Sobre a destruição da democracia nos EUA e no Brasil: um projeto ainda em curso - Paulo Roberto de Almeida, Umair Haque

Sobre a destruição da democracia nos EUA e no Brasil: um projeto ainda em curso

  

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Diplomata, professor

(www.pralmeida.org; diplomatizzando.blogspot.com)

  

O plano trumpista para destruir a democracia americana – pela submissão do Congresso e pela manipulação do processo eleitoral – foi seguido quase ipsis litteris pelo seu imitador, adorador, seguidor fiel (mas um pouco mais imbecil) do Brasil, com as diferenças aplicáveis a dois sistemas político-partidários e eleitorais bastante diferentes. 

Ambos não conseguiram realizar o seu intento, inclusive porque as instituições dos dois países dificultaram esses intentos respectivos, mas o americano esteve muito mais longe desse objetivo do que o brasileiro, por um motivo muito simples: as FFAA americanas são muito menos manipuláveis do que são as brasileiras (que foram praticamente compradas pelo candidato a ditador, mas os comandantes das três forças, e o próprio ministro MILITAR da Defesa concluíram que não tinham condições, nem motivos, para seguir o tresloucado). 

O que não impede que ambos, Trump nos EUA, Bozo no Brasil, disponham, cada um, de uma base social e eleitoral respeitável, com a diferença que Trump praticamente domou o Partido Republicano e o tem a seu serviço, com alguns poucos dissidentes, ao passo que o seguidor tupiniquim foi domado pelas forças mais corruptas e venais do establishment político e não tem nenhum partido a seu serviço, mas se se serve deles irrigando seus aparentes apoiadores com toneladas de dinheiro público que aqui no Brasil parece ser mais fácil de desviar do que nos EUA. 

Trump nos EUA e Bozo no Brasil gostariam de decretar fechamento do Congresso, para governar por decretos, ignorando eleições e eleitores, mas as instituições atuaram como contrapesos e vetaram essa via destruidora. 

Mas ambas democracias permanecem frágeis e fragilizadas, pela ação corruptora dos dois grandes mentecaptos que empolgaram as duas nações, respectivamente em 2016 e em 2018, o que também é uma tendência em outras democracias avançadas, nas quais também se observa um eleitorado ignorante disposto a seguir populistas mentirosos – como Trump, Bozo, Modi, Orban, Erdogan, Salvini, Duterte, AMLO e muitos outros, vários que ainda são candidatos, inclusive na França – na ilusão de solucionar problemas corriqueiros da vida nacional: inflação, desemprego, desigualdades persistentes, insegurança civil, supostas ameaças externas (representadas por potências estrangeiras, imigrantes ilegais, terroristas fanáticos, etc.) e persistência de velhos problemas internos, entre eles frustrações individuais.

A democracia é um regime aborrecido e demorado, daí que os insatisfeitos queiram resolver esses problemas com alguém que se apresenta como o "solucionador" eventual: Make America Great Again, família, religião, propriedade, ordem, segurança, e o que mais existir como promessa fácil.

A única solução duradoura é a educação e a capacitação produtiva de todos os cidadãos, o que nem sempre é fácil, dada a conhecida fórmula econômica de desejos ilimitados e recursos limitados.

 

 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 4044: 13 dezembro 2021, 2 p.

Inside Trump’s Plot to Destroy American Democracy

Martial Law. Overturning the Election. What We Know Gets Worse By the Day

Umair Haque in Eudaimonia and Co

Medium Daily Digest, December 13, 2021

https://medium.com/@umairh/inside-trumps-plot-to-destroy-american-democracy-c5e86d0e2807?source=email-319a74712899-1639374431766-digest.reader-9b4cc1c6abbd-c5e86d0e2807----0-2------------------bcd0d557_6910_4251_8ed0_086d78d0cff6-31-08b0a3b6_ac13_4a20_80e0_141bdfe9b5d8

I know, I know. It sounds like the bad season finale of a worse TV show. “The plot to destroy American democracy.” And yet here we are. It turns out that not only was there one, it was way, way worse than the average person or pundit believed…even at the time…while Trumpists were storming Congress…and killing people…one that was every bit as over the top and unhinged as us scholars and survivors of authoritarianism warned of.

I bring all that up because Mark Meadows, Trump’s Chief of Staff, is the latest such figure in the Congressional Investigation’s crosshairs. He’s refused to testify. And then a presentation by him got leaked. And…whew. If you haven’t read it yet, prepare to have your breath taken away.

The presentation goes like this. It’s entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 Jan.” As in…“options”…for the date…the Presidential Vote was to be certified by Congress…for Biden. If this is already sounding vaguely menacing, just wait.

It sketches out a conspiracy theory — of a truly insane and ludicrous kind. “The Chinese systematically gained control over our election system constituting a national security emergency. The electronic voting machines were compromised and cannot be trusted to provide an accurate vote count. To restore confidence the “failsafe” of counting the paper ballots must be used to determine who won the election for President, Senators, Congressional Representatives. Hand counts reported by the media are not really hand counts and easily subverted.”

The bolding’s mine. You can already see where this is heading.

Why the need for a conspiracy theory? Well, because, the presentation, aka Mark Meadows, the President’s Chief of Staff, continues: “Donald J. Trump was winning by a significant margin across all key states. Nov 3 evening, a massive spike occurred that favored Joe Biden and exceeded the counting capabilities that were on hand in many cases.”

It must be the Chinese! Of course not. This sketchy “analysis” just cherry-picks data. The presentation goes on to show a few pages of charts…with minor upticks for Biden. The same was true for Trump, too, where counties and cities leaned heavily for him. It’s just selection bias of the most obvious and egregious kind. For example: “FiveThirtyEight told Reuters that it is not true that Biden received all the votes in the overnight dump: “these batches were NOT 100% Biden votes; behind the blue line, there is also a red line representing the thousands of votes Trump gained. There are also counter examples, where Trump’s line shoots up suddenly when a favorable batch of results are reported.” But this is hardly about science. It’s about…stopping an election.

This is all a setup, of course — a pretext and a justification. For what? We’re getting there. But let’s keep going with the conspiracy theory. Not just because it’s entertaining, but because it’s a vivid demonstration of how completely crazy and malicious Trump and his ilk really are.

Who gets involved next in this erstwhile plot, according to Meadows? Well, it can’t be Putin, since he was busy installing Trump to power and keeping him there. North Korea? Iran? Close. You guessed it, Venezuela. LOL.

“China has leveraged financial, non-governmental and foreign allies including Venezuela to acquire INFLUENCE and CONTROL US Voting Infrastructure in at least 28 States.”

Remember for a moment…this is the White House Chief of Staff. Espousing by now what are obviously completely loony theories with no substantive evidence of any kind. How could there be? Are you kidding me? Venezuela can barely feed itself. It’s not exactly the kind of nation that can influence or control much of anything.

But all this, remember, is just an obvious pretext and justification. China and Venezuela. Together. They’ve stolen America’s election. They’re the ones who’ve thwarted Donald Trump. Why? Wait for it…because this part might just make you splutter out your coffee in laughter.

China and Venezuela are part of “an ongoing globalist/socialist operation to subvert the will of United States Voters.”

Funny? Hilarious. But also see how weirdly sinister that is. If you don’t vote Trump, you’re not really a “United States Voter”….you’re part of a “globalist/socialist operation.” That’s the only way anyone but Trump could really have won — because “real” Americans only vote one way, apparently, or else. Or else what? They’re not real Americans to begin with. Hmm, sounds a lot like the way Putin gets 99% of the vote.

Who stole the election from Trump? Wait for it…a nefarious and shady spy operation run by some group, even more powerful than America, known as…“global socialism”…did. Apparently, Karl Marx is alive and well, or maybe directing the operation from his grave in Highgate. Who is “global socialism,” anyways? Well, it’s Venezuela and China — because it can’t be France and Denmark, who are pretty damned socialist…but they’re.…wait for it again…too white.

Come now. We all know there’s no “global socialism.” There’s no council, no ministry, no spy agency. It doesn’t exist as an entity, institution, force, even politics anymore, except maybe outside grubby college shared houses.

Yet here we are — right, LOL, back at the boogeymen of the Cold War. Socialism! The red menace! And it leads to totally bizarre places. Way back when, the Soviet Union was scary and backwards. Now? Well, to invoke the scare of the red menace, Meadows has to dream up China and Venezuela getting together to thwart American democracy. Even James Bond movies would turn down such a ridiculous comedy cartoon villain on grounds of implausibility. Meanwhile, Russia, which actually did help install Trump, isn’t, conveniently, part of the picture.

It’s already, I grant you, absurd, hilarious, ridiculous, idiotic, crazy.

And now it’s about to get scary.

Because having frantically laid out his ludicrous pretext — Biden only won because of a global socialist plot, and real Americans only vote for Trump — Meadows now rises, hysterically, to his conclusion.

“ — Declare National Security Emergency

— Foreign influence and control of electronic voting systems

— Declare electronic voting in all states invalid”

Did you get that? Trump’s Chief of Staff was laying out a pretext for him to declare Martial Law. To declare a “national security emergency” and then to “declare” all electronic votes — every single one — invalid.

What was to happen next? A recount. Of only paper ballots.

Run by the military and law enforcement.

“A Trusted Lead Counter will be appointed with authority from the POTUS to direct the actions of select federalized National Guard units and support from DOJ, DHS and other US government agencies as needed to complete a recount of the legal paper ballots for the federal elections in all 50 states.

US Marshals will immediately secure all ballots and provide a protective perimeter around the locations in all 50 states.

• DHS will use their emergency response logistic capabilities to support the effort. They will integrate the IT support that will include separating out the legal from the counterfeit ballots and communications with all supporting the effort and cameras (Possibly cell phones) imaging each and every ballot. These images will be distributed to the Internet.
• The federalized National Guard in each state will be supplied detailed processes and be responsible for counting each legitimate paper ballot. Teams made up of three (first couple counties will be five) National Guard members will do the counting. As the counting occurs each ballot will be imaged and the images placed on the Internet so any US citizen can view them and count the ballots themselves. The process will be completely transparent.”

Now we’ve come to a territory so insane, so baffling, that it’s even beyond most failed states.

What Meadows is recommending here is that martial law — as in the military — be used to direct a democratic process. But obviously, such a process has no democratic legitimacy to begin with. We don’t involve the military in elections in democracies for a very good reason, because that would immediately disqualify any electoral result to begin with. The military, too, doesn’t often want to get involved with democratic processes for just that reason. Meadows appears to not even be aware of the most basic principles of civil jurisprudence and martial law both.

Even in failed states, this kind of bizarre situation rarely comes to pass. An “election”…run by the military? LOL — everyone would instantly know it was a sham. That’s how you get to places like “99% of Russia always votes for Putin!”…precisely because democratic processes have no integrity exactly since they’re under the control of the military and law enforcement. In other words, the men with guns run the elections — not the people.

Meadows finishes with this final set of recommendations, which are the “options” for 6th Jan:

“VP Pence seats Republican Electors over the objections of Democrats in states where fraud occurred

▪ VP Pence rejects the electors from States where fraud occurred causing the election to be decided by remaining electoral votes

• VP Pence delays the decision in order to allow for a vetting and subsequent counting of the all the legal paper ballots”

Now we are beginning to know the whole story. It goes like this.

Trump and seniormost team really were drafting a plan — an insane and ludicrous plan — to overturn the election. It relied on a baffling, bizarre, comedic conspiracy theory — China and Venezuela were just one part of a “global socialist” plan to “subvert the will of the United States Voter.” They stole the election, and that’s how Biden won. As a result, Trump would declare a national security emergency, all electronic ballots — all of them — would be thrown out, and paper ballots, which of course leaned for Trump, would be “recounted” under martial law.

It’s worth saying: this is exactly what us survivors and scholars of authoritarian collapse — and maybe, probably you — were warning of at the time. Martial law. A pretext to declare the election invalid and overturn it.

The reality, it turns out, is even stranger than the fiction. There really was a plot — and it was way, way worse than anytime much at the time knew or believed.

So why didn’t it come to pass?

Because of what happened on Jan 6th. It seems Pence refused. I’m not saying that Pence saved America — sorry, no, he helped get it to that point. The Trumpists who stormed Congress, ironically, may have made it impossible for Trump’s plan to go according to plan. They went too far — or they didn’t go far enough. They didn’t intimidate Pence into going along with the plan. They drew too much attention to the idea that democracy could fall. The nation’s eyes suddenly opened up.

And the Trumpists had to retreat. On that fateful day, though, American democracy really did almost fall.

We knew it in a different way: the Trumpists stormed Congress, shed blood for the first time since the war of 1812, smeared faeces all over the walls…and came within a hairs’ breadth of massacring those counting and certifying the election for Biden. If they’d done that? Trump probably would have gone on full on with the plan.

Which plan? The plan to declare martial law because of a fake “national security emergency” and overturn the election. The plan anyone sane could have seen even without the PowerPoint above.

Every day, we’re learning how much closer America really came to losing democracy on Jan 6th. Now we know it wasn’t just about the Trumpists almost massacring those counting the vote. It was a plot much, much worse than that. It was about literally declaring martial law to overturn the election.

Only two things stood in its way — the Vice President, and America’s apathetic acceptance of it. Neither one of those happened. The storming of Congress made America wake up — and it made it, enough of it, anyways, feel ashamed, angry, and alert. And the VP didn’t go along with the plan. So the plan didn’t come to fruition.

But America came this close. This close. A baby’s breath.

To a President declaring martial law over a fake “national security emergency” to overturn an election.

Think about that. Really think about it. Because the truth is that they haven’t stopped. They have only gotten smarter. For the bad guys, Jan 6th was a warm-up, a trial-run, mere preparation.

Now we know. American democracy really did almost collapse. In the most spectacular way imaginable. Like in the plot of a bad movie. Like at the hands of authoritarians and fascists ready to declare martial law and use real military force to end the project of self-determination and self-governance for good.

And we know why Trump’s top henchmen are “refusing” to testify before Congress — as if that was some kind of perfectly normal option. The reason is that they’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. If they don’t, they’re in contempt, if they do…well, unless they want to perjure themselves…the truth, which is almost comedically horrifying, speaks for itself.

Umair
December 2021

Eudaimonia and Co

Eudaimonia & Co

Don’t Kill Me For Saying It — But Biden’s Presidency is Failing - Umair Haque (Medium)

Don’t Kill Me For Saying It — But Biden’s Presidency is Failing

America and the World are Losing Confidence in the Biden Administration — Because it Keeps Making Baffling Mistakes

 Umair Haque

Medium, September 18, 2021

https://eand.co/dont-kill-me-for-saying-it-but-biden-s-presidency-is-failing-d08537b29056

It falls on me to be the bearer of news I don’t want particularly want to give you. Sigh. Who wants to have tell people — especially liberals — that Biden’s presidency is now in danger of failing. And yet it is.

Now, before you get your hackles up, let’s…talk about it. Like grown ups. Adults. American Liberals get incredibly defensive about Joe Biden. They have a seriously unhealthy relationship with their politicians. A cultish one. They don’t brook any criticism, and lash out in rage. It’s understandable. America is indeed under siege from a militant, fanatical, authoritarian far right. And yet it doesn’t do liberals any favours to treat Biden and his team like blessed saints, above and beyond mere mortals, perfect, divine, and unquestionable. Don’t regress into the infantile rage of spoiled American liberal man-baby, OK?

It’s been a terrible month or two for Biden — that much should be clear to all. His approval rating is plummeting. It’s now hovering down there, approaching Trump’s. Again, this isn’t my opinion, it’s an objective fact. “His” means his whole team’s, obviously, so again let’s not fall into the trap of cultish personality centred thinking. Biden’s Presidency isn’t in free fall just yet. But it’s getting perilously close.

And if this trend keeps going, where does America end up? With President Trump, all over again. Or maybe even worse. This is not a drill. It’s bitter reality.

So please, take it seriously, as painful as it may be to hear, because it is an objective, empirical fact that Biden’s Presidency is now beginning to fail.

When I say “Biden’s presidency is beginning to fail, and it’s an objective empirical fact,” I mean it in three ways. One, Americans are losing confidence in Biden, and not just Trumpist fanatics but average people. Two, the world is beginning to lose confidence in Biden, America’s allies left shaken and bewildered. And three, all the numerous crises hitting us at once from Covid to climate change show no signs of abating.

Why is Biden’s Presidency beginning to fail? Because he and his team are making amateur level mistakes. Too many of them, too fast. And so Americans are beginning to lose confidence in Biden’s supposed strengths — competence, calmness, poise, a kind of assured control. A firm hand on the wheel in stormy waters. So why does the boat still feel so rickety?

Let’s discuss a few of those mistakes. I’ll begin with the one Americans care about least, to highlight just how amateur hour these mistakes are.

Biden’s team recently signed a pact with Australia and the UK to essentially make new nuclear submarines, to ward off China. What the hell is this nonsense?

It’s not just me asking — it’s the entire rest of the world, beginning with America’s closest allies. Something unprecedented then happened: France recalled its ambassador to America, because it was so offended and shocked. Germany said the deal challenged the “coherence and unity of the west.” The French foreign minister had strong words: “There has been duplicity, contempt and lies, and when you have an ally of the stature of France, you don’t treat them like that…this is a real crisis.” A former French ambassador to the UK said, “This puts a big rift down the middle of the Nato alliance.”

Now, you might think this is all meaningless. It’s not. Read the quotes above. This isn’t a game. It’s our duty as responsible adults to understand this stuff.

What the hell is Biden doing making new nuclear weapons to have some kind of macho pissing contest with China over? What on earth? Biden’s doing it because his team thinks China is a big, big threat. Are they kidding? To whom? To America? China’s not exactly a model global citizen, it’s true — but it’s hardly going to attack America, let alone Australia, or the UK. And if the US really wanted to make China scared, all it has to do is shut down trade for less than 24 hours and the Central Committee will quake in its boots.

Biden has signed this pact — AUKUS — to please Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison. These are two fanatically ultra conservative leaders. One a climate change denier, the other who behaves as if Covid is “just a flu.” They could care less about Biden or liberal progress at all. Why appease them? At the cost of Europe? This ain’t just bad policy. It’s terrible, amateur hour politics.

This is a bad, bad look for America. It reeks, to the rest of the world, of both paranoia, racism, and American empire. Three white nations…making nuclear weapons…to fight against…the largest non white nation. For no good reason. Unprovoked.

It’s not just about nuclear non-proliferation, though it is about that. New weapons? Nuclear ones? Seriously? Three white nations teaming up to intimidate the largest non-white one? What century is this?

It’s about much, much more than that though. This whole dumb episode reveals just how amateur hour the Biden teams’ mindset really is.

What is the actual biggest threat to America, right now? There are three. “Climate change,” or global warming, if you want to use the more accurate term and not the one made up by a Republican pundit to keep us from taking it seriously. It’s already making parts of America uninhabitable. Who’s going to live in California in a decade or two? How is the West going to have water? Then there’s the far right, which is doing an end run around the rule of law, and doing things like making people bounty hunters to harass and try to catch…vulnerable women. And number three is Russia. You know, the nation that essentially installed Trump in the Presidency, a fact which we now have stark evidence in support of.

Two of those three threats — global warming, the far right’s ascendant fascism — are domestic. Only one is external. And it has nothing — literally nothing — to do with China. So Biden’s team has managed to alienate allies over…nothing. For no good reason. Over something useless.

China paranoia, at this point, is more about racism than reality. No, China is not some kind of beacon of goodness and light. But it’s hardly a country so menacing to the West that a whole new nuclear arms race has to happen. This is not reality. It’s paranoia. It’s rank stupidity.

What’s the big deal about alienating, well, all of Europe, to build new nuclear weapons to intimidate China with?

There are three Very Big Problems with such Epic Goddamned Stupidity. One, America needs Europe on its side to fight the world’s — and America’s — actual biggest problem, which is global warming. Two, America needs China on its side to fight global warming, too. And three…let me think about how to put this kindly…nobody on the planet needs more nuclear weapons. More nuclear weapons aren’t going to save anybody’s ass. Our asses are going to be cooked by megafire, drowned by megaflood, poisoned by new pandemics, parched and starved — they already are.

What are you going to do, bomb global warming to death?

This isn’t just a failure of foreign policy, in other words — it cascades into the domestic and global policy failure of not fighting climate change hard enough. Meaning, half the country was either flooded or on fire a week or two ago, and it’s only going to get worse. These are failure cascades, which is how Presidencies fail. One mistake — bang!! — becomes a much, much bigger one.

The UN is warning that the world is on a “catastrophic climate pathway” — and there’s Team Biden alienating the very allies the world needs, on both sides, to fight climate change with…for the sake of macho posturing…more nuclear weapons…that aren’t going to save a soul from the planet melting down…which is the world’s, and America’s, actual biggest threat.

Let me say that last part again because I think most people are still in deep denial about this, caught in the minutiae of the latest crisis, constantly distracted by the next media buzz. Climate change, aka global warming, is the world’s biggest threat. Global warming is the biggest threat to America, to the world, to our civilization, right now.

It’s epic, epic stupidity. In all this, Biden comes off to the entire world as…just another idiotic cowboy American. Who else alienated Europe, do you remember? Trump did.

Why? Because his philosophy — and that’s a generous term — was “America First.” But it turns out, chillingly, fatally, that Biden’s isn’t all that that different.

You’re probably hopping mad right about now, because I compared Biden to Trump. So let me keep going and prove it to you.

What is Biden’s next massive failure — this time, the one Americans actually care about? Covid. Covid is out of control in America all over again. And American liberals ascribe this to the kind of moronic red staters who think making kids wear masks in schools is like Jews being sent to gas chambers during the Holocaust.

That’s only half right, though: yes, Covid’s out of control because Red Staters are idiots. But it’s also out of control because there’s a new variant, Delta. What happens when idiots meet a new variant of Covid? The cycle of death repeats. They turn a new variant into a wave. How do you really solve this problem? You stop the new variants.

How do you do that? You vaccine the world, fast. So that new variants don’t have breeding grounds. Because those variants will affect you, too.

Now I have some really bad news for you. News which should infuriate you, but leaves most American liberals indifferent, which just proves to me and the rest of the world that, yes, basically, they’re not that different from the idiot Trumpist fascists they imagine they’re opposing.

Biden hasn’t been on the side of vaccinating the globe. He’s been against it. Sure, he might have talked about it once or twice. But in practice? His people are at the WTO, literally enforcing patents with legal power. America will not let the world have vaccines.

But who does “America” mean? Well, it means figures like Bill Gates, who it seems intervened to make it happen, when researchers wanted to give the vaccine formula away. And it means Joe Biden, whose administration is actively preventing the world from being vaccinated.

What’s the outcome of all that? Well, as the head of the WHO has pointed out, Covid cases globally outpace vaccinations. That simple math has a devastating conclusion. New variants keep on igniting. Because obviously if people are getting a disease faster than they’re getting vaccinated, it’s spreading, breeding, and mutating. Worse, plenty of those new variants are vaccine resistant, like Israel’s experience shows.

Why is Biden’s preventing the world from getting Covid vaccines? Because they’re more interested in protecting the profits of pharmaceutical companies. Don’t Pharma companies already make enough money? Of course they do. Do they deserve to earn history’s greatest fortune from vaccinating eight billion, every year, over and over again? Of course they don’t. The worst part of all this might just be that Covid vaccines were literally created with public money at public institutions, which means they’re public goods, which means they’re there to be shared. With the whole world. Just like, say, the polio or smallpox vaccines. Because diseases spread right back to us.

Do you see how goddamned idiotic all this is? Biden might get on TV and talk a good game about Red States and Covid. But the truth is that if he and his team really wanted to stop Covid, they’d vaccinate the whole planet. Tomorrow. Do you know how much that would cost? Literally a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. The IMF estimated $50 billion, of which it had a shortfall of $13 billion. Zuck or Bezos could do that single-handedly. That’s way less than all those new nuclear weapons.

This is an epic, incredible, shocking, jaw-dropping, amazing, astounding mistake. No superlative can possibly be enough. All Biden needs to do is spend $50 billion — call it a hundred if you like, it’s pennies for a nation like America — to stop Covid dead in its tracks. No more Red State lunacy, because no more new variants. No more domestic chaos and panic and anxiety, because Covid never goes away.

But he won’t do it. Because he’s too busy defending Pharma profits and building new nuclear weapons.

Do you know how much $50 billion — the cost of vaccinating the world — is? It’s a quarter of one percent of America’s GDP. It’s a tiny, tiny fraction. This is what Biden is sacrificing the planet’s public health for, sacrificing his Presidency, utlimately, for.

Let me make really clear why I say that.

Biden could go down as one of America’s few — very few — Presidents who did something good and noble and beautiful for the whole world. The man who eliminated Covid. He’d be up there with FDR. The entire world would applaud. America would be a respected and admired nation again. He would have defanged his opponents, too, by taking the game to a much, much higher strategic level, a higher level of vision and ambition and purpose. Conservatives would look like the narrow-minded fools they are, and they would be badly disempowered as Americans felt good about being a country that could do genuinely beautiful and noble things again.

But Biden won’t do it. He’s shown us, at this point, time and again, what his governing philosophy really is. Tragically, stupidly, astonishingly, it’s not that different from Trump’s. At least if you’re France, Germany, China, Russia, Afghanistan — the entire rest of the world. America First.

The problem with that is that none of this century’s great Existential Threats can be solved that way. They are all global. We are all in them together. You can’t fight global warming with nuclear bombs. You can’t even fight global warming alone. You can’t fight Covid with individualism and selfishness and indifference.

But Biden isn’t teaching Americans that. He’s teaching them the opposite. He’s telling them that the world doesn’t need vaccines — so why should they believe the position that Americans do? He’s telling them that global warming matters — and then going out and spending a fortune on bombs.

Is it any wonder that Americans — the sane ones — are losing confidence in Biden? They’re baffled and bewildered, and they’re beginning to get a little frustrated. I thought this guy was better than Trump, they’re saying. And he is, in some ways. But in others? He’s a lot like him. He doesn’t seem to really think things through. He shoots before he thinks. He has double standards and inconsistencies which are too glaring to really not to see.

Biden’s Presidency is beginning to fail, my friends. I don’t say that with gloating glee — I’ve always liked the guy. I say it as a warning. Nuclear weapons and preventing the world getting vaccinated. America First-ism and giving the fascists a slap on the wrist. Global warming a lower priority — while America burns and floods — than bombs and guns. Don’t even get me started on Afghanistan. What is going on here? The captain of the ship doesn’t seem to know how to navigate this storm. He seems to be going in circles, while the ship buckles, and the waves roar.

I think a lot of Americans feel this way, right about now. Biden should have been better than this. Why isn’t he?

Umair
September 2021