Pretty Fly for an Old White Guy

I just saw a headline saying President Biden has rolled out the most aggressive climate change agenda of any president. Other headlines have noted his plans to deal with racial and economic inequality. He wants to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure. He wants to rebuild our relationships with our allies. 

If we progressives aren’t cheering, I don’t know why. We may have feared Biden would be a milquetoast, but in his policies he’s roaring like a liberal lion. And he’s staffing our government with experienced, smart people who can make his plans happen. And he’s doing it all fast.

I didn’t even mention his COVID response. He’s doing what the federal government should have been doing all along. It’s just that we got so far off course with you-know-who in charge that ordinary competence seems like a miracle.

It’s a great relief to believe again that our government is doing the right thing.

Biden will be a good technocrat, to use a popular term I don’t particularly like, but I think he’ll be much more than that. In his first week in office, he has shown himself to be humane, determined and decisive. All without polemic. 

Remember the old saying that only Nixon could go to China? (He was on record as strongly anti-communist, so when he traveled to China and restored our relations with it, no one could say he was soft of the Reds.) Well, maybe only a man with well-established moderate leanings could act so boldly now on so many progressive fronts.

It’s early days. Mitch and his gang are still going to be obstructionists. They hated deficits before they loved them, and now they hate them again. Congress will do what it always does when it’s so evenly divided: as little as possible, and that grudgingly. But president Biden is running the Executive Branch, and he will run it for the benefit of all of us, including especially those who have not had their voices heard for too long.

For the first time in four years, I’m going to stop worrying about my government and return to pursuits that are more personal and, though perhaps no easier to achieve, make me feel like I can accomplish something again, and that it won’t be a waste of time because at any moment I might have to flee the land of my birth where for the last four years I'd heard the drumbeats of fascism that Europeans heard in the 1930s as Hitler rose to power and began to marginalize and purge anyone he didn’t like, all to the enthusiastic salutes and rapturous cheers of ordinary Germans seduced by his cult of himself above all else.