On the menu today: There’s no sugarcoating it — President Biden just unilaterally decided to make taxpayers pick up the at-minimum $300 billion bill for unpaid student loans, a move that nearly 60 percent of Americans think will make inflation worse. Even a former Obama administration official characterizes it as “pouring roughly half [a] trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire.” But what’s so particularly galling is that this comes from a president who couldn’t stop telling us how much he was determined to unite us and end our angry divisions.
President Unity Strikes Again
I’m getting awfully sick and tired of political leaders telling us how much they want to unite the country, and then jamming through their unpopular agenda items by any means necessary.
You can’t give grandiose speeches about how your preeminent priority is to bring Americans together, and then by executive order decide that taxpayers will be on the hook for $300 billion in unpaid student loans — a sum that comes out to about $2,000 per taxpayer — by invoking a post-9/11 law that allows for debt cancelation “in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.” This is a grotesque abuse of the authority of the executive branch; if the law stands, it will only be because the Supreme Court can’t decide who has the legal standing to challenge the decision.
It is as if many of our elected leaders don’t see any connection between how they approach their roles and duties and the country’s political and social divisions. You can’t approach the job of governing with an “I’m going to do this, and you guys just try and stop me” attitude, and then be surprised that the country is growing angrier and more divided on your watch. Angry divisions are the direct consequences of choices you deliberately made.
Way back on January 20, 2021, Joe Biden took the oath of office and pledged that his whole soul was dedicated to the task of uniting the American people:
To overcome these challenges — to restore the soul and to secure the future of America — requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity.
Unity . . . my whole soul is in it. Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation. I ask every American to join me in this cause. Uniting to fight the common foes we face: Anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence. Disease, joblessness, hopelessness. With unity we can do great things. Important things. . . .
History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity. We can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury.
And then, in the following months and years, Biden passed most of his agenda with only Democratic votes in an evenly divided Senate — with a few exceptions such as the infrastructure bill. He contended that those who supported an election-reform law in Georgia stood with George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis, and stood against Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and Abraham Lincoln. (That election-reform law led to higher voter turnout, including higher turnout among minorities.) He declared that, “This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that has existed in American history.” (The Weather Underground — which claimed credit for 25 bombing attacks on targets including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the California Attorney General’s office, and a New York City police station — could not be reached for comment.) He contended that the 2022 midterm elections could be illegitimate because they were conducted under election-reform laws he opposed.
Does this sound like seeing others as neighbors, not as adversaries? Does this sound like treating others with dignity and respect? Does this sound like peace, instead of bitterness and fury?
Biden’s job approval bobbling along in the high 30s and low 40s for so long is a strong indicator that he has not been that grand unifying force he envisioned himself being.
When most politicians call for unity, what they often mean is that everyone should unite behind what they want to do. Their vision of unity is everyone falling in line behind the leader’s will and agenda. They’re saying “unite,” but what they really mean is “submit.”
But that’s not the way genuine unity works. A free society is rarely if ever going to be a united society because freedom of thought and freedom of expression are almost synonyms for division. The day Americans are united on most of our current controversial domestic issues — abortion, tax rates, the correct level of government spending — is the day we have all become reprogrammed automatons.
Genuine unity is nearly impossible, but what is achievable with a better, wiser mindset is compromise and consensus — circumstances that leave few Americans truly thrilled about the decisions and outcomes, but almost everyone satisfied, or at least not deliberately antagonized. You can envision a consensus on abortion that leaves it legal in the first trimester and provides exceptions for rape, incest, and the life and the mother, but otherwise bans it, with no taxpayer funding for it under any circumstances. Few activists on either side would be happy with that compromise, but it would be closer to that old Democratic Party adage of “safe, legal, and rare.”
The blunt truth is that Americans are most united when we face an outside threat, and a near-universal recognition of that outside threat usually only happens after it has manifested some terrible consequences — like Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
A lot of our modern politics consists of two sides, one insisting that something is a significant and worsening threat, and the opposition insisting that the fears are overblown. Democrats think Republicans are in denial about the threats posed by climate change, racism, economic inequality, white nationalist terrorism, callous and counterproductive aspects of the criminal-justice system, vaccine skepticism, microaggressions, and incorrect pronouns. Republicans think Democrats are in denial about the threats posed by illegal immigrants with malevolent intentions, Islamist terrorism and states like Iran, violent criminals, sprawling and unresponsive bureaucracies, the national debt, the ticking time bomb of entitlement programs, and those who intend to shape the sexuality of young people for their own purposes.
Every once in a while, both the Left and the Right find some areas of agreement on things such as the threat from big corporations, the Chinese Communist Party, or Vladimir Putin.
Note that on the issue of student-loan debt, Biden’s so-called solution does nothing to address the root of the problem of extremely high tuition rates and graduates who find themselves making significantly less in their jobs than they expected. (That problem is probably worsening; one survey this year found students in college “now expect to make $103,880 in their first job after graduation.” The average starting salary is currently around $55,000.)
Jason Furman, who spent eight years as a top economic adviser to President Obama, is attempting to sound the alarm:
Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless. Doing it while going well beyond one campaign promise ($10K of student loan relief) and breaking another (all proposals paid for) is even worse.
Then again, about 14 months after Biden told America that his whole soul was dedicated to the goal of bringing Americans together, Biden pledged to Americans that, “I have made tackling inflation my top economic priority.” At the time, it was 8.6 percent; since then, it has come in at 9.1 percent and 8.5 percent.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to everyone who has purchased Gathering Five Storms, and the pleasantly surprising number of readers who have chosen to start reading the series from the beginning with Between Two Scorpions.
As I wrote Between Two Scorpions, I realized that at some point, the reader needed to see how the country was reacting to the book’s events — and in particular, what the president and top levels of the U.S. government were doing. Some authors create a fictional president — “President John Jones” — and I don’t know about you, but that choice usually interrupts my suspension of disbelief, unless the characteristics of the fictional president are key to the story. Otherwise, it’s just a reminder that the story is taking place in a world that isn’t like our own.
Between Two Scorpions was/is set in “the not-too-distant future” during the Trump years, and I tried to thread the needle by simply referring to the president as “the president” and the unnamed secretary of defense as “the secretary of defense.” But in the short transcripts of their briefings, they sounded an awful lot like Donald Trump and James Mattis. I basically took past statements by Trump and Mattis and inserted references to the book’s events.
And in Gathering Five Storms . . . well, the once-again-unnamed president who’s early in his term will probably remind you of someone:
JUNE 16, 2021
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON THE WAY TO MARINE FORCE ONE
THE PRESIDENT: It’s been a tough day. This afternoon — excuse me, morning, as you all know, a terrorist attacked — attempted an attack — that we’ve been talking about, and worried about, that the intelligence community has assessed — has undertaken — tried to undertake an attack. The terrorist attempted, tried, to detonate a truck bomb at the entrance to CIA headquarters. The George Bush — the effect would have been terrible. Had the bomb gone off, the casualties would have been enormous.
Only the quick action of the guards at the little — the entrance checkpoint — stopped today from being a dark day. A really dark day. They took action, and the bomber was killed before the bomb could be exploded, the bomb could be detonated.
I’ve been engaged all day, in constant contact with CIA Director Stern, Barb Stern, great woman — the FBI, the military commanders here in Washington and the Pentagon as well as overseas. And my commanders here in Washington and in the field have been on this with great detail, and you will have a chance to hear more from them at some point.
The situation on the ground is still evolving, and I’m constantly being updated. These American law enforcement officers who gave their lives — I mean, risked their lives — it’s an overused word but it’s totally appropriate here — are heroes, heroes who have been engaged in a dangerous, selfless mission to save the lives of others. They are a part of simply what I call the backbone of America. They are the spine of America. The heart. The spleen. The best the country has to offer.
To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay. I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command.
Q: Mr. President, is there any sense of who the bomber was, was he part of a terror organization or acting alone, or—
THE PRESIDENT: We don’t know anything about that yet. I haven’t been told anything about that.
Q: Mr. President, is there any sense whether there is potential for more attacks? Should Americans be concerned—
THE PRESIDENT: We don’t know anything about that, either. What I can tell you, I will tell you, and I really mean it here, I’m not being facetious — is that the risk today is the same as yesterday. It’s like my dad used to tell me — and I’ll never forget this — he was driving in his car, and he told me — he was a wise man, my dad — he told me you couldn’t walk out the door in the morning without taking a risk. Risk is part of life. You just have to live with it. You just live with it. You live with it until you die. And that’s what we’re going to do. Live with it, I mean. Not die with it. I mean, yes, eventually we all die. But—
WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president really needs to be going! Thank you, everyone!
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, thank you! Thank you, everyone!