The Joe Biden love-fest continues. So glad are they to be rid of Donald Trump, that journalists have been “jumping the shark” in their praise of a president who has been in office barely two months.
On March 11, New York Times columnist David Brooks headlined an article on the paper’s website titled “Joe Biden is a Transformational President.” It took longer for Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to reach that exalted status.
They need to find space on Mount Rushmore for a man born in 1942 who had been running for this office since 1988. I wonder why nobody had noticed his amazing talents before, while the Democrats were nominating Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
Biden’s inauguration was treated as a coronation and cable TV pundits were euphoric. John Heileman at MSNBC compared Biden’s speech to Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural, while fellow commentator Rachel Maddow was overcome by emotion. CNN’s David Challen in a fit of over-the-top rhetoric told us that the lights along the Washington Mall were like “extensions of Joe Biden’s arms embracing America.”
On Valentine’s Day, an article on the Politico website announced that the Bidens had brought “presidential PDA back to the White House.” For those scratching their heads, the acronym refers to public displays of affection.
“On a mission to rebuild institutional norms and help heal a hurting nation, Joe and Jill Biden are trying something novel after four years of the Trumps: a little tenderness,” gushed Quint Forgey.
Also, as Matt Taibi, in a March 12 article, “The Sovietization of the American Press,” joked, “We now know in advance that every Biden address will be reviewed as historic and exceptional.”
In reality, Biden can barely get through a speech nor has he held a press conference. So why such propaganda, worthy of writers who turned Stalin, Mao and Kim Jong-un into living gods?
Because, as Newsweek columnist Marianne Williamson noted, in a March 10 article, the country remains “The United States of Oligarchy.”
This had become the case long before Trump appeared on the scene, and it’s unlikely Biden will turn things around. More and more Americans realize that America has turned into an oligarchy.
“The oligarchic take-over of the U.S. government started in 1980, sometimes moving faster and sometimes moving slower but never really waning,” she asserts. The massive transfer of wealth into the hands of one per cent of Americans has been “a march of malfeasance that began with the Republicans but which no Democratic president stopped.”
Unlike the sunshine stories from Biden’s hagiographers, Williamson warns that so far Biden “is in too many cases supporting policies that paved the way to Trump's ascendency to begin with.”
His massive $1.9 trillion rescue bill “provides just enough relief to enable people to go back to living lives as economically stressed and traumatized as they were before the pandemic occurred.” She wonders why reforming the financial system to prevent further disasters isn’t on Biden’s agenda.
Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, in the September 2019 issue of the Atlantic magazine, wonders “How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition,” and contends that today’s economy hollows out the middle class and “excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite.”
Harvard University Law School professor Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? warns these elites that the very system that has afforded them the tools to thrive amid economic and social instability has given rise to political discontent and lies at the root of populist backlash.
He too cites a string of failures from 1980 to the present, including “stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s, the Iraq War, a nineteen-year, inconclusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, and the financial crisis of 2008.”
In each instance the ruling class benefited from these crises, or at least were not harmed by their consequences. Reflecting on this situation, University of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, notes, in “A Tyranny Without Tyrants?” in the spring 2021 issue of American Affairs, that approximately half the country showed its contempt by voting for Trump in 2016.
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