After our presidential election I wrote that what had just
happened felt to me as if Lady Liberty had been crossing Fifth Avenue when out
of nowhere a crazy guy driving a bus ran a red light. Thankfully, “Lady Liberty
leapt out of the way barely in time, and she’s now sitting on the curb, her
heart pounding, just glad to be alive.” But she knows just how narrowly she
escaped.
اضافة اعلان
I hoped that once Joe Biden took charge my anxiety over how
close we came to losing our democracy would soon fade. It hasn’t.
Just listen to Donald Trump or Senator Ron Johnson or Fox
News whitewashing the ransacking of the Capitol as a Republican white boys’
picnic that just got a little rowdy. Just listen to Trump’s former lawyer
Sidney Powell trying to escape a lawsuit by arguing that no serious person
would have believed her claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had helped
to perpetrate a stolen election. Just watch Georgia’s legislature pass a
measure supposedly designed to prevent the very fraud that Powell now says
never happened by creating obstacles for Black voters — even making it a crime
for anyone to serve water to someone waiting hours in a voting line.
Yes, that crazy bus driver is still out there and Lady
Liberty is still in danger of being run over.
Instead of the GOP sitting down after the election and
resolving, “Let’s complete a bridge to the votes of a diverse 21st-century
America — where a GOP message of immigration reform, plus pro-business,
pro-law-and-order, pro-smaller-government ideas could win” — it’s decided to
burn down any pieces of that bridge and compete only for a white-dominated
20th-century America.
As Michael Gerson, the former George W. Bush speechwriter
and now columnist for The Washington Post, put it the other day: “One of the
United States’ venerable, powerful political parties has been overtaken by
people who make resentment against outsiders the central element of their
appeal. … Elected Republicans who are not bigots are generally cowards in the
face of bigotry. And that is a shocking, horrible thing.”
Which is why this Trump GOP must never be allowed to occupy
the White House again. It also cannot be trusted to cede power. It barely did
so in January, and it shows no signs of regretting its behavior. Which is why,
if we want to preserve our democracy, we still have the fight of our lives on
our hands.
The key to winning that fight is for Biden to succeed well enough
and long enough for this anti-democratic Trump version of the GOP to flame out
and be replaced by a new, principled, center-right Republican Party, ready to
compete for 21st-century America. (We need a healthy conservative party to keep
some of the excesses of liberal Democrats in check, like cancel culture.)
And the key to that is for Biden to deliver real stuff that
enables all Americans to realize their full potential. And the key to that is
to make sure that the $1.9 trillion stimulus and his coming $3 trillion
green/infrastructure proposal actually deliver as promised. And the key to that
is for Biden to not only channel his inner FDR but also a little Ronald Reagan
and some rip-roaring capitalism.
Despite concerns that the $1.9 trillion could drive up
interest rates to levels that tank the stock market and crimp government
borrowing and discretionary spending down the road, there are lots of signs
that we could be headed for just such an explosion in entrepreneurship.
Consider this report from The Wall Street Journal on Friday:
“After a year of economic shutdowns and other changes brought on by COVID-19,
rents for Manhattan storefronts, apartments, and work spaces have been marked
down to their lowest prices in years. That is already bringing in new small
businesses and residents, and has the potential to change the character of the
city’s most-exclusive borough. … New York state as a whole saw its highest
number of new businesses launched last year since 2007.”
Biden also needs to maximize his green aspirations. It’s not
just about unleashing spending. It also about unleashing capitalism. The key to
a green revolution is scale. You need a whole lot of everything — wind, solar,
hydro, nuclear, batteries, efficient materials. And the only way to get that
kind of scale is by leveraging the market — by getting all kinds of
public-private partnerships going that reduce carbon.
The government can catalyze these in two ways. The first is
to use its buying power to drive down costs. For instance, “offshore wind used
to be much more expensive than onshore wind,” explained Hal Harvey, CEO of
Energy Innovation, “but then the British and Danish governments stepped in to
subsidize it and move it down the cost-volume curve. Now it is a huge and
cost-effective resource.”
The Biden team just announced $3 billion in loan guarantees
to do exactly the same here. Kudos!
Then, once these green technologies are affordable, said
Harvey, “you stimulate the private sector to make them steadily cheaper and
more efficient by having the government set improved performance standards
every year” — like California recently did, requiring the end of internal
combustion engines in cars by 2035, and the way Obama did in 2012, when he
required US automakers to nearly double the average fuel economy of new cars
and trucks by 2025.
That’s just smart capitalism. And it’s the surest way to
ensure the success of Biden’s spending bills and deal a knockout blow to this
dumpster fire called the Trump GOP. That would be a gift to both liberals and
principled conservatives — and to Lady Liberty.
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