Andrew Sullivan remarks on Joe Biden’s week:
He is lucky, in many ways, to succeed Trump. Any normal inauguration would feel transcendent after the sack of the capitol. The Covid19 pandemic is cresting as the economy keeps sinking — all of which can easily be blamed on Trump. But, looking forward, vaccinations are finally gaining momentum and the spurt of economic growth this summer and fall is likely to be any president’s dream. The psychological effects of surviving a plague year also tend to be extremely positive, if history tells us anything. People are also exhausted from the melodrama and psychological abuse the last guy put us through. In politics, timing is everything. And Biden has it.
If Biden’s team meaningfully accelerates the pace of vaccination, he will be rewarded handily, as he should be. (He’s already lowering expectations, to maximize any political pay-off.) If he’s capable of passing an economic stimulus that can mitigate some of the extreme social and economic inequality this teetering republic labors under, rescue and grow the economy and help innovate and expand non-carbon energy sources, ditto. These are clear, measurable tasks that most non-ideologues can heartily support. So too would be a fuller extension of universal access to healthcare, via an Obamacare public option, if they can squeak that through the evenly divided Senate.
These are sane, sensible, center-left policies with majority support. He should make his explanations of these policies simple and clear. If he wins some of these battles this year, he would move the country lastingly leftward. Stick to them, and the politics takes care of itself.
But Joe Biden has also shown this week that his other ambitions are much more radical. On immigration, he is way to Obama’s left, proposing a mass amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants, a complete moratorium on deportations, and immediate revocation of the bogus emergency order that allowed Trump to bypass Congress and spend money building his wall. Fine, I guess. But without very significant addition of border controls as a deterrent, this sends a signal to tens of millions in Central to South America to get here as soon as possible. Biden could find, very quickly, that the “unity†he preaches will not survive such an effectively open-borders policy, or another huge crisis at the border. He is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.
I’m even more critical. I think that there are serious internal contradictions in the policies he advocates. You can effect one of them but that will nullify the others. And in the present political climate partially effecting any policy is no better than doing nothing at all. Worse even.
Good and hard.
As a person living in LA County the unrestricted borders concern me. We are now the epicenter of the pandemic. The vast majority of our cases are from poor immigrant neighborhoods where people are living on top of each other, not dissimilar to the tenement days in New York. It is only compounded by the high cost of rent. The county cannot take care of its own much less assimilate mass immigration. No one is willing to acknowledge how bad it really is here.
But we care about the downtrodden. We have a responsibility to the underserved of the earth. That’s who we are. Every life is precious. But none so precious as those who make the most noise.
Christian charity is one thing. But Biden is Catholic and Catholic charities are tailored to increase in the faithful.
Vietnamese Catholic, Central American Catholic, African Catholic immigrants are good for business. Am I on the wrong track? Does Biden’s support for abortion mean he won’t support immigrants who grow the Church?