Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
The Left should be ecstatic that Joe Biden has given them everything they wanted.
The Left likes inflation. It reduces the value of old money by printing lots of new money. Those richer who have it, lose the value of their money; those poorer who don’t have any money, suddenly do.
When combined with low interest rates, inflation roars even louder. Not since Jimmy Carter has a Democrat been so insistent on inflating the money supply.
For decades, the Left has amplified former Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s 2008 dream that the government must spike fuel costs up to European levels. That was seen as the best way to force unsophisticated Americans to quit burning gas and transition to renewable energy. Biden took that sermon seriously.
He canceled federal energy leases. He shut down ANWR. He canceled pipelines and warned the oil industry its days were numbered. Biden has done more than any other Democrat to ensure fossil fuels were unaffordable, forcing America’s supposedly unthinking consumers to drive less or consider ditching their gas-engine cars altogether.
The hard American Left always wanted unlimited illegal immigration. Biden agreed and destroyed the southern border as we knew it.
The result is that in less than two years, nearly 3 million illegal aliens have surged into the United States. Nearly all of them arrived unvaccinated, untested, and unaudited at a time of a COVID pandemic.
Biden worries little that record numbers of Americans are dying from drugs that now pour across the border. Cartels became richer and more powerful than ever under his watch, while child traffickers were freed from worries.
Biden did more than any prior Democrat to ensure massive illegal immigration as part of the leftist dream of flipping red states blue by changing the demography.
The Left rails about imperialism, neo-colonialism, and military expenditure. Joe Biden without warning simply yanked all troops from Afghanistan. He abandoned a $1 billion new embassy, a $300 million refitted U.S. air base, and $80 billion worth of sophisticated arms and equipment.
In other words, Biden did more than any other prior Democrat to ensure the United States was humbled abroad, and its expeditionary forces taught a lesson about the evils of foreign interventions.
The Left fetishizes race. It enshrined the idea of “good” racial discrimination: to stop racial bias, one must be racially biased.
Biden was the first president to promise in advance that his vice-presidential running mate had to be both black and female. For his cabinet picks, Biden ignored most criteria of prior experience or specific expertise, but instead ensured that his administration was “diverse.”
No prior Democratic president has been so beholden to identity politics or so consistently used de facto racial, gender, and sexual identity quotas in his presidential appointees.
The Left for years has railed about the criminal justice system. It believes punishment does not really deter crime, which is instead a result of racism and a toxic capitalist system.
Biden agrees. Federal attorneys mimic the so-called George Soros city and county prosecutors who enforce the law largely according to ideological directives.
No prior president has managed to weaponize the Pentagon, the FBI, or the CIA in ways that have transitioned them from traditional institutions to woke avatars of social revolution.
No prior Democratic president has so attacked conservatives, a strict-constructionist Supreme Court, and the Republican Party.
So why is the Left so eager to oust Biden or at least ensure that he does not dare seek reelection in 2024?
Strangely, leftists do not grasp that Biden’s current record and unpopularity are due not just to his unmistakable cognitive decline. The problem is not just his often-toxic personality, or his creepy habits of trying to shake the hands of invisible people or violating the private space of younger women.
Instead, the Biden Administration has become an utter failure because voters detest its agendas. They recoil at $5-a-gallon gas. They feel their lives are being destroyed by 9.1 percent annual inflation and supply chain shortages.
The public is tired of near record annual increases in murders and other violent crime.
They are sickened by the tsunami of dangerous drugs pouring across the border and unvetted millions of foreign nationals entering their country without their permission.
They are irate that the Biden cabinet never responds to these disasters. Instead, the administration denies the crises even exist.
Or it blames its own self-created messes on the Russians, or Trump, or their own Democratic senators who balked at printing more trillions of dollars.
Now the Left is looking for a younger, more charismatic, and more glib replacement president to advance their stale unpopular agendas.
But since when has changing an inept messenger ever changed a disastrous message?
While it’s way out of my lane to suggest any reading, VDH fans might enjoy a couple of pieces of relatively recent fiction.
C.S. Lewis “Screwtape Proposes A Toast”, which describes almost exactly how and why the left uses the word “democracy” for propaganda.
Jerry Pournelle “West of Honor”, which has a paragraph or two about why militaries have traditions and customs.
My guess is most VDHers are already here or ahead of me, but maybe a few would benefit.
Thanks for the suggested readings. Any help in understanding progressive marxists is appreciated. I would like to add one more reading that many assume our citizenry has already read: George Orwell’s classic book “1984”. General Mcclellan benefited from studying Lee’s plans to invade the North in 1862. George Orwell’s book is the progressive marxist’s study guide on how to destroy the United States. If you have not read it, please read it. If you have already read it, please read it again. Then the work really starts! What are we going to do about it?”
I, for one, welcome all recommendations. The Dude abides.
Now, Dude – that’s a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
As usual Dr. Hanson nails it.
The Left was well aware of Joe’s limited mental capacity as well as his 35+ years of congress incompetence. Yet they hitched to Biden’s broken down wagon as the only option to garner the White House as the only real issue the Left had was Trump deranged voters. Even then, the Left knew they had to “rig” the system.
But let them believe it is Joe’s declining mental acuity that the voters rebel against. Is that not exactly what might restore some common sense to DC? We can only hope.
Get well Dr. Hanson, the nation needs your sound commentaries more today than ever.
Bloody shame that oil isn’t as cheap and plentiful as stupid and amoral is in this “country”.
Basic question: why do we allow PAC’s , etc to run our elections? I, as a citizen, am limited by law to a set amount for my political contributions. PAC’s and George Soros have no limits. Thus, even my local elections can be manipulated by expensive ads and mailings.
Because americans would rather hide in their sheepfolds that risk a conflict.
Terrific article . Thank You.
All of this destruction was by design in this third term of the America-hating Barry Sotero. Stolen elections have consequences, Dr. Hanson.
Everyone always needs to keep in mind that Xi Xiden still got 70 plus million legit votes. When the US was still a viable representative republic Xi wouldn’t have gotten more than maybe 3 or 4 million popular votes.
Xiden is the fault of the american electorate’s stupidity, greed and in the case of marxists living here, their hatred of this country.
No one will ever convince me that the pretend “election” of 2020 was in any way legitimate.
The actual left had nothing to do with Biden being selected. Like many other mostly right wing propagandists, you apparently have no idea what constitutes the left. Let me be of service. DemocRATS and liberals are not of the left. Sorry to to burst your bubble. They consistently vote for more war crimes, they are all prattle and no battle when it comes to issues of massive inequality and impoverishment. They use culture war fetishization to get votes, not because they care about these issues. They are status quo fascist enabling bloviating asshats. They are the “feel your pain” half of the bi-partisan political death cult that runs this country. They forgave the torturers of the Bush administration, they kept the torture Gulag at GITMO open, they support the terrorist states of Israel and Saudi Arabia, and they are persecuting Julian Assange for revealing war crimes. Leftists, on the other hand are anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-censorship, and pro Assange. Leftists have no voice in corporate media presstitute land. The left is censored, de-platformed, and smeared by both parties. The fake leftist DemocRAT(ICK) party sheepdog Bernie Sanders was even too much for them to bear so they cheated him in two primaries. The irony is that the right wing toady Tucker Carlson is to the left of the whole DemocRAT(ICK) party on Assange and some of the war mongering of our death cult empire.
Perhaps a little too late to get any responses, but is the figure of $80 billion VDH cites that was left behind in Afghanistan in terms of sophisticated weaponry, truly accurate (even as a rough estimate)? I’ve been reading that that figure is reflective of all the money that has since been spent in the Afghanistan operation since 2001, and that the figure reflecting materiel and such is somewhere between 8-10 billion. Then again, if it were true I wouldn’t put it past the media to go on defense and try to misrepresent the real figure to prevent a general outrage at the overall Afghan mismanagement and demonstrably expose Biden’s incompetence.