Governing When "The Natives are Restless"

I guess I understand why the Biden administration decided to go full emergency on COVID. Government is nothing unless it has a war to fight. 

And if you've just lost a war, what better than to start a new one, and replace the dastardly Taliban with dastardly anti-vaxxers as the Enemy, the Other du jour.

But, on the other hand, I'd say that we are getting definite signs that "the natives are restless." That was supposed to be the line of the British colonial administrators when the native hordes in their dominions became uncomfortable under British rule.

We see college kids chanting "eff Biden" at college football games; we get mothers shouting at Biden at his photo-ops. And last night I heard about unruly passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight who weren't being properly obedient on the masking front. Bit of a problem on the natives front?

But here's a take. I was to dinner with my liberal neighbors last week and they were clearly feeling angry about vaccination resisters. So maybe Biden's COVID emergency is just about nailing down his base.

Of course, when your political acts are about solidifying your base rather than attracting moderates, it suggests that there might be a bit of a cock-up on the governing front.

And that is the question that keeps returning to me. Why? Why did the Democrats in 2021 think they had to go pedal to the metal with every single progressive initiative from climate change to systemic racism. And with a bare majority in Congress.

Seriously. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden are political veterans going back decades. You would think they would be the adults in the room holding back the over-enthusiastic young'uns. But they are not. 

Why not? Are the old'uns just going along for the ride? Has the Democratic Party has got to the point where if you don't go full Woke you are toast? Or are we just seeing the internal logic of the progressive movement, that there must always be a new program, with new loot and plunder, because without some new bauble to dangle before the voters you are nothing?

See, if I were president I would be trying to get the economy back on track, trying to normalize it as much as possible after the disruptions of the past year and a half that have hurt many millions of ordinary Americans -- but not well-to-do Americans like me. I would be thinking that, yeah, educated Americans that can work from home are doin' fine. Welfare state recipients that live from government checks are doin' fine. But ordinary Americans in the middle, they are the ones whose lives have been disrupted by the COVID lockdowns and restrictions. I would be telling my supporters: look, I want to enact your stuff, but we can't do it until we fix the economy.

I don't see any recognition from our rulers that they care about this.

And that is really weird because if there is Rule One in politics it is to make sure that the voters know that their leaders "care about people like me."

And I would say that the one kind of voter that the current Biden administration shows, by its actions, that it does not care about is the ordinary middle-class voter, the sort of voter that is easily seduced by politicians like Trump.

Has the Democratic Party just flat given up on voters like that? Are they completely consumed by pandering to their own base? Have they developed a new strategy where ordinary middle-class Americans are the new Other that all good people oppose, because racist-sexist-homophobe?

I naturally assume that the Democratic leaders and their acolytes know what they are doing, and that there is a deep cunning in what they are doing.

But what if they are not cunning? What if they are blindly reacting to the day's events and hitting out blindly because they really don't know what they are doing?

Surely, that can't be the case. Can it?