If an administration deliberately wished to cause havoc on the border, to ensure fuel was nearly unaffordable, to create a crime wave, to spark 1970s hyperinflation, and to rekindle racial tensions, what would it have done differently than what President Joe Biden has done?
When pressed about inflation and fuel price hikes, Biden either blames someone or something else, gets mad at the questioner, or claims former President Donald Trump did it.
His administration apparently believes things are going well and according to plan.
When polls disagree, his team either believes the American people are brainwashed, or that they themselves have not supplied sufficient propaganda. So they never pivot or compromise, but rededicate themselves to continued failure.
Apparently what most in the country see as disasters, Biden envisions as success.
Take the border, or rather its disappearance.
Never in U.S. history has an administration simply canceled immigration laws, opened the border, and welcomed in millions of aliens. All arrive illegally, without audit or vaccinations and tests in times of a pandemic.
Almost all the entering millions who break the law are poor, without high school diplomas or English skills, and in dire need of massive federal and state housing, food, education, legal and health subsidies.
Do the leftists in Washington believe that millions of dependent new residents will look to the left for decades of support and soon find ways to reciprocate with fealty at the polls?
Former President Barack Obama's energy secretary-designate Steven Chu once gaffed in the 2008 campaign when he openly wished that U.S. gas prices would reach European levels. In truth, the left has always believed the only way to achieve their objectives of discouraging driving, forcing middle-class Americans onto trains and buses, and persuading them to live in urban high-rises rather than drive carbon-spewing cars from spacious suburban ranch-style homes was to encourage high fuel prices.
Is that agenda why Biden, during the current energy crisis, canceled new federal oil and gas leases? As diesel hits $7 a gallon in California, why else did he refuse to finish the Keystone XL pipeline or reopen Alaskan oil fields?
Violent crime is on its way to 1970s levels. The combination of defunding the police, radical city and county prosecutors who don't charge or lock up criminals, and emptying jails and prisons have ignited a national crime wave.
The Biden administration shrugs. It offers no new federal help to fund more police or charge freed criminals under applicable federal statutes. Does it think it is more socially just to let criminals free than incarcerate them? Does it buy into critical legal theory that laws do not reflect ancient ideas of right and wrong, but instead are constructed by the privileged to oppress the already oppressed?
Is what Americans see as dangerous crime something the Biden zealots applaud as tough social karma?
Americans are tired of the new woke tribalism. Judging individuals on the basis of their race, gender, or superficial appearance is amoral, and contrary to the entire civil rights movement and the U.S. Constitution. It destroys any idea of meritocracy and divides the country artificially into supposed victims and victimizers.
But do the Biden people see it that way? Or do they promote racial tensions and tribalism, as welcome revolutionary fervor?
In that regard, the Bidenites promote identity politics as a good way to stir up the pot, to demonize supposed oppressors and deify the oppressed--all as a way of retaining political power. For the left, living in a socialist nation controlled by an elite is far preferable to living in a free and prosperous one answerable only to the people.
But Biden and his delusional team seem delighted with what they have wrought.
What Americans see as an abject catastrophe, they cheer on as a stunning and planned success.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.