Democracy for dummies
Allow me to indulge in a quick thought experiment. Let’s assume that Biden is exactly right when he says, as he did in his primetime address last night, that the extremism of “MAGA Republicans… threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
In this experiment, the dark diagnosis is the truth and Biden knows it to be the truth. What should a responsible president do under such circumstances? The answer, as my colleague Matt Purple put it in his must-read reaction to the speech, is to seek to vanquish election denialism and ugly conspiracy theories by “working to bring [Trump supporters] back into the national fold” rather than “treating them like the enemy — which will drive them deeper into the MAGA maw.”
Look at what Biden has done in office and you will struggle to find instances of such action. Examples of exactly what a responsible president should not do, however, are easier to come by. To list a few, briefly: recommend the effective abolition of the filibuster; vilify Supreme Court judges; look on as your party spends tens of millions of dollars boosting the most extreme voices in Republican midterms; slander anyone who refuses to support your voting legislation as no better than a segregationist; describe modest changes to the rules that govern elections as “Jim Crow on steroids”; indulge in economic policymaking by executive edict in a way that you know is unconstitutional.
I could go on, but the point is hopefully clear enough: by his own standards, Biden is not acting as a responsible president should act in the circumstances he says we are in. That leaves one of two options: either Biden is exploiting a moment of national peril for partisan and personal gain, rendering him a cynical and irresponsible commander-in-chief, or Biden is ginning up a sense of national peril for partisan and personal gain, also rendering him a cynical and irresponsible commander-in-chief.
There are many reasons to object to Biden’s speech: the use of the trappings of the presidency — including the Marines standing in the background — for what was a highly partisan election pitch; the mischaracterization of the nature of the threat to American democracy; the weird lighting. But the failure of Biden to even come close to meeting the standards you might expect of a president faced with the challenge he describes is perhaps the most revealing.
Even if you buy Biden’s infantile, self-aggrandizing Harry-versus-Voldemort account of the current moment, the president offers you no solutions other than “vote for me.” Which, of course, was the whole point of the speech.
If last night’s address confirms Biden to be a cynical partisan, it also shows that the president will not escape the shadow of his predecessor and has given up trying to do so. He is acknowledging, in deed if not in word, that he serves no purpose to his party, to the country, to anyone, beyond defeating Trump. But he’s already done that, and so must confect another showdown. Biden makes it a two-man show and bets on being better than the one-term president who stirred up a phony stolen-election controversy that ended with his supporters attacking the US Capitol.
We get what we deserve in a democracy, and if we continue to fall for the self-centered and self-interested fictions of the current president and his predecessor, we won’t be rid of either of them any time soon.
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The cost of school closures
The National Center for Education Statistics released its latest report on educational progress on Thursday. Two and a half years after the start of pandemic-era school closures, the document makes for grim, if unsurprising, reading. The study found that average scores for nine-year-olds declined by five points in reading and seven points in mathematics compared to 2020, which is the largest score decline in reading in thirty years and the only fall in score decline ever recorded for mathematics.
These precipitous falls are cause for considerable alarm. As is the fact that the gap between high and low performing kids is widening, As Bethany Mandel argues in her excellent piece for our September issue, the effects of lockdown learning loss will compound over time: “If you never learned how to read in first grade and you’re now in fourth grade, every part of your academic progress is stunted; everyone around you is moving but you can’t keep up, not just in reading and writing but in social studies, math and science.”
With school more or less back to normal this fall, teacher union chief Randi Weingarten is busy gaslighting Americans about why so many classrooms were closed for so long. Meanwhile, not nearly enough time and energy is going into the many thorny questions of how to make up for learning losses experienced by millions of American children in the last few years.
More good jobs news
US employers added 315,000 jobs in August and the jobless rate rose to 3.7 percent. A solid outcome in an already-tight labor market and a piece of moderately good news that beat expectations slightly and was welcomed by rising stock prices at this morning’s open. The size of the workforce is still smaller than it was on the eve of the pandemic, with the labor force participation rate about a percentage point smaller than it was in January 2020. Slightly under half of that loss is a consequence of an aging population. But still leaves a gap of 1.5 million net workers who aren’t in the workforce today but were just before the start of the pandemic.
What you should be reading today
Sarah Montalbano: Sarah Palin isn’t done yet
Lewis M. Andrews: The culture war inside the space program
Freddy Gray: The return of Meghan and Harry
Lee Smith, Tablet: Why did the FBI raid Mar-a-Lago?
Andrew Osborn, Reuters: Gorbachev died shocked and bewildered by the Ukraine war
Matthew Continetti, Washington Free Beacon: The green surrender
Poll watch
President Biden job approval
Approve: 42.1 percent
Disapprove: 54.8 percent
Net approval: -12.7 (RCP Average)
Is the country heading in the right direction?
Right direction: 23 percent
On the wrong track: 68 percent (Wall Street Journal)
