But that’s because it’s true. And they’ve been increasingly more open about it over the years. Let us never forget Rahm Emanuel’s infamous 2008 declaration, in the wake of the financial crisis:
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.
To be clear, crises can expose serious problems needing redress. But it seems so often to be the case that, whatever the crisis we end up in, the solution, for the Left, seems to be the same: pass Democrats’ bills, expand government, etc. Unsurprisingly, Harris’s speech enumerates as her preferred solutions the current policy priorities of congressional Democrats.
Rarely is there a clever or unique solution offered in such instances; to the extent it is tailored to the problem at hand, it becomes more a matter of “what part of government should become bigger?” than “what should we do differently to prevent this from happening again?” Expanding the state and maximizing political goals are the guiding lights of this mindset, not genuine adaptation or crisis prevention.
There also comes an addiction to the crisis mindset. It is, at least theoretically, “easier” to govern in or under the pretext of a crisis. Whatever challenges a crisis might pose, it also tends to weaken procedural and institutional barriers to action. At times, this might be necessary. But it should not be the default mode of governance. And governments should be made to relinquish the powers they accumulate during such instances, lest such powers linger into and warp ordinary life, or increase the temptation to reimagine ordinary life as itself an emergency.
For all her blatant desire to abuse the departures from normal political life that coronavirus has brought, even Kamala Harris has an incentive to let this particular crisis end — an incentive that puts the Biden administration in a bit of a bind. As Charlie Cooke pointed out on a recent episode of The Editors, for the Biden-Harris administration to take (dubious) credit for ending the pandemic, it will eventually . . . have to admit the pandemic is over. But much of the trillions of dollars in legislation President Joe Biden has proposed is dependent on this emergency mindset, or at least on the contention that it deserves to transcend the scrutiny of ordinary political life.
This was the essence of the “Build Back Better” slogan Biden ran on: It is not enough simply to emerge from coronavirus; we have to do everything Biden and Harris want, too. But as America emerges from one crisis — whether Biden and Harris admit it or not — they may well find that its appetite for extraordinary measures diminishes. They may still propose, and we will still debate, their preferred policies, as well as others; no place is perfect. But this will occur as part of the ordinary course of political life. And that’s fine. After the past year-plus, normalcy sounds like a pretty good political aspiration to me.