Joe Biden’s woke left-wing agenda is a catastrophe for the free world
Three months after his inauguration, his administration is shaping up to be the most Left-wing since Franklin D Roosevelt. Out of weakness or lack of focus, Biden has allowed his party’s radicals too much sway. The consequences will be disastrous not just for America but also for Britain.
We live in a globalised world where politics has become an international fashion statement. Ideological tribes cross borders, at least when it comes to virtue-signalling, over-educated graduates desperate to latch on to the latest feel-good trend. Ideas that begin in Washington make their way to our own Parliament, offices and streets. We too will pay the price for Biden’s mistakes; and America’s struggles will become our battles, even if they shouldn’t be. Biden’s first blunder has been to give free rein to the woke revolutionaries. Their ideology is a fusion of post-modernism, Marxism, Freudianism, critical race theory, gender studies, intersectionality and much else besides, and the brew is toxic, explosive and potentially fatal to Western democracy and capitalism. It detests rationality, the rule of law and even the presumption of innocence. It is obsessed with race and gender, assumes extreme amounts of never-ending exploitation, posits that progress is impossible and rejects the liberal, meritocratic, colour-blind approach that has done so much to improve society and combat racism since the Fifties. It claims to believe in “social justice” but rejects the very concept of a functioning polity and the possibility of objective, enlightenment-style justice. It considers free speech to be a form of violence, and assumes that anybody who disagrees is guilty of false consciousness and, as such, deserves to be cancelled as a dangerous heretic.
It is already destroying American universities, and now threatens to debilitate American business. Its next target are US cities, where idiotic mayors are allowing crime to run riot. The proper approach to the disgraceful racism and violence that characterises so much of US law-enforcement is to reform forces and stamp out hateful practices; yet the woke lobby prefers to demand the police’s abolition, an absurd, utopian approach advocated by the likes of Alexandria Ocaso-Cortez, a prominent Congresswoman…
Biden is also veering sharp Left on the economy, increasing corporate and personal taxes. His Democratic allies at local and state level are doing the same. The compound effect threatens to turn into a major supply-side shock. New York and California are being hammered, with companies and wealthy individuals fleeing to Texas and Florida. This nonsense has already contaminated the rest of the world. The huge, destructive increase in Britain’s corporation tax announced at the Budget was justified on the basis of what America is doing.
We will also feel the heat from Biden’s increase in spending. Much of it isn’t really on infrastructure, but it will push up aggregate demand just as the economy bounces back after Covid. US inflation and interest rates might go up, with a knock-on effect on our own cost of borrowing: bad news for Rishi Sunak.
