President Joe Biden takes notes during a briefing on the shootings in Atlanta Wednesday, March 17, 2021, in the Oval Office Dining Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
The coming year will be one of political paralysis, says Matt Purple in Spectator World. Despite Democrats owning the House, Senate, and the White House, Purple says they’ve run out of ideas, and will stagnate.
Build Back Better Dead?
Purple starts his predictions for what is likely in the coming year with the premise that Build Back Better is probably dead. He writes:
Long after the snow melts, 2022 is looking to be a year of chilly political paralysis. Chalk it up to a shortage of good policy ideas; chalk it up to a president who looks like he regularly gets lost on staircases; but our politics right now appears about as frozen as an unsalted block of Independence Avenue.
Let’s start with the most obvious example, Build Back Better. Joe Biden’s federal shopping spree hit a legislative roadblock just before Christmas when Senator Joe Manchin announced there was no way he could support the $1.9 trillion package. And while I suppose BBB could still rise from the dead — recall how Democrats found a way to ram through Obamacare even after Scott Brown replaced Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts — it just doesn’t seem likely that a guy from West Virginia is about to get onboard with a massive anti-fossil fuels package.
Build Back Better seems all but dead. And that means the president probably won’t rack up another major domestic accomplishment. Today, the American government works roughly like this: one party wins control of the White House and Congress; knowing this control won’t last, they set to work stuffing as many priorities as they can into one or two gigantic and clinically insane packages; these bills pass amid discordant yodeling on cable news; and the public recoils in horror and votes for divided government in the midterms.
What to Do?
What will Biden do in the face of defeat? Will he, as Purple suggests, “cast his gaze abroad?” Biden has always styled himself a “foreign policy expert.”
When presidents get stalled at home, they sometimes cast their gazes abroad. Yet thus far the Biden foreign policy doctrine has consisted chiefly of getting people killed in Kabul and Jen Psaki spelling out the words “leadership” and “alliances” with Bananagram letters. I’m the first to admit that not all of this is Biden’s fault. The Afghanistan pullout was negotiated by Donald Trump, and a fine idea it was. Attempts to renegotiate the Iran deal were poisoned by the previous administration’s withdrawal from that agreement.
But that doesn’t change the fact that at the moment our foreign policy appears muddled and lifeless. (And it’s not like the Republicans are much better. Confronted with Russia’s plan to build its Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Ted Cruz’s novel idea is…more sanctions! That’ll bring the onion domes in Moscow crashing into the ground.)
Parents Will Decide the Future
What the final outcome of 2022 will be is anyone’s guess, but the future lies in the hands of disgruntled parents and grassroots voters who are tired of the mismanagement of the Washington political machine. Purple concludes:
The answer, I think, is to look to the local and state levels. There do we find such innovations as a grassroots parents movement seeking to improve education and push critical race theory out of public schools. America might be a more nationalized place than she was a century ago, but the usual clichés still apply: politics is local, congressmen bring home the bacon, politics is downstream from culture. With Washington frozen over, perhaps it’s time we all rediscovered that old fondness for the small and the proximate — and set a more level gaze.
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