Monday open thread: 100 days
This coming Friday, President Joe Biden will mark one hundred days in office. Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt's blistering first century during his first term in office, presidents have had to live up, or down, to that standard. Most don't match it. But Pres. Biden came into office facing, I would argue, as large of a crisis—or sets of crises—as confronted Pres. Roosevelt. So what has he done?
- He's not a narcissistic sociopath.
- He pushed through the most impactful social legislation under the American Recovery Plan since Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society.
- He has, bit by bit, undone large swathes of the former guy's toxic decisions.
- He took a moribund COVID vaccination regime and injected steroids into it, to the point that he doubled his campaign promise of one hundred million jabs in the first one hundred days.
- He rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, treating climate change as the existential crisis that it is.
- He has proposed a $2.5 trillion infrastructure plan, which, if it's not cut too much in negotiations, promises to transform this country's crumbling edifice.
- He's served notice to tyrants like Vladimir Putin that the days of appeasement they enjoyed under the former guy are gone. He'll work with them when he can, as with climate change or tackling the pandemic; but he won't write them love letters, or bat googly eyes at them.
- In that vein, he's the first US president to acknowledge the fact of the Armenian genocide, sticking it to the Turkish autocrat.
- Trans rights are human rights.
- And much else, but most of all: he has restored decency to an office which had been shat upon for four long years.
It's that last part which is the most stunning. Even under George W. Bush, most of us didn't argue that he wasn't basically a decent person, within a broad definition of the term. We didn't like his policies, but we didn't think him an unfettered monster. Four years of a sociopath in the Oval Office will impact us psychologically in ways we don't even know yet. It was essential for that black hole to be followed by a man who embodied its exact opposite: empathy, kindness, caring. The former guy was the American myth of individualism and self-centeredness brought to garish life. We had someone in charge of the country who embodied everything the culture pushes as American values: an individualism which dispenses with community; a life centered around pursuing one's own gain, regardless of the harm one does to others; saying whatever is on one's mind, without concern for the feelings of others. "Fuck your feelings" was the order of the day. And now we find that the fuck your feelings crowd was, as always, projecting, now that decent people have wrested back control of the ship, and are exacting consequences for four years of horror. Now their precious feelings are being affronted, and they are apoplectic that we're not letting bygones be bygones. One could quote the line from that really not very good movie, Gladiator: in this life or the next, I will have my vengeance. Except it's not vengeance we're after. No. It's restorative justice. It's accountability. Those on the receiving end will howl and squeal. And that's because for all their talk about being alphas, they're actually sad little people who feel alive only when oppressing others. Justice being meted out feels like oppression to them. When the former guy gets indicted, expect that to explode in millions of miscreants whining that their god is being crucified.
We have so much more work to do. But it's necessary work, and joyful work. One hundred days. It's only the beginning.