
A recent article published by one of our colleagues makes a great deal of the notion that in ‘smiling like your grandfather’ Biden is masking a nefarious political agenda. Unfortunately, our American compatriots are forgetting that whilst Mr Biden does smile like our grandfathers, he forgets our names, too.
Importantly, Mr Biden’s regular incoherence provides a logical explanation for many of his policy failures. Take for example his views on foreign policy since being elected to the Senate in 1973. Biden has consistently been sceptical of long-term military action abroad. He supported the ‘elimination’ of Saddam Hussein in 2002 (a short-term project in theory), but whilst in the Obama administration he opposed the invasion of Libya and argued that ‘the country disintegrates’ should Gaddafi be removed—which would then mandate further, unnecessary, US intervention. Whilst we may not share the same outlook as Biden, these are certainly not radical positions to hold. Moreover, his approach to both Libya and Iraq are reminiscent of his approach in Afghanistan. The problem though, is that a 79-year-old, clearly suffering from neurological problems and the natural effects of old age, is unable to exercise a coherent policy direction himself. The Executive Branch can exercise policy to significant effect provided there is a source of leadership, normally derived from the President and the Cabinet. Without this influence, American bureaucracy flounders like a fish out of water, forced to pursue policies that become inapplicable to fluid situations and the need for realpolitik.
Where then, is the source of authority and leadership that is driving forward the radical policies that our American friends are concerned about?
Unfortunately, the answer lies in the person of Kamala Harris.
Thematically, it is easy to identify within Kamala Harris’s own career the philosophies behind many political issues facing our transatlantic neighbours. Rightly raised in a previous Torch article, illegal immigration on the southern border is a key political issue in the United States. Whilst serving as Californian Attorney General in 2015, Harris is quoted as saying ‘an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal’. As Senator in 2018, she voted against an immigration bill that would have established a pathway to citizenship for many migrants, on the grounds that it provided ‘billions (25) of dollars that may also be used to implement this Administration's anti-immigrant agenda—one that targets California and its residents.’ Of course, Ms Harris will be fully aware of the impact urban immigrant communities, legal or otherwise, have on Democrat election hopes, both in California and in key states in the sunshine belt, and increasingly in Texas—a swing that, in theory, would upset the Electoral College hopes of the Republican party for multiple election cycles. Surely it is this that fuels the immigration policy that this administration has pursued.
But more dangerous than her philosophical flaws is her ability to get the most out of bureaucracy. Harris is a bureaucrat by trade, a professional state prosecutor and only later a politician. Thus, she understands the significance of the presidential Cabinet, executive orders, and the significance of Congressional appointments. She knows that this is the route to affecting ‘real’ change, particularly for political benefit in the short term. Incidentally, many of the aforementioned radical policies have been enacted at this level of government; shortlisting only black women for the Supreme Court and the Cabinet, exercising disastrous immigration policy, rubber-stamping an Anti-Disinformation Bureau, and allowing the fiscal situation to run out of control. Indeed, Biden has quickly become the ‘Executive Order President’, signing ninety executive orders in his first 18 months in office, compared with 54 executive orders signed by Bush across his entire presidency. It is unimaginable to me that a man who cannot consistently read a speech from a teleprompter is significantly involved in crafting these highly detailed and functional operative documents, especially when they are being deployed in such volume.
Harris knows that, with a President who will rubber-stamp whatever is put in front of him, she can satisfy the Democrat voter-base sufficiently that they will turn out in 2024 and 2028, even if at the cost of the security and good governance of the whole country. This is after all, the woman who was memorably caught on microphone declaring to Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono ‘I'm [blanking] moving to Iowa’ in advance of the primaries. We are dealing with a woman of questionable morals, whose claim to even a shred of integrity flew out the window after she vilified Biden for discriminating against her, the girl on the segregated bus, in her primary campaign, only to drop out and take the vice-presidential job. Harris is self-interested—and, critically, she is politically reactionary, responding only to the crazed woke agenda of the radical elites, particularly in her home state California, in the interests of being marketable to the Democratic caucuses in 2024. Perhaps worst of all, she does this at the expense of the whole country, making her far more radical and dangerous than the President.
It is easy to enjoy vilifying our political opposition, but we must not let it blind us to the danger that lies at the heart of the American government. As people of intellectual fortitude, British small ‘c’ conservatives must look across the channel to our American compatriots with a degree of trepidation, and not forget it in our own political endeavours. It is easy to accuse President Biden of misplaced and ill-conceived radicalism, in turn writing off the current Democrat administration as an unfortunate aberration. However, to do so is to ignore the malevolent reality of American politics and the rot at the core of this administration. When this rot is ignored, abhorrent political philosophies like the inherit evil attached to American (or western) identity, positive discrimination, and socialised spending as the ‘moral way forward’ thrive and cause political necrosis. As conservatives we must be alert to these dangerous people that shy away from public scrutiny in the Biden Cabinet. Not particularly because the verity of American identity is important to us, but because events in the USA transmit themselves across to Europe. One must only look at the London riots of July 2020 to see that American politics can badly fragment our own social structures. Should we, as conservatives, fail to rally at home and abroad to the threat posed by politicians working in the darkness of bureaucracy (like Harris), we will only have ourselves to blame when our giddy arrogance allows truly radical people to access the levers of power.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
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