DL Open Thread Sunday, July 11, 2021

Before 2020, you’d have to look hard to find a bigger critic of Joe Biden than me. Listing all his flaws would take more time than you have, so I won’t, and you know them all anyway. But the one thing I never doubted he possessed was a keener-than-average sense of empathy — when my wife almost died of a subdural hemorrhage when an aneurysm burst, he wasn’t just the first public person to call to offer help, he was the only one.

Like most progressives, I thought he was too old and too centrist and, like most progressives, I miscalculated how much Americans wanted to ditch the toxic atmosphere created by the Previous Guy, and I certainly didn’t foresee his more progressive choices for important jobs in the administration. Basically, I was highly doubtful about what looked like a return to the past, and I failed to realize that, as the Russians demonstrate anytime a military man tries a ground invasion, standing toe-to-toe to fight an overconfident madman isn’t the smartest approach. Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker has a whole article about this.

In the face of the new politics of spectacle, he kept true to old-school coalition politics. He understood that the Black Church mattered more in Democratic primaries than any amount of Twitter snark, and, by keeping a low profile on social media, showed that social-media politics was a mirage. Throughout the dark, dystopian post-election months of Trump’s tantrum—which led to the insurrection on January 6th—many Democrats deplored Biden’s seeming passivity, his reluctance to call a coup a coup and a would-be dictator a would-be dictator. Instead, he and his team were remarkably (to many, it seemed, exasperatingly) focused on counting the votes, trusting the process, and staffing the government.

It looked at the time dangerously passive; it turned out to be patiently wise, for Biden and his team, widely attacked as pusillanimous centrists with no particular convictions, are in fact ideologues. Their ideology is largely invisible but no less ideological for refusing to present itself out in the open. It is the belief, animating Biden’s whole career, that there is a surprisingly large area of agreement in American life and that, by appealing to that area of agreement, electoral victory and progress can be found.

For example, I never would have thought Joe Biden would sign an executive order targeting corporate monopoly power in Big Tech, Big Pharma and meatpacking that prompted a pants-pissing response from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Wall Street had the more accurate response — the stock market soared.

As Molly Jong-Fast notes, even the “moderate” Republicans are awful as more and more of them fall in line with Trumpism, and she nails the reason:

Since no one in Trumpworld has been punished for anything, Republicans have learned that you do anything at all and no one will ever hold you accountable.

Why are Republicans desperate to limit Biden’s infrastructure spending to roads and bridges? Because enacting the clean-energy parts would, according to one study, create 26 million jobs over 10 years, and GOPers see that as 26 million votes they wouldn’t get.

The statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, the one that kicked of the American Nuremberg rallies, is finally coming down. My feeling is that if conservatives think affirmative action policies have been in place long enough, why are they still flogging the lies that slaves were happy with their lot and their masters were in any way “honorable” men? Those myths have been around for a century longer.

Haiti has requested U.S. military aid because chaos erupted after the assassination of its president. The administration refused.

Are you pestered by unwanted robocalls? If you’re in America, of course you are. The FCC is doing something about it.

The floor is yours.