By Victor Davis Hanson
|American Greatness
The Left is being consumed by its own hatreds and hubris.
Joe Biden, first as a candidate and then in the White House, from the outset saw the COVID-19 pandemic mainly as a means of leveraging political support, from the manner in which the lockdowns allowed him to run a virtual campaign from his basement to equating Donald Trump with the COVID-19 virus.
Like many on the Left, Biden was overt in
such cynicism. So were Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, and Jane Fonda—who claimed
that COVID was a “never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste” moment. Panic and lockdowns
could help achieve single-payer health care, or a recalibrated capitalism, or
the end of Donald Trump himself.
At the height of the last presidential campaign, Biden
in September 2020 declared that Trump was responsible for the then-current
200,000 COVID deaths: “If the president had done his job, had done his job from
the beginning, all the people would still be alive.”
Biden felt no need to list details where
Trump had lethally erred or had not “done his job.”
He did not explain how any president should
be able to prevent all deaths from a plague. And in 2020, Biden
certainly had no expectation that before his own first year as president was
over the cumulative deaths from the pandemic would exceed 800,000. He would
have found it surreal to even imagine that soon there would be far more deaths
under his own tenure than during Trump’s presidency—despite being the
beneficiary of ubiquitous vaccinations, new therapies, and antiviral drugs
unavailable throughout most of 2020.
During the 2020 campaign, both Biden and
vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris also had cast doubt on the safety
and efficacy of the Operation Warp Speed vaccines. They repeatedly implied
that any forthcoming jabs would be tainted by Trump’s sponsorship.
Yet, later in office, both would publicly
deplore any doubt similar to their own about vaccination safety or efficacy.
Indeed, they equated remaining unvaxed to being unpatriotic. In addition,
when Biden was inaugurated, he claimed that no Americans had been vaccinated.
In fact, on some days under Trump more than a million people were receiving
vaccinations.
Given that the new daily cases and COVID fatality rates
had begun to decline shortly before Trump left office, and due to the growing
ubiquity of the Warp Speed vaccinations, Biden gladly took ownership of the
virus and boasted it would be essentially gone by July 4—due to his own
rebranding of Trump’s vaccination programs.
Biden had assumed he could blame Trump for all 2020
COVID-19 deaths, while few would die from the pandemic in 2021, and that,
again, he could take credit for the Warp Speed vaccination program.
But fate, not Biden, was the master of our
COVID-19 destinies. Soon both the Delta and Omicron variants
arrived, and we are now back to a Groundhog Day of possible lockdowns and mask
mandates. Certainly, Biden would not wish a political rival to do to him
what he did to Trump: question the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, blame
Biden for more than 400,000 deaths on his watch, and claim the continuance of
the pandemic was Biden’s fault alone.
Truth and Consequences
What’s the moral of Biden’s current troubles? From
the Bible and the Greeks and throughout the Western tradition, there is a
constant refrain of being wary of hubris, the lying and arrogance that are
innate to it, and the divine power that ultimately levels things out.
Biden and the Left so despised Donald Trump
that they lost all sense of moderation, of proportion, of logic itself.
Thus, they find themselves in the current ridiculous situation of suffering
the consequences of their own unhinged rhetoric and actions.
This madness was birthed in part because Trump’s newly
calibrated populist Republican Party had the potential to permanently draw the
working class away from Democrats. In part, they found Trump’s salesmanship and
braggadocio repulsive and contrary to bicoastal manners. Partly his agenda
had more success since any first term since Ronald Reagan. Add it up, and the
result was toxic hatred and mindless rejection of the successful
policies.
Biden’s undoing was claiming not just to be antithetical
to Trump, but the antithesis of all that Trump did. His
hatred blinded him to the reality that Trump’s record on Afghanistan, the
border, COVID-19, the economy, foreign policy, energy, and regulation was in
each instance either adequate or very good. To simply nullify all of it, and to
claim Trump was an ungodly disaster, meant Biden’s own one-dimensional
rejectionist policies had to be winning and successful. And when they were
neither, he suffered not just the wages of failure, but of hypocrisy and
nemesis as well.
This irony of blindly speeding over the cliff to one’s
own destruction is not limited to COVID-19.
How did the once omnipotent, omnipresent
Hillary Clinton descend into a caricature of a shrill, mean-spirited, and
pathetic has-been? Even more so than Biden, she assumed that her hatred of
Trump would excuse anything. And anything not excusable could simply be fobbed
onto Trump as if it was his own doing.
Illegal to use a private, unsecured private email server
to avoid government audit? When caught simply cry that Donald Trump encouraged
the Russians to hack it.
Was Clinton’s “Russian reset” a failure? Was her
campaign’s opposition research via British ex-spy Christopher Steele a dud and
a lie? Then simply amp up the Russian
collusion hoax, accuse Trump of being a Vladimir Putin asset, and count on
the “friends of Hillary” in the administrative state to seed and fuel the
lie.
Lose a supposedly sure-thing presidential
election? Then blame the terrible, failed campaign on voting
fraud, or on the Electoral College, and then claim the winner was
illegitimate, while joining #TheResistance.
What Hillary Clinton could not abide was that the loud
Trump had outsmarted her hip campaign experts, that his agenda was more
applicable to the times and the national mood, that she was a nastier and
more egocentric candidate than Trump, and that dislike for her grew in
proportion to her public appearances.
Weapons of Self-Destruction
The military traditionally polls as the most popular of
all major U.S. institutions. No longer. In a recent Ronald Reagan
Presidential Foundation and Institute survey, only 45 percent of Americans
expressed trust and confidence in our armed forces. That is a stunning,
almost inexplicable reversal—until we remember what has transpired over the
last four years.
Why would our most esteemed retired generals
routinely violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice in smearing and
slandering the commander-in-chief between 2016 and 2021?
They did so freely and arrogantly on two
assumptions. One, they were assured that the bipartisan
establishment would applaud their political attacks and provide them legal and
political exemptions in a way unthinkable had they compared, say, Barack Obama
to a Nazi, a fascist, a Mussolini, a death camp jailer, a fraud, and a liar
deserving removal “the sooner the better.”
Second, they were so taken with their stars
and epaulets, their high public profiles, and their entry into the corporate
monied class upon retirement, that the public would surely listen to their
supposedly sage, insider advice.
Instead, their hubris earned them the
opposition of half the country—ironically the half once most supportive of the
military.
Just as importantly, the high-ranking officer
class, fairly or not, was humiliated in Afghanistan. China
and Russia now assume the United States has lost much of its prior deterrence.
The Pentagon was seen as reckless and wasteful: gone in a matter of days
were a $1 billion embassy in Kabul, a $300 million refitted air base at Bagram,
and some $80 billion in U.S. weapons and equipment.
When the people looked for contrition, for apologies, for
explanations, they got instead the opposite: generals blaming Biden off the
record; Biden blaming generals on the record; the sense that China has reached
parity with the U.S. military; the chairman of the joint chiefs apologizing for
usually routine photo-ops with the president, unlawfully interfering in the
chain of command, and claiming a pandemic of mythical “white rage”—all
done with the full acquiescence of his superior, Secretary of Defense Lloyd
Austin, another retired general.
Meanwhile, suspicion continued to grow that much of the
woke agenda was fast-tracked through the military because it served the
careerist trajectories of the compliant officer class. Again, those who
felt their self-importance had earned them commensurate influence and power
well beyond their tasks of ensuring deterrence and military preparedness,
lost both influence and power—both for themselves and the military itself.
The Rot Spreads
The Green New Dealers assumed that by the sheer force of
their own superior morality that they could abruptly curtail fossil fuel use,
with little if any concern that millions of the lower-middle class depend upon
inexpensive natural gas and gasoline for their daily survival.
After bragging they would end fossil fuel use in a
decade, these same purists ended up begging the carbon autocracies of Russia
and the Gulf Arab states to produce more of the toxic fuels they had done so
much at home to curtail. The radical climate changers had little idea
how unlikeable and unpopular they had become—not just because of their credo,
but due also to their own hypocrisies, arrogance, and preening.
Black Lives Matter is similar. In
summer 2020, it assumed the role of arbiter of all race relations. Corporations
rushed to send it cash. District attorneys competed to drop charges of the
arrested. Mayors stampeded to defund police departments. And criminals vied to
commit crimes on the assumption that they would not be caught, or not be
indicted, or not be convicted, or not be jailed—and that societies were
culpable, not the criminals, for the damage wrought.
And now? BLM is polling even lower than Joe Biden and
the U.S. military.
The lessons from these hypocrisies? There are natural,
eternal laws that transcend personalities and are the ultimate adjudicators of
right and wrong.
Good leaders acknowledge the talent of those they
despise. They are not so obsessed in their hatred that they mindlessly fixate
on the negation of unwelcomed success. General George S. Patton found General
Bernard Montgomery a poseur, affected, and condescending—but Patton also
appreciated that Monty was methodical, professional, and, as a defensive
tactician, admirably tough and stubborn.
Churchill privately saw Charles De Gaulle as vain,
exasperating, and narcissistic. But he publicly acknowledged that no other man
of France in 1940 would have, or could have, rallied the defeated in exile,
orchestrated a triumphant return, brought order to chaotic France, and restored
French sovereignty, and, yes, chauvinism, to a defeated and humiliated
people.
Republicans who joined FDR on the eve of World War II knew
him to be vain, duplicitous, treacherous, and an egomaniac. But also,
they conceded that he had the rare talent to galvanize the nation to defeat its
enemies, and to charm and cajole the capitalist classes to produce weapons and
goods as no other nation in history had done.
So, there were reasons why Socrates advised “Know
thyself,” why the oracle at Delphi emblemized “Nothing too much”—and why you
reap what you sow.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/26/sowing-winds-and-reaping-whirlwinds/
