As I watched President Biden shuffle around the Middle East last week, moping and rambling like an old man searching his living room for the TV remote in his left hand, I suddenly realized why his presidency feels to the people paying close attention like the fraudulent and empty failure it is. There’s no there there.
Joe Biden is an empty shell; a political robot who has been mindlessly toiling for five decades toward the goal he announced in childhood: to be president. It is now painfully obvious that, having arrived he has no idea what he ought to do with the position. This sense of aimlessness is evident in the trajectories of others who have serially failed into high office; Jimmy Carter comes to mind. So does William Howard Taft, Hillary Clinton and Kamela Harris. Their inability to articulate a purpose people find inspiring must be infuriating and productive of great self-doubt and loathing. This might explain their fragility and bouts of temper.
Part of their common problem is that they have neglected a great human need, possibly best articulated by George Orwell in March of 1940 in an essay reviewing Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “(H)e has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life,” Orwell noted. “Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain… Hitler…. knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”
In the depths of England’s life-and-death struggle with Naziism, English Socialist George Orwell looked into the heart of his country’s mortal enemy and found a hard truth: “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”
More than ease; more than free health care, cheap gasoline or subsidized housing; more than tuition-free college, rebate checks to offset inflation or lost wages; the human soul wants a challenge. Humans flourish when they have problems to solve and goals to accomplish. Take these away and societies languish in a navel-gazing morass of ego, laziness and intellectual decline. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with history knows this dire tale full well.
Great statesmen have a sense for this need, and they use it. Lincoln did so when he reminded the country at Gettysburg that the great issue facing the country had not yet been decided and later, after it had, when he called on all Americans to embrace a seeming impossibility: a reconciliation without permanent rancor.
John Kennedy did it when he announced that America would “…land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth within this decade” – a daunting task for a country which had yet to put a man into orbit. And Kennedy was clear about the rationale of his challenge: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
Kennedy knew that great achievement requires not only desire but dedication, sacrifice and hard work – the eternal engines of human accomplishment. He also knew that it was vital to galvanize public opinion and capture the nation’s imagination with a vision that was big, bold and new. He shared with a few other western leaders in the last century, Orwell’s tyrants among them, the ability to inspire his countrymen to strive for seemingly-impossible goals.
Joe, in contrast, inspires no one and has no clearly-drawn goals save the impoverishment of the American middle class and the establishment of fiat rule by the “expert” elite. We must live a straightened life, he insists, not to achieve anything monumental but so that China, India and others may continue unimpeded in their progress, using fuels that we have foresworn as evil because they are destroying Earth’s environment. We must embrace misery that others can enjoy life. A less-inspiring challenge is difficult to imagine.
But that’s Joe: even when he attempts to inspire he falls flat.
Hopefully, two years hence we will be rid of our inflatable president and his assorted witless and hate-filled hangers-on. Pray America has the strength to last until then.
