It should therefore come as no surprise that they're all-in on continuing his faux dictatorship of populist error.
When European heads of state look at Joe Biden, they see an accomplished world-historic leader.We still have no idea what the end conditions for Ukraine will be, let alone whether that will lead to a "geo-strategic disaster for Russia;" nor does the return of "got a problem, get a program" promise something other than Carter era stagflation and malaise. And restoring the structure-conduct-performance paradigm to antitrust enforcement? Spare me.
An aging world-historic leader, to be sure. Joke: How old is Joe Biden? He’s so old that when NATO leaders gather at their July summit in Washington, Biden will be the only one born before the organization was founded 75 years ago.
But as Biden’s age has advanced, so too has his clout and respect within the alliance. It was Biden who warned European leaders in early 2022 that Vladimir Putin was going to send his military into Ukraine, a warning many of them initially refused to believe. When the invasion happened as predicted, it was Biden who rallied Western and other allied countries to Ukraine’s defense. It was also Biden who authorized a dramatic increase in U.S. natural gas exports to Europe as Russia cut off supplies. It was Biden who picked up the phone and called the heads of Finland and Sweden with a quiet suggestion that they join NATO. And it was Biden and his team who overcame the resistance of Turkey and Hungary to make NATO expansion a reality, thus turning Putin’s military quagmire into a geo-strategic disaster for Russia.
No president since Ronald Reagan has more successfully wielded influence in the Western alliance. Yet Biden has also overturned one of Reagan’s greatest legacies, Reaganomics, and replaced that free market “neoliberal” ideology with an economic vision of his own, Bidenomics. Instead of cutting safety net programs, Biden vastly expanded them during the pandemic. Instead of encouraging corporate monopolies, his administration is charging them with antitrust violations. Instead of “letting the market decide” all matters of economic development, his government is providing hundreds of billions of dollars to encourage private investment in green energy and microchip manufacturing on American soil.
The Monthly, though, offer what might be a serious case for the continuation of the Biden presidency, one based on traditional, if wrong, notions of What Governing Is, and it rewards careful study.
Nor am I particularly encouraged when that Biden hagiography issue also includes an essay by former general Wesley Clark. No, seriously.
As a result, instead of declining as an economic power, as most experts 10 years ago predicted would happen, the U.S. over the past four years has zoomed ahead, writes former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark in this issue’s cover story. American voters may not have noticed, but every NATO official visiting Washington understands that on virtually every economic measure—GDP, wages, inflation, job creation, business start-ups—the U.S. is outperforming their countries, and China, too.Is that because of, or despite, all the money printing and ukase-issuing? By all means, read both of those articles, and noodle around the Monthly home page, apparently it's Biden hagiography season. But note how the general is pinning his hopes on that presidential power.
They are also aware that military and diplomatic strength depends on economic strength. So, while European leaders might protest some of Biden’s positions, like favorable treatment for American-made EVs, they mostly accommodate themselves to him. For instance, under pressure from Biden, the European Commission has taken a harder line on China’s predatory trade policies despite resistance from Germany and other countries with massive investments in China.
Bidenomics has also included other elements that don’t involve spending significant tax dollars but instead flex public muscles that government had almost forgotten how to use. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department reinvigorated antitrust enforcement to promote competition and reduce monopolistic power in the marketplace, including banning noncompete clauses that overpower labor mobility and limit the ability of workers to seek higher wages by offering their services to competing firms. The administration took scores of actions to reduce the bottlenecks and improve the resiliency of supply chains, which were raising costs to consumers directly and indirectly. And after decades of scant federal support for—and at times outright opposition to—organized labor, Biden put the government squarely behind strengthening the power of unions to give workers a greater voice and more power. He also was the first president to march with striking workers on a picket line.Sure, take the boot of corona tyranny off the necks of people, and watch them get back to business. No doubt the political talking heads will parse those jobs numbers in ways more favorable to their side, and the internal migration from tax hells to free states will come up. That industrial policy? Inconclusive at best. The infrastructure? The much touted bipartisan bill won't even make good this year's wear and tear. Student loan forgiveness? I cannot find that line in the Federal Constitution that authorizes this ukase. Monopsonistic price caps on drugs? Sooner or later that supply chain breaks. Helping ordinary Americans? If so, why is Donald Trump campaigning in the slums and in the hinterlands such a threat?
The administration has worked tirelessly to provide relief for unfair, anticompetitive, and crushing student debt—another effort to restore spending power to the middle class and rebuild the economy from, as Biden says, “the bottom up and middle out—not the top down.” And, notably, the president respected the independence of the Federal Reserve as it raised rates to dampen inflationary tendencies.
Over the past three years, the results have been remarkable. Under Biden, the economy has added more than 15.2 million new jobs (through the first quarter of this year), including 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. The economy had added more than 5 million new small businesses by the end of 2023. Unemployment has fallen below 4 percent and stayed that way for the longest streak since the 1960s. U.S. wages are growing at the fastest rate in five decades, and outpacing inflation. Americans are saving more for retirement than ever before. U.S. GDP grew by roughly 6 percent in 2021, and above 2 percent in real terms in 2022 and 2023.
New support for infrastructure is everywhere. Investments in renewable energy are soaring. Chip manufacturers are adding new facilities in the United States. Threatening mergers in the data and health care industries have been blocked, and unions are regaining strength, with autoworkers in Tennessee recently voting to unionize—a huge step for that state. Prices on several essential drugs, including insulin, have been reduced for those on Medicare. So much for trickle-down, supply-side economics! Biden has moved the economy a long way in the direction of helping ordinary Americans.
The general, though, thinks command-and-control works the same way in a complex adaptive system that it does in an army.
In space, where there is fear of Chinese anti-satellite technologies, and in cyber, which could threaten our critical infrastructure systems, the U.S. has always been ahead and, so far as can be determined at the unclassified level, retains its lead in both areas.The closing sentence of the second paragraph undermines the topic sentence of the third paragraph. There is no such thing as "wise industrial policy," particularly when rent-seekers run rampant, and the role of nuclear-steam electric power production is only another potential conflict between the corporatist and communist elements of the Democrats' coalition.
In energy, the United States is the world’s leading producer of oil—ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia. Our natural gas supplies are abundant. And while the U.S. would like to transition to green energy as rapidly as possible, these hydrocarbons currently provide an essential foundation for national economic power. In the area of renewables, China does have the lead in low-cost solar power panels, but only because of Chinese government subsidies.
This is precisely why market-driven solutions must be supplemented by wise industrial policy. Everything from car mileage standards to rebates on U.S.-produced electric vehicles plays to renewable portfolio standards, and net metering will contribute to our catch-up in solar energy production. In areas of the most critical national needs, we cannot simply let the market decide. Another carbon-free energy source is nuclear power; the United States is gaining in the development and certification of small modular nuclear reactors, and these will become increasingly important in the future.
Somehow, though, that conflict doesn't bother Monthly writers. The hagiographic article concludes by dismissing the fears of Normals.
Of course, millions of Americans whose economic well-being and security have been enhanced by these and other actions have almost no idea that any of it has happened, and even those who are aware seem so far unconvinced that Biden had anything to do with it. That’s why the polls this summer have Biden neck and neck with Donald Trump, a convicted felon who has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO.That old-school scolding doesn't work any more. Nowhere in either of those long Monthly articles is there any acknowledgement that the cranky populists have a point. Nor does that claim that economic conditions are improving, or at least not as bad as they remain elsewhere, necessarily have purchase with voters who might see a bundle that includes the open borders, Weimar freak show, and generalized incompetence seasoned with senility. That is to say, those policy follies Victor "Blade of Perseus" Hanson calls attention to.
Trump scares the bejesus out of the alliance leaders gathering in Washington. And they have rising right-wing illiberalism in their own countries. So, they will greet Biden with genuine admiration and wish him well with desperate sincerity. But they will also be having side conversations with emissaries from MAGA world because most of them think Biden is going to lose in November.
And he might. But they should also keep two things in mind. First, the best way to defeat right-wing populism is to deliver economic conditions that benefit average people, and Biden has done that. Second, no American president who has presided over an improving economy has failed to be reelected.
Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills. And worse still, why would federal authorities be ordered to release repeat violent felons who have gone on to commit horrendous crimes against American citizens?There's almost no overlap between what Mr Hanson enumerates and what the Monthly call attention to, unless one sees that there is no such thing as a wise industrial policy. But perhaps the design was not to secure re-election so much as it was to get as much of the open-border-Weimar bundle in place quickly and then dare anyone to fix it.
Equally perplexing to most Americans is borrowing $1 trillion every 90 days and paying 5-5.5% interest on the near $36 trillion in ballooning national debt. Serving that debt at current interest exceeds the size of the annual defense budget and may soon top $1 trillion in interest costs, or more than 13% of the budget.
Why would the United States suspend military aid to Israel as it tries to destroy the Hamas architects of the October 7 massacres? Why would it lift sanctions on a terrorist Iran? Why would it suppress Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish homeland? Why would it prevent Israel from stockpiling key munitions as it prepares to deal with the existential threats posed by Hezbollah?
Why would the Biden administration cancel key pipeline projects and put vast swaths of federal lands rich in oil and gas off limits to production, even as it further drains the strategic petroleum reserve? Why not pump rather than drain our own oil from strategic stockpiles?
Nihilism only explains so much. A better explanation is that the Biden administration and its handlers knew that there was a good chance that most of their policies would prove unpopular and might even jeopardize Biden’s reelection.Here, though, it's the Monthly contributors who provide the way out.
But they also were confident the changes were of such magnitude that the United States would either become—in the infamous phrase of Barack Obama—“fundamentally transformed” or force the next Republican administration to adopt such tough medicine that it would prove untenable politically and the malady would still prove mostly impossible to undo.
After all, how would a Trump administration deal with 10 million illegal aliens who entered the US without audit or legality? Where are they? How would they be found and deported? How many court suits in blue-jurisdictions before blue judges would have to be overcome?
Biden, after all, inherited a recovering economy, flush with post-COVID-19 lockdown stimulatory dollars, pent-up consumer demand, and ossified supply chains. And then he stupidly poured gasoline on the explosive mix by dousing the country with even more federal spending. Now we have the worst of both worlds: high interest rates and nearly $36 trillion to service.But if the policy wonks advising the Jarrett regency have been able to roll back as much of the Morning in America policies as the Monthly credits them with, shouldn't rolling back the roll-back also be straightforward. Yes, Mr Hanson is skeptical. "The Biden years did the country great damage and rendered Biden himself one of the most unpopular incumbent presidents in American history. But his agendas may have fundamentally changed the country for decades, if not longer—and will require tough remedies that may be almost as unpopular as the wreckage they wrought."
But in the leftist mind, it was worth it, given that left-wing constituencies received vast expansions of entitlements that will be hard to prune back. And unprecedentedly vast debt at levels like our current burden of 123% of annual GDP prove unsustainable. And the historic correctives are brutal: 1) major cuts in entitlements and redistributive spending programs; 2) tax hikes at a time when state, local, federal, and gas, sales, and property taxes—and other “fees”—already take over half the income of most middle-class Americans; 3) hyper-inflation to pay back what is owed with cheap funny money, with the added leftist fillip that those who have dollars lose wealth and those who don’t gain greater access to them; 4) renunciation of debt. We already saw in the Obama era that liberal bureaucrats and courts often reversed the orders of creditors in bankruptcy hearings. When debt becomes unsustainable, historically arise cries of “Why should the poor suffer more when the rich already have enough money and don’t really need to be paid back?”; and 5) efforts to “confiscate” private wealth by giving, in exchange, government “credits.” For example, there have already been floated ideas that 401Ks could be absorbed into the insolvent Social Security system for credit in government benefits.
Perhaps so: there has been no mass deportation of illegal aliens since the Eisenhower era, and who knows when the real debt ceiling will take effect? Reality is often like that, and reality might be particularly harsh on the political class irrespective of affiliation or creed, as politics is often the art of postponing the day of reckoning. Buckle in.
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