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Even the top democratic leader of the last century chose his battles. When Franklin Roosevelt shaped New agreement in economics, it retained much of the old business of culture. The cause of civil rights was postponed for another generation. Narrow immigration laws they remained, even when the crowded masses of Europe applied for entry. If there was a post-Jazz Age pettiness in the air, it wasn’t limited to Washington. Hollywood, the other capital, began enforcing its code against risky issues.
It is difficult to explain the mixture of material reform and cultural reduction of these years. But a theory is suggested. There are only so many changes that one society will endure at once. If the rules of economic life change, people want stability and even regression in other areas. Seen from this angle, the contention of the 1960s could be read as the spasms of a nation trying to change too much in too many fronts in too little time.
The question is whether Roosevelt’s presumed heir accept this restriction. A recent increase of inflation has fueled the idea that there is a backlash against the grand government of President Joe Biden. But his economic audacity per se is not exceptional. It is their coincidence with so many other changes.
Violent crime has been on the rise US cities for some time now, reversing the trend of at least one generation. At the same time, the southern border of the country has been a place of anguish and chaos for much of the year. The authorities had done so “Meetings” with more migrants there in April than in any month since the turn of the century. Next, a third source of cultural insecurity, is the set of issues that lie beneath the neologism of the day, “awakened,” with all its implications for the first modification of the right to freedom of expression.
Even together, these social rumors hardly constitute a revolution. Nor can the president be said to be its main author. The criminal wave began under his predecessor Donald Trump. Identity politics has been brewing on the Western left since the French philosophers made a postmodern turn in the 1960s.
But if cultural upheaval is not his fault, it is his problem. Americans are being asked to absorb an economic breakdown doctrine while changing the social context. As if to capture the problem in miniature, Congress is currently committing itself to a tax hike and police reform. These are sales hard enough on their own. Biden is trying both at the same time. It’s a lot to process from a man that many will have thought of as a respite after one another drama president.
The idea that economic and cultural reforms naturally combine is recent. History more often throws conservative welfare state builders to nostalgia in their broader perspective. Clement Attlee in Great Britain, Charles de Gaulle in France and Otto von Bismarck in Germany are only the largest cases. For them, redistribution was a national glue, not a source of abstract “justice,” and it changed something better done sequentially than suddenly.
In other words, what Biden is trying to do: exchange in the context of an even greater change, it is provocative for the standards of not only American politics, but also Western politics. It helps to be, by force of age and registration of votes, an innately reassuring figure. Don’t expect this image to last if voters start to feel affected by events.
The easiest mistake of politics is to assume that ideas that survey well on their own terms are grouped into a popular whole. Actually, voters don’t hear the notes, they hear the agreement. Lots of reforms can exhaust and baffle even those who admire them individually. It is not Biden’s policies that call for medium-term retaliation on the part of the electorate, both in terms of their number, scope and simultaneity.
Gustave Flaubert’s rule that a person can only adopt so much radicalism (“being regular and orderly in his life,” the writer said, “so that you are violent and original in your work”) applies as much to political body. If Biden had won one of these landslides, such as in 1932 or 1980, when the public auditionally demanded a new course, he could have been licensed for a global change.
Instead, he clearly won but not shredded against one only inappropriate opponent in an aberrant year of world history. Congress is only in the hands of Democrats the thinnest of the margins. It is a fragile mandate on which to support so much activity. Those who know him say the president has reduced the normal arc of life, increasing his passage through change over time. It’s a noble change, but it shouldn’t take on any.
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