Joe Biden is very interested in waging the culture war. He just wants it to be a shadow conflict.
Charlie provided an apt description of the Biden administration’s duplicitousness the other day. Essentially, it sells itself as both moderate and a purveyor of radical change.
It’s a seemingly difficult task made much easier by its allies in the press. Take, for example, Adam Serwer’s latest for the The Atlantic, headlined “Biden Chooses Prosperity Over Vengeance.” The subheading is even more telling: “The future of American democracy depends on the president’s ability to show that even when the Republican Party loses, Americans who vote Republican do not.”
Biden’s $1.9 trillion boondoggle “uses the state as an instrument of broad prosperity rather than as one of vengeance,” Serwer explains. The passage of the bill represents “a leap of faith that Americans of all political backgrounds will reward a party that seeks to make their lives better, rather than one that simply manufactures new targets for scorn,” he says.
It’s an arrogant formulation: We have to pass the bill for you to realize you actually love Democratic rule. Of course, the bill is popular. It turns out that when you have an entire media infrastructure devoted to insisting a bill will end child poverty, fill their wallets, and potentially bring about world peace, people tend to have a pretty rosy understanding of it. Unmentioned by Serwer and most of Biden’s media boosters are the 15 weeks of paid leave offered to federal workers, the billions of dollars spent on bailing out state pension systems, and the fact that it was passed without a Hyde Amendment rider.
On that last topic, it’s worth turning our attention to New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, who writes, without a trace of self-awareness, that “Biden Wants No Part of the Culture War the G.O.P Loves.” Really?
Is issuing an executive order to force schools to allow transgender athletes to compete in sports that conform with their gender identity rather than their biological realities wanting no part of the culture war? How about backing the Equality Act? And the Democrats’ police-reform bill, which all but calls for police to treat individuals unequally under the law, lest they find themselves legally liable for racial profiling? Is the crisis at the border, the inevitable result of Biden’s foolhardy immigration policies, not a cultural issue? If Biden is so uninterested in fighting over social issues, why has he ordered a review of Betsy DeVos’s comprehensive Title IX regulations with the explicit aim of making due process on campus a tertiary concern of the federal government, weaponizing the pain and suffering of sexual-assault survivors for political-signaling purposes? Why did he nominate Xavier Becerra, an eminently unqualified abortion enthusiast — yes, an enthusiast — to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services amidst a pandemic?
I have an answer; because Joe Biden is very interested in waging the culture war. He just wants it to be a shadow conflict, one he can use to quietly remake the country’s social fabric while benefitting from the either intentionally misleading or ignorant coverage of journalists like Serwer and Edsall, who seem to believe that because the latest culture-war developments please them, it’s no longer being waged.