Biden as President

My last few blog posts have been critical of Biden, but I am glad he won.  Trump was a terrible President, but his strong point was that he represented and stood up for the cultural ideas that are espoused by many ordinary, middle class people.  He is the ultimate illustration of the problem highlighted by the book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”  Many people vote against their economic interests because they believe cultural interests are more important.  In Trump’s case it is even more surprising because he is a bad cultural icon.  He is course, crude, immoral, impolite, selfish, stupid, and the list goes on and on.  However, regular old white people see themselves under attack from all sides, and Trump is someone who is willing to take on the hatred from American intellectuals and minorities.  That one trait got him elected and it almost got him re-elected.  The Democrats were smart to change the voting laws right before the election to make it easier to vote.  Democrats could get apathetic, uninterested blacks to make the minimal effort to vote by mail for Biden, and it worked.  This Denver Post article illustrates the two approaches to voting requirements, although it clearly comes down on the side of making voting as easy as possible.   

Trump has incorrectly claimed that there was something illegal about the mail-in vote, but the states involved had made it legal.  It probably did cost him the election, but the state Democratic politicians and judges did it legally.  Easier voting favors Democrats.  The Republicans used the 2010 census to gerrymander their states to favor Republicans.  Each side is looking for advantages.  There are arguments on both sides.  When the US was founded, in most states only white adult male property owners could vote.  They wanted to restrict voting to responsible people who had a stake in their country.  Today, the Democrats have completely different priorities from the nation’s founders. 

Anyway, Biden is a much more normal President and good for the country.  He is being pushed by the progressive wing of his party to do a lot of questionable things, questionable because they have never been done before and they are very expensive.  But the Republicans are in a position to block most of them, or to tone them down.  Infrastructure repair is needed, but it needs to be limited, and paying for it right after huge payments for the covid pandemic if bad timing.  It’s good that interest rates are so low now, making it reasonable for the government to borrow money. 

Biden is a welcome change from Trump on foreign policy issues.  Trump tended to alienate our allies and pander to our enemies.  Trump messed up relations with Europe and North Korea, among others.  His China and Russia policies could have been more nuanced.  Biden is currently facing tough decisions on Afghanistan and Israel-Palestine, but he is approaching them rationally and intelligently. 

Biden’s reassuring, comforting tone is another welcome change from the Trump’s often strident, mocking, confrontational approach.  This offsets my concerns that Biden will take the country too far left.  That may be the trade-off for having a more traditional President.  Let’s give Biden a chance. 

A Lie about Voting

I was put off last Sunday by all the political talk shows that characterized the Liz Cheney-Donald Trump standoff as being about the “lie” about the election.  There is more to the issue than simply calling Trump a liar.  The Democrats did win the election, but only by changing the rules for voting at the last minute.  In the weeks preceding the election, key states where Biden barely defeated Trump made it much easier to vote.  They made it easier to vote by mail, to vote early, and so on.  The main result was that many more blacks voted, and voted for Biden, than they would have if the laws had not been changed. 

It is not surprising that the Democrats would cry foul about the Republicans changing the voting lows now.  The Democrats know they won because they changed the voting laws then.  The difference is not so much about a “lie” about voting as it is about a fundamentally different view of how voting should be done.  Democrats want the uneducated, the poor, the unmotivated to vote, because they know they can win those votes by promising those voters money – welfare benefits, generous unemployment insurance, stimulus checks.  One of the main reasons for Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus act package was to pay off the black voters who put him over the top in the election.  Of course, he had to pay a lot of white people, too, but the main target was the poor, black underclass, the George Floyds of America who voted for him.  The Democrats would be happy to have as many people vote as possible, illegal aliens someday, but today Democrats just want to get them into the US so that they can vote later, perhaps not too much later, if they can change the citizenship laws. 

Meanwhile the Republicans prefer people to vote who are more motivated.  The Democrats probably win the intellectual vote, but the Republicans do well with people with ordinary educations and skills.  The Republicans appeal to people who love America, while the Democrats tend to deride America as an evil, slave-holding country that needs to turn its back on its past and welcome new, uneducated people with no history of participating in any kind of good government.  If you are part of a civil war or a drug cartel, the Democrats want you.  Right now, the Democrats want the District of Colombia and Puerto Rico to become states, but down the line they have their eyes on Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador as future US states.  For Democrats, the border between Mexico and the US will gradually disappear and citizenship in one will entitle a person to be a citizen of the other.  The United States of America will become the United States of Latin America and the old US ties to Europe will fade away.  The Aztecs and the Mayans will replace the Greeks and Romans as models of ancient civilizations. 

Democrats are looking for voting rules that promote their idea of an America that has no connection to European ideas and culture.  The Republicans want a voting system that perpetuates the European ideas embodied in the Constitution, the British common law, the English language and other cultural connections to the founders’ home country, Britain. 

There is more to the voting issue than that Biden’s victory is a “lie” or that Republicans are trying to deprive blacks of the vote.  There is no indication that the new voting laws in Georgia or other states will be applied inequitably between blacks and whites.  It is just that blacks claim they can’t vote according to the same rules that white people can.  They can’t show up at a specified time and place.  They can’t vote without help from their family, neighbors, and friends.  They can’t provide a picture ID.  If they could do these things, which white people can do, they could vote just like white people. 

So, calling questions about the election a “lie,” or stricter voting rules as “racist oppression,” is just sweeping under the carpet the issue of what kind of country people what this country to be.  The Democrats have one vision, the Republicans another.  Democrats are afraid to debate the real issue and hide behind a “lie.”