There is substantial danger that the approaching Biden Administration will enter office determined to execute a 180-degree policy course change in almost every field, partly out of the spiteful and irrational antagonism that swiftly arose in opposition to Donald Trump, and partly from the perversity, obsolescence, and reactionary contrariety of current Democratic policy thinking.
Inevitably, the Democrats suffer from the polyglot composition of the contending factions that now compose that party. The African Americans within the Democrats are more militant than ever: President Trump raised the Republican percentage of African American votes by approximately half, and earned widespread credit for his promotion of Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina’s Enterprise Zone program, which incentivized heavy job-creating investment in disadvantaged areas. This and other Trump policies, especially the drastic reduction in unskilled illegal immigration, effectively eliminated black unemployment for the first time since World War II.
As it is now becoming practically impossible for the Democrats to retain their lock on the African American vote—approximately 11 percent of the country’s total—by simply dismissing Republicans as fat-cat, white, country club devotees afflicted by complacent whites’ racial indifference or bigotry, the black Democratic leadership is now reduced, in a phrase from the O.J. Simpson trial, to “dealing the race card off the bottom of the deck.”
The charge that Trump is a racist was completely unfounded and debunked by his success in improving the lot of the ethnic minorities, and Trump has shaken the Democratic hold on the African American vote with his charges that the Democrats’ polemical pandering to sentiments of racial anger and even self-pity, while doing nothing to reduce the dependence of many African Americans on the welfare system and drug addiction, or to alleviate the inordinate levels of incarceration of African Americans (and other minorities), are just hypocrisy.
The Democrats are hamstrung between those who shared the surge of outrage over the footage of the death, apparently by police-imposed asphyxiation, of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May and those who were appalled at the ensuing violence and destruction that raged all summer across the country in Democratic-governed cities and states. The “peaceful protesters” often reported on by television journalists with blazing buildings or projectile-throwing mobs behind them as they spoke, killed scores of people, injured 700 policemen, and inflicted approximately $2 billion of property damage, almost all of it on unoffending third parties, and mainly to minority small businessman.
The Democratic National Convention made no mention of the riots that dominated the news from May to August and took no position other than what was judged to be the obligatory demands for reform of police methods. The consequence of these events was that many cities defunded and generally disparaged the efforts of their police, demoralizing them and reducing their numbers and visibility in high-crime areas.
The inevitable result came quickly: spectacular increases in crime of all kinds with skyrocketing increases in violent crime in those cities where the police had been defunded and gratuitously criticized. The footage of the detention and last minutes of the life of George Floyd is disgusting. But the leap from there to the theory that the problem is too great a police presence is insane. In his capacity as leader of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden is going to have to take a stand on these issues. It will no longer be adequate simply to waffle on about social workers accompanying policemen on emergency calls and the police being taught to shoot people’s legs rather than their torsos.
In the atmosphere of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Democrats were able to avoid reconciling any of the contradictions in their positions and to focus the entire electorate upon the question: “Do you or do you not want Donald Trump as your president?”
Because Trump promised to uproot the political establishment and set about doing so with considerable effect, he united against himself all of the forces of official incumbency, perhaps most virulent among them the NeverTrump elements of the Republican Party which saw that they would be extinguished completely if Trump and his followers were left unvexed in their possession of their party. Even with the unwavering and frequently malicious and rabidly partisan support of the national political media, and with twice the financial resources available to Trump, the vast anti-Trump coalition had to resort to electoral skulduggery on an unprecedented scale, masked by the public health crisis and the agitation of the militant black leaders of the Democrats, such as Stacy Abrams in Georgia, about “voter oppression,” to “win.”
Because they ignored or were ambiguous about many subjects in order to focus exclusively on slinging mud at the president, the Democrats are going to have to sort out a good many policy conundra. Immigration is not quite as pressing but is almost as important as law enforcement. President Trump effectively doubled the Republican share of the Hispanic American vote, again by his tax cuts, reduction of illegal immigration, and incentivizing job creation in economically depressed areas.
The Democratic tactic of seeking these votes by tolerating a practically unlimited number of illegal immigrants across the southern border, declaring vast tracts of America to be “sanctuaries” where police are ordered not to cooperate with immigration officials in removing those who have entered illegally, while agitating that non-citizens may vote if they are residents, has been exposed by Trump as very vulnerable. It is one of the greatest and most rotten scandals of recent American history that the combination of the Democratic desire for the illegal votes of illegal migrants combined with the desire of Republican employers for exploitable cheap labor in large numbers has immobilized the U.S. government for decades while up to 20 million generally unskilled and not easily assimilable people entered the country illegally.
The same occurs with climate change. Biden is packing his administration with climate change zealots and is claiming that he will replace the energy industry as an employer with millions of green jobs, completely unionized and paying at least $50 an hour. This is another dangerous fantasy, but the environmental zealots are being sent into battle to assault America’s great bipartisan achievement of oil self-sufficiency and replace it with a policy of frenzied and self-punitive reduction of fossil fuel use, and hideously expensive development of renewable energy. Solar and wind power can’t be stored and thus has to be duplicated by the existing system for those many inconvenient days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
Biden’s climate policies are as mad as his proposals for sending social workers out on emergency police calls and returning to open borders. Biden and his gang of retreads from the largely unsuccessful Obama-Biden Administration are going to have to face these and many other issues. They aren’t running against Trump anymore. They’re running against his record, which was one of considerable achievement despite their psychotic and often illegal harassment of him, and was largely endorsed by the voters in congressional and state elections.
America is relying on the able Karl Rove to prevent the Democrats from stealing Georgia again, and maintaining a Republican Senate to spare the country the full terror of the Biden-Sanders far-left program.