Joe Biden’s American Grandstand
The president panders to the young, like the Dick Clark of 21st-century statesmen.
The country reinvents itself from time to time. Reinvention is what Americans have instead of revolution, which Karl Marx called the “locomotive of history.” Who needs a locomotive when you’ve got the Wright brothers and Elon Musk?
The country started with people coming across the ocean to reinvent themselves—a project that was either glorious or genocidal, depending on how woke you are. It reinvented itself, as a democracy, by electing Andrew Jackson in 1828, when all those unwashed white men swarmed into Washington from beyond the mountains. It reinvented itself in 1861-65 by fighting a civil war, and after that by creating, in effect, a new country in the vast expansions (of population, of settlement, of industrial development) during the Gilded Age. It reinvented itself and its way of government in the New Deal. It reimagined itself after World War II, among other things by creating the GI Bill and the interstate highways—two brilliant new systems of mobility. During the 1960s, the baby boomers conjured a “counterculture” around a noisy repudiation of their parents’ America. What they came up with arguably wasn’t an improvement, but it was definitely a reinvention.
Now the Biden administration, headed by a man a few years too old to be a boomer, entertains ambitions to take a great leap forward. But wait. Does a transformation require a mandate? By what mandate does the Biden administration undertake the work of irrevocably altering American society? Do Mr. Biden and his people claim that the dogmatic and occasionally hysterical certitude of the woke is sufficient warrant to turn the country upside down?
There was no mandate in the outcome of the last election. November 2020 merely confirmed that the U.S. remains split precisely down the middle, 50-50, as it has been for more than 20 years, since the deadlock of Al Gore and George W. Bush and the hanging chads of Florida. If the 2020 election meant anything, it confirmed the irreconcilable differences—a standoff of the cobra and mongoose. The election certainly didn’t give Mr. Biden marching orders from the American people to open the southern border to all comers, or to redesign the natural order of biology (in regard to gender identity and all the social arrangements that have flowed from the difference between the sexes since time immemorial), or to change the country in a hundred other ways, bundling it off on an expedition to the far left fringes of reality and grievance. What the new administration proposes may be less a transformation than a hijacking. Half the country doesn’t want to be reinvented—not on Mr. Biden’s terms.
He and his people have gone into business with a bogus, echo-chamber mandate: They manipulate a media illusion of unanimity, and presume to impose a moral narrative. The Bolsheviks, a tiny but ferociously focused minority, proceeded in this way in 1917...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-american-grandstand-11617559989
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