Biden’s Whole-Of-Government Interventionism Does Not Reflect The Soul Of The Nation

In addressing real and imagined Threats to Democracy,^TM there are perhaps choices other than Ultra-MAGA and Biden’s Ultra-spendy pillage people.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre almost daily repeats that Joe Biden will not “shy away from calling out” this or that. Accordingly, this week in Philadelphia, Biden did so again in red-tinged fury with remarks “On the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation.”

Fair enough, but others will not shy away from “calling out” things like increasingly radical and intolerant progressivism, wokism, vax mandate inclinations, green extremism, and induced energy poverty and recession of which Biden and his interventions are the leading edge.

These conceits individually and together comprise secular religions and sub-sects complete with dogmas and human sacrifice (canceling, de-jobbing, de-banking, and presidential speeches denouncing swaths of the population for not thinking they’re swell).

Stripped of its misleading invocations of the Framers and the Constitution, Biden’s idea of “democracy” is forcing compliance with rule by progressivism and the unelected so-called expert.

But “Guess What?” as Biden likes to ask: people have the right not to be governed by left wing radicalism. And left wing radicals have no right to inflict it by “The Vote” (also ^TM), regardless of their assembled number. That’s just basic. Republics, which is what the U.S. is, limit the power of folks like Joe Biden from Scranton, as well as of Congress. By contrast, democracies, in the mob rule, anything-goes embodiment seemingly popular today, do not afford that limitation. Last night’s speech aimed at blurring the distinction.

“And that’s not hyperbole,” as Biden also likes to say all the time.

There are serious matters, and the U.S. better get it straight before constitutional normalcy is irretrievably lost.

“We need to save the core values of our … country,” Karine Jean-Pierre proclaimed earlier this week. This was met, as typical, with little media pushback on the implication that that those values consist of Biden’s collectivism and the society of unelected rulers and pickpockets (like immature student loan borrowers) thereby fostered. Some out there still believe our core values instead entail enshrining individualism and the adult responsibilities that go with that, that it’s OK for some individuals just want to be left alone and not be forced to pay for the choices of others.

Despite the soaring safeguarding-of-democracy rhetoric, one struggles finding something Biden thinks either he, the federal Congress or the unelected administrative regulatory state shouldn’t control—ranging from some individual town’s water supply system up through the health, energy and tech economics; indeed, the very structure of business.

As Philadelphia shows, Biden’s stridency is growing. Those Hillary called a “basket of deplorables” were recently accused by Biden of embracing something “almost like semi-fascism.” But the folks Biden disparages as Ultra-MAGA tend to oppose the fusion of business and government he pushes, a societal structure for which the Miriam-Webster dictionary has an interesting name. Along with his capstone speech, this week brought Biden’s second reference to F-15s, implying the ease with which he can force “MAGA” to submit; but others, mind you, are the domestic agitators.

To be sure, there’s ample extremism on the right, a cohort with which I routinely disagree. Yet even it holds the same views it held a quarter century ago and that the left itself held 10 years ago when it comes to a range of social issues. Plenty might oppose Biden’s authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses without also supporting Trump.

While Biden’s “Build Back Better” terminology was dropped for a time, it has reemerged big time amid student loan forgiveness and the new “Soul” campaign. Since Biden favors escalating economic and social controls beyond reasonable conceptions of ordered liberty and free competitive enterprise, it’s worth a bit of a rundown on some of the state of play so that future policy makers might react as the chickens of the past few years of mega-spending come home to roost under noisy progressive leadership.

First, apart from the spending explosion on which volumes have already been written, there has been a repudiation of the Trump regulatory streamlining agenda so thorough that it undermined even pre-existing regulatory oversight norms, including basic cost-benefit analysis of rules and regulations on the thousands of annual rules on which Congress never votes. The significance of this has been ignored over the past two years and it is a … wait for it … threat to democracy.

Second, there has been an unleashing of federal agency sub-regulatory “guidance documents” that omit even the public notice and comment that ordinary rules get, but that many in business ignore at their peril. Alongside, there has been a degradation of public disclosures and protections from administrative state abuses of said regulation and guidance. The hidden tax of regulation is at least as important as ordinary taxation and spending, so the 118th and 119th Congresses will need to pick up the pieces somehow to remedy this additional threat to democracy with emergency legislation.

Third, as if rules issuing from individual regulatory bodies were not enough, Biden and administrative spokespeople boast regularly of a range of epic “Whole-of-Government” (WOG) interventionist campaigns. These not only threaten democracy but rule out the possibility of limited government. Whole-of-government is Biden’s framing, a term borrowed apparently from the U.K.’s Tony Blair. Biden’s WOG pursuits draft the entire unelected, anti-democratic administrative apparatus into an assortment of simultaneous, seemingly insatiable, top-down pursuits.

The leading edge of all these is Biden’s Whole-of-Government “Equity” campaign characterized by differential treatment under law based on identity, which Biden is capable of imposing owing to the awesome and anti-democratic power the federal government wields in employment, procurement and contracting. This is a massive area in need of congressional inquiry in coming months and years.

Most prominently bolstering the Equity campaign is Biden’s escalation of “whole-of-government” climate and environmental alarmism at an economy-transforming scale. The pursuit undermines citizens’ basic access to energy and weakens the nation, but, as with Covid, demonizes dissenters. Even the independent financial oversight bodies are eyeball deep in the inducement of this one =.

Other campaigns that have received the “whole-of-government” designation and prominece include “competition policy,” digital assets oversight, and long Covid.

Fourth, although mentioned already, it’s worth singling out that there needs to be a concerted policymaker focus resisting Biden’s predatory “competition policy.” “Build back better” consists of increasing antitrust and other regulation in ways that broadly and systematically shrink the scope of private competitive enterprise in favor of expanding federal oversight and the steering of what ought to be the purely private activities of free enterprise. Biden’s interventions are all-encompassing, affecting sectors ranging from agriculture to high tech, which (as with climate and equity WOG pursuits) are increasingly vulnerable to federal procurement and contracting influence alongside regulation. These newfanlged intervenions will pile atop prior prior decades’ iterations that themselves bear reponsibility for the supply disruptions, increased consumer prices and undermined wealth creation that plague the nation now.

Despite the “big-is-bad” stance toward free markets, Biden’s WOG economic interventions go beyond the mere regulating of private companies and extend to industrial policy that rules out the democratization of shareholder capitalism. Unfortunately with Republican aid, Biden is delivering sweeping large-scale infrastructure spending and subsidies on that usher in regulation that will be difficult for our descendants to ever extricate from. The growing list of projects entangling large-scale business with central government ranges from routine infrastructure to frontier sectors like next-generation networks of vehicle-charging stations, artificial intelligence, commercial space, and basic science investment. A notable moment was this summer’s Summit of the America’s, at which both Biden and Kamala Harris called for business to collude with government, touting open-ended “public-private partnerships” or PPPs that tend to rule out free enterprise and render any future large-scale undertaking as a business/government partnership.

Fifth, mandates and censorship are a growing concern given Biden’s rhetoric. Alongside the new “modernized” regulatory environment we saw Biden exploit the pandemic to impose mandates and strictures that not only cost business and families but also aimed at suppressing dissent on private platforms and services. The fusion of regulation and censorship matters even more now, as Biden tends to characterize people rigidly and single out flavors of extremist for vilification while failing to notice others in service of the “Unity” he invokes. The attacks on “misinformation” by the federal government become more dangerous as business and government intertwine, collude and conspire as noted above. Tellingly, the castigation of so-called misinformation is not ending with the contagion’s receding from the headlines, but is being adapted to protect other pet liberal causes like climate alarmism.

Let’s be clear: the duty of our government is to affirm and protect the right to dissent, not establish Disinformation Governance Boards. The Constitution allows us to work out for ourselves what is or is not misinformation and disinformation. It does not allow Biden and the WOG federal cohort to clamp down on people’s airing of expression. This has risen to a matter of urgent importance, as Biden also oversees a pandemic-fertilized escalation of surveillance that is broadening the federal government’s even longer-standing war on anonymity as such. This too is a threat to democracy.

Not letting anybody on the right who deserves it off the hook, something Biden said last night is applicable to himself and his administration: “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.” Radical progressism is itself “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” to borrow another Biden speechwriter phrase.

The “Soul” speech represents the capstone of efforts to demonize as extremism the opposition to a relatively recent and extroardinary increase in the scale and scope of federal government intervention, and to intimidate and induce compliance with it. A major disappointment is the condoning of this by the media, which in daily press briefings does little to challenge Biden’s impulses but urges even more government control in just about every sphere of ordinary life. The New York Times, among many, is pleased with Biden’s shift from “compromise to combat.”

Biden said in Philadelphia that “We’re all called, by duty and conscience, to confront extremists who will put their own pursuit of power above all else.” Few are the pursuits of power that match the scale of Biden’s own “whole-of-government” ambitions.

Biden was better when he said, “We, the people, have burning inside each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall.”