Yglesias: Why did Biden's handlers go nuts?

Biden insiders turned out to be boring mainstream Democrats. Yet, they still went crazy for transgenderism, immigration, George Floyd, and "equity." How come?

Matthew Yglesias writes at his Slow Boring* website:

What we don't learn in "Original Sin"

Who was driving the Biden administration's controversial policy choices?

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

MAY 27

Like everyone in Washington, I’ve read the new Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book, “Original Sin.” …

But I had a lot of questions about the Biden administration and what actually happened, and I was hoping the book might answer some of them. Unfortunately, it mostly doesn’t. …

But one part of the book is really not like the others. Michael Bennet recounts seeing Biden flub the name of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas at an immigration debate, and he reflects that maybe Biden’s age explains why the administration’s actual immigration policy is so muddled and murky. Bennet decides that the problem is that the Democratic Party is in a state of disagreement about what to do here, and that without a full-time president, there just isn’t a clear choice or direction. This sounds plausible to me, and I’ve heard other members of Congress offer similar speculation.

Critically, though, Bennet by his own admission is just spitballing. And the book does not answer the question of whether Bennet is right. …

And that is the central enigma of the Biden administration: What was going on as they made policy decisions? The Bush, Obama, and First Trump administrations all generated plentiful tick-tock reporting on what happened at various key moments.

Do we have any good reporting on why the Obama Administration, after a cautious first term, egged on the Great Awokening in its second term? I mean, I predicted it in my 2008 book America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance,” but it would be nice if some historian would bother to write up the inside story.

With Biden, we never really got that. And there’s so much we still don’t know.

One issue is that Biden has always been boring. I read a chapter about him in Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1972 in 1974 and another in Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes in the early 1990s, and even these two great political writers couldn’t make him interesting.

Tapper and Thompson describe decisions in the Biden White House as dominated by a small group of senior advisors — Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, and Anthony Bernal (Jill Biden’s chief of staff) — that they dub The Politburo. Or, rather, they say that this inner circle group was called The Politburo inside the administration. This may be true, though I always heard it described as “the inner circle,” and sometimes Anita Dunn and/or Annie Tomasini were also regarded as members of the inner circle.

As I responded repeatedly to the conspiracy theorists, the feeble old Biden’s shadowy “handlers” weren’t anybody interesting: they were just Democratic political lifers who had been handpicked by Joe and Jill for their loyalty to Biden.

Regardless, the thing that even in retrospect I find puzzling is that with the exception of Bernal, who many people dislike, these are pretty seasoned Democratic Party operatives.

And they are very decidedly from the moderate wing of the party. ...

So why did the Biden Administration push what, from the perspective of 2025, seem like crazy leftwing policies on transgenderism, immigration, crime, and “equity?”

Paywall here.

Because it wasn’t 2025 then. It was still the Great Awokening. Biden’s dull old moderate Democrat advisers were influenced by the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, as embodied in their younger advisers, to push policies that would seem nuts in either 2011 or 2025.

A central problem was that Biden’s inner circle were, like all respectable people, just plain ignorant about the relevant facts.

How many of them had ever heard of autogynephilia? How many of them knew that the Black Lives Matter fad had twice driven up the black death rates from murder and car crashes? How many of them knew how big were the racial gaps in shootings and IQ? How many had thought about how how bad unlimited Third World immigration would be for America if the U.S. really did let in all the Wretched Refuse like Founding Father Emma Lazarus demanded?

Nice people just plain don’t know deplorable stuff like that these days. You have to be a bad person who reads bad me, the ultimate bad guy because I believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, to learn about things that nice people are stupid about.

And yet, what the White House didn’t know became crucial to the main domestic policy issues of their Administration.

Why are the Democrats so depressed today?

One reason is October 7, 2023, which drove a wedge between the Democrats’ woke activists and their richest and most influential constituency

Another is the election results. If Trump had won by galvanizing white voters to rebel against all the racist anti-whiteism of the Great Awokening, white liberals would simply have laughed it off as one last gasp by the Bad People who will soon be swept away by the incoming Diverse.

But, instead, it turned out that the Diverse have the bad taste to kind of like Trump the more they get to know him:

What could be more disheartening for white liberals than to realize that your Great Replacement is replacing moderate whites with populist nonwhites who … like … Trump!?!?

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“Slow Boring” is Yglesias’s joking reference to his preference for writing about not particularly galvanizing good government reform topics. It’s also a reference to the credo of the great German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), conceiver of the Protestant work ethic theory of capitalism:

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.”

It’s a pretty clever Substack title and Yglesias is doing well off it.