Quick Take: Thanks for Nothing!
Biden caves on student loan debt cancellation, loses deadbeat vote
The narrative promoted by his cabal of sycophants portrays Joe Biden as a paragon of hard-earned wisdom, tested and seasoned by decades of public service, a man with a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state. It’s a narrative that seems a bit…questionable…when measured against the record of his tenure in office thus far, which exhibits such incidents as the deplorable Afghanistan bugout, the empty threats directed at Saudi Arabia and China, and the reckless spending that supercharged the current inflationary spiral.
Now we have another example of Joe Biden’s ineptitude to set against that narrative: his cave-in on student loan debt cancellation. Briefly to review, in an attempt to buy the votes of young Americans with student loan debt, the President proposed, unilaterally, to cancel it. As his authority to do so he cited the 2001 HEROES Act, which provided debt relief to military personnel on active duty after 9/11—a claim that’s really kind of an insult to those for whom the HEROES Act was enacted. Alas, though, the Supreme Court stayed Biden’s initiative pending consideration of its legality.
But in the meantime, at least, the suspension of student loan debt repayment and interest accrual, a pandemic emergency measure, remained in place—until, as part of his cave-in on the debt ceiling, Biden agreed to a resumption of regular repayment and interest accrual in September.
Well.
All those young voters whom he attempted to bribe via his reckless power grab are now absolutely furious with our tested and seasoned president. Joe Biden promised that he’d lift the debt burden from their shoulders—but now they’re being required to pony up after all! The cries of rage and pain, the tears and lamentations and rending of garments, are piteous. Indeed, it requires a heart of stone not to laugh aloud at the spectacle of these arrested adolescents, claiming a privilege not on offer to other people who’ve borrowed money, such as me. Theirs is the least sympathetic cause extant in America today: the attempted valorization of a bunch of deadbeat whiners. Hey there, Caitlyn Dimbulb, nobody forced you to borrow $100,000 to pay for a degree in eco-feminism!
Considering the reliance that Democrats place on the storied youth vote, this could present a real problem for them. It seems likely that the Supreme Court will reject Biden’s attempt to dodge around Article One, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States, which gives Congress sole power to appropriate and spend money. The President, however, couldn’t be bothered to navigate the legislative process. This was a big mistake in my opinion; probably some legislative compromise on student loan debt relief could have been agreed upon. But Biden apparently wasn’t willing to settle for half a loaf, and now he’s left without a crumb.
Since the days of FDR, Americans have been encouraged to think of the president as the Great and Powerful Oz, the one and only individual responsible for the happiness, prosperity, and security of us all. That, more or less, is what progressives mean today when they talk about “our democracy.” Progressive Democrats in Congress virtually beg Joe Biden to disregard the Supreme Court and even strip them of their own power for the sake of the Radiant Future. His immediate predecessors, Obama and Trump, were similarly looked to for signs, portents and miracles. The nausea-inducing cults of personality that surrounded them both as candidates and chief executives stand among the most embarrassing incidents in American political history.
Even when the president is tolerably competent, America’s absurdly inflated imperial presidency doesn’t live up to its billing. The spectacle of Biden’s student loan debt cancellation debacle goes to show what happens when the office falls into the hands of a clueless doofus. The gap between promises recklessly made and performance manifestly incompetent soon becomes obvious and unbridgeable. That’s how Joe Biden managed to make some forty million Americans mad at him and his party.
Personally, I have no sympathy for him, the Democrats, or those forty million deadbeats.
You shouldn’t have sympathy for them. Let no one make you feel ashamed for pushing back against their postliberal tyranny. The populists with their will to undermine the judiciary with threats to defy their rulings whether by continuing race-based affirmative action or federalizing abortion; sabotage the separation of powers by perhaps abolishing the filibuster; or using the 14th amendment to give the executive absolute power to appropriate money--will turn America into Erdogan’s Turkey sooner or later, unless we critique their complete absence of principle, and illuminate the perverseness of their moral logic and make a sustained case for maintaining the republic the way the founders designed it.
And we can only fight them without pity. Bc populist politics is rooted in manipulative pity, borne of a bad conscience: beliefs that the planet is more important than people; that the “identity,” however one defines it, of transgender men takes precedence over women’s biology; that white people today are guilty for slavery 200 years ago. Etc. By showing compassion for them we only give them more power, as we also contradict ourselves by falling victim to our own bad conscience.
We should emulate Hume Swift and Voltaire who defended humanity from the violent excesses of religious superstition, with appeals to reason, commonsense, open debate and empirical argument.
If populists use grievance and pathos to secure their irrational innumerable wants through administrative fiat, then we must combat this tyranny of progressive earnestness with irony and parable. It has never been more important since the dawn of the european enlightenment, that the west aggressively sideline the tribal morality rationalizing the collectivist politics of direct action in its every trace and vestige.