Spare us the media love-in with Biden and the woke Democrats

“This is America’s day. This is democracy’s day. A day of history and hope, of renewal and resolve…” Thanks, Joe, that’s really good to know. “We’ve learned again that democracy is precious, democracy is fragile and, at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.” Great, Joe, so it’s all come to a happy ending? Maybe that bit about democracy being fragile struck an unintended chord with some people – householders in Portland, Oregon, voters in some precincts with strange electoral results, but the important thing is that you are going to bring unity to America.

To those who missed out when the rose-tinted spectacles were issued, Joe the Healer carries as much credibility as one of those quack peddlers of patent medicines, selling bottles of coloured water to marks in the old Wild West. Granted, the Capitol has been, for more than two centuries, the venue for ritual rhetorical B.S. whenever an American president of any stripe first gets his paws in the honey jar – er, first dedicates himself to the service of a great nation.

The notion of Biden, or any Democrat, as an agent of unity, after that party has spent four years protesting, denouncing, impeaching, rioting and tearing the country apart, requires a suspension of disbelief of which few imaginations are capable. The Democratic holistic theme, of course, is a legacy of Barack Obama, who endlessly protested his desire to reach across the aisle, while conducting one of the most partisan presidencies of modern times.

But the Democrats have a new theme, a recent addition to their mythology, and Biden duly invoked it. “And here we stand just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground.” The riot at the Capitol deeply shocked Democrats. They had always imagined their opponents, even the most embittered, would play a passive role.

Democrats viewed with equanimity “largely peaceful protests” that in their first two weeks alone caused $2bn of damage and left 25 people dead; five people died in the Capitol, four of them protesters. That did not prevent the previously riot-tolerant Democratic camp and its media allies exhausting hyperbole, of “the day democracy died” genre, to create a myth of the party supported by BLM and Antifa as the standard bearers of law and order, and of constitutional rectitude.

Who, they ask, would be so deranged as to challenge the outcome of an American presidential election? Look at this demented tweet from an obvious fruitcake: “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.” Oh sorry, that tweet actually came from Nancy Pelosi on 16 May, 2017 when the Democrats were claiming Russia had stolen the election for Trump. She was not banned by Twitter.

As any Democratic apologist will explain, all the party did was run some relatively perfunctory tests on the validity of the election: prosecutors issued no more than 2,800 subpoenas and conducted only 500 witness interviews, while special counsel Robert Mueller and a small team of 19 lawyers investigated President Trump for the very limited period of 675 days, before concluding there was no evidence of any Trump-related individual collaborating with Russians. Then, just to be on the safe side, the Democrats impeached the president. They are currently impeaching him again, presumably as part of Joe Biden’s drive for national unity across party lines.

As against that minor caveat by Democrats regarding the outcome of the 2016 election, the disproportionate reaction by Republicans, seeking to challenge the result of the 2020 election in the law courts, was a clear abuse of the constitution. Besides, with every mainstream television station except one backing the Democrats and Big Tech’s algorithms marginalising Republicans, including the now ex-president, from social media, public sentiment was clearly anti-Trump.

Republicans hardly needed to obsess over Dominion voting machines, the electoral regulations set by officials in places where Democratic manipulation dates back to Tammany Hall in the 19^th century sealed their fate. In Wisconsin the Electoral Commission, exceeding its powers, allowed county election clerks to “cure” spoiled ballots invalidated under state law, exempted nearly 200,000 voters from ID rules and illegally retained 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls.

As Joe Biden said, “the will of the people has been heeded”. Yes indeed, the people have spoken and we know both their names: Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. America’s oligarchs have come out for their moment in the sun, as Russia’s oligarchs once did. Like all woke corporations, Twitter and Facebook may come to regret their stance: they have helped empower forces that are ultimately viscerally opposed to their interests.

The official establishment narrative is that the four years of Trump were an aberration, an insane interlude in American history, to be followed now by a return to sanity and normality. That is the infantile delusion into which the media and commentariat have bought, on both sides of the Atlantic. Establishment groupthink, as with Brexit, constituted a consensus to which all who aspired to be “liberal” or “enlightened” adhered. From the earliest days of the Trump interregnum, it was easy to identify the intelligent elite: they were the ones wearing “pussy hats” who believed there were 23 sexes. One of America’s two great parties of state transitioning into neo-Marxism was not a pretty sight.

Insane? Trump? The real insanity starts now. Already the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has imposed “gender neutral” language on the most powerful legislature in the world, replacing terms such as “father” and “mother” in official texts. The second impeachment of Donald Trump totally trivialises what was formerly one of the most potent and sparingly used sanctions in defence of governmental integrity.

The new administration will treat many illegal immigrants as lawful citizens, especially with regard to voting rights, in the expectation of swelling the Democratic vote. Large-scale amnesties, for the same reason, are likely. If imposed on a sufficiently large scale, they could turn America into a one-party state. Only the need for a two-thirds majority in the Senate will deter Democrats from abolishing the electoral college and expanding the Supreme Court, with a view to gerrymandering it.

The hostility to the police shown by the left wing of the Democratic Party, now firmly in the driving seat, threatens to wreck law enforcement across America. Anyone who thinks the looney tunes element among the House Democrats, headed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, will not be fiercely active over the two years until possible mid-term retribution, gravely underestimates the situation. Expect a tsunami of woke measures relating to transgender issues and (most damagingly) race, based on identitarian politics.

Fiscally, the prospect is lunatic. The headline figure that Biden intends to increase federal spending by $5.4 trillion over the next decade is a gross underestimate of the fiscal incontinence that will be the defining characteristic of the administration. The American economy is strong – the strongest in the world – with a resilience that has largely survived even the pandemic crisis.

But if someone set out to devise a means of breaking this near-invincible economic leviathan, it would be the Green New Deal, championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, endorsed by the Democratic National Convention and acknowledged by Biden as “a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face”. Much of it has been incorporated in his “Build Back Better” programme and he has said it will guide his climate policies. If he implements the proposals to any significant degree, he will bankrupt America.

American Action Forum, a think tank, has estimated that the plan could cost as much as $93 trillion over the next decade. The potential cost works out at $600,000 per household. Eliminating carbon emissions from America’s transport system alone could cost as much as $2.7 trillion; universal healthcare carries a tab of nearly $36 trillion. Of course, in its progress through Congress it would be sliced and diced and compromises would be struck; that would produce the familiar outcome of targets missed but costs inadequately diminished.

When politicians and climate fanatics reach an astral plane above the humble denomination of billions, replaced by trillions, it is testimony to how far the deluded, having eliminated the voice of critical reason via cancel culture, cross-fertilize one another’s fantasies. Power is increasingly in the hands of crazed visionaries, buttressed by social media oligarchs and a servile commentariat. The Green New Deal is about far more than climate change and clean energy. It would nationalise America by putting the federal government in charge of huge swathes of the economy and represent the biggest centralisation of power in United States history.

In a word, it is socialist Utopia. And like all socialist experiments it would end in total impoverishment, with catastrophic effects on the rest of the world. There is a possibility that Biden might use the current emergency as an excuse to implement only a mini-version of the Green New Deal. But will he have the authority to restrain his party? Before long, America and the wider world will begin to think nostalgically of Donald Trump.