The fiasco that is the Biden* administration should not surprise anyone, except perhaps in its sheer, all-encompassing scope. For as long as I’ve been alive, Democrat administrations have been instituting terrible policies that lead to inflation, job loss, shortages, and recessions at home along with disasters abroad.
The lone exception, possibly, is Bill Clinton, who for all his peccadillos governed more as a conservative, or at least a moderate, thanks in equal parts to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and Bill’s own highly-developed sense of self-preservation (he called it “triangulation,” remember?).
Not that Republican administrations have been folly free. But the GOP’s worst mistakes tend to come when they follow the Democrat playbook—like Bush One raising taxes after promising not to. Or Bush Two shoving the Patriot Act down American’s throats. Or Trump giving Anthony Fauci a bully pulpit and agreeing to shut down the economy.
So why are leftist policies so uniformly bad? And when I say “bad,” I don’t just mean I disagree with them. I mean they produce objectively awful results, like the ones mentioned above. I can’t think of a single leftist policy that has actually worked, unless the goal was to destroy the country and ruin people’s lives.
Hey, maybe I’m onto something. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, let’s be charitable and assume most people on the left want to do good; they just don’t know how. And the reason they don’t know how—the reason none of their policies work—is that their world view is rooted in fantasy. They cannot hope to effect meaningful, positive change in the real world because they don’t live in the real world.
This was obvious to me even as a teenager, in the midst of the Cold War. Leftists of that era had this insane notion of “unilateral disarmament,” the belief that if we dismantled our nuclear arsenal, the Soviets would see that we meant them no harm and do the same. The flaw in this theory is that the Soviets made no secret of the fact that they did indeed mean us harm, and the only deterrent was our stockpile of nukes.
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You didn’t have to be a genius to see that unilaterally disarming—or even showing significant weakness in the face of the very real Soviet threat—would have been disastrous. You just had to live in the real world.
Thankfully, Ronald Reagan did.
Today’s leftists continue to inhabit a fantasyland in which men can have babies, a porous piece of cloth can stop a submicron aerosolized virus, printing bales of cash doesn’t lead to inflation, and paying people to stay home doesn’t affect the labor market. Policies based on such beliefs are certain to fail because the beliefs themselves are irrational.
Another reason leftists’ policies are so bad is that they subscribe to a perverse notion of moral equivalency. To them, being a Wiccan is just as good as being a Christian (if not better). Oppressive, barbaric regimes like Iran and Cuba have just as much legitimacy on the world stage as the United States or Great Britain. There’s no difference between a man marrying a woman and a man marrying another man.
If you can’t see, or refuse to see, that there is in fact a moral hierarchy—that some beliefs and actions are more likely to promote human flourishing than others—how can you hope to make good decisions? Isn’t that what a good decision is—choosing the better of two (or more) options? Centuries of experience have shown that free markets are superior to centrally-controlled economies, individual rights are more ennobling than state coercion, and traditional marriage is better for children and society than other variations. We ignore or deny those realities at our peril.
The final reason leftist policies are so bad, though, is also the most sinister: As I alluded to above, some leftists are actually trying to destroy things. They know good and well their “ideas” don’t work, that they will indeed make everything worse; but for them, that is a feature, not a bug. Their goal is to tear down society—perhaps, to give them credit they might not deserve, in order to “start over” and create “a better world.” But I’m convinced many of them are like little boys pulling the legs off bugs. They’re destroying just to destroy, and because they can.
Of course, some have another motive altogether: They are getting rich from the very breakdown of society they themselves are instigating. Barack Obama’s reality-blind policies gave us years of economic stagnation and nearly destroyed our health care system, but he’s doing just fine. So is Hillary Clinton. And John Kerry. And Joe Biden. They have no problem tearing down the old order as long as the new one has them on top.
At the very least, those who institute these destructive policies are confident they will never personally suffer. Remember, the people who gleefully locked us down for six months or more never worried about losing their own jobs. Just the other day, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said struggling families now forced to pay more at the pump due to his boss’s stupid policies should just buy a $60,000 electric car. “Comedian” Steven Colbert even said the quiet part out loud: He’s not worried about high gas prices because he drives a Tesla.
These are just bad people. They don’t care about you or anyone else but themselves. They don’t care that their ideas lead to suffering and societal collapse, as long as it doesn’t affect them directly—and as long as they get to run things.
But most of your run-of-the-mill leftists aren’t really evil. They’re just sad, frustrated, deluded people. Unfortunately, when their politicians of choice are in charge, those delusions can wreak havoc on the rest of us.
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