NO HONEYMOON FOR THE COOT.

Incoming president^* Joe Biden gave a banal inaugural address, exhibiting all the voice modulation of a man with a bad hearing aid.  For some reason, he kept stressing "unity," which might not be the best message to give from behind a razor-wire fence, with both houses of Congress closely divided.  Rich Lowry elaborates.

The problem is that calls for unity can carry an expectation of unity, i.e., the belief that truly reasonable people can’t or shouldn’t disagree in good faith on matters of profound significance. This is how self-styled unifiers end up becoming high-handed and divisive (Biden’s ex-boss, former President Barack Obama, often fell into this trap).

In politics, get-along-to-go-along might be the way to go if it's your playground and your colleague's overpass going into the transportation appropriation. We're currently at a more difficult pass. "Unfortunately, a Consensus, by definition, requires some combination of the silencing of serious objections, or the reluctance of serious objectors to wage the kind of lonely battle against go-along-to-get-along, until the shortcomings of the Consensus become clear."  Mr Lowry writes from the perspective that Washington is far from Consensus.

Biden isn’t going to pursue a consensus, bipartisan agenda, but a progressive one. That is his right. He is a Democrat who has always been in the center of gravity of his party, which has steadily moved left over the decades. He isn’t going to act on the more extravagant demands issuing from his left flank — ending the filibuster, adding new states — both as a matter of temperament and because he lacks the votes in the Senate. But almost everything he does unilaterally or pushes legislatively will inherently be anathema to the GOP.

Plus, with Trump exiting at such a low point, the temptation will be to ignore the lessons of his rise. That one of Biden’s first big legislative proposals is yet another “comprehensive immigration” reform of the sort that has failed repeatedly after triggering massive, grassroots opposition on the right shows an impulse to learn nothing.

Put another way, we're close to where we were in December 2015, when the Wise Experts still figured the Republican establishment could hold serve in the primaries.