Someone once said of a British politician of notably flexible moral principles that his frequent wrestling bouts with his conscience must have constituted one of the longest winning streaks in sporting history.
The jibe comes to mind in these turbulent moments for Joe Biden’s presidency. His proliferating woes are his own making: Afghanistan, a stagflating economy, renewed lack of confidence over the course of Covid. All presidents hit turbulence at some point. What sustains the better ones is a sense that they have a compass, a clear set of values beyond the fickle dictates of their party’s political demands. The problem for Mr. Biden is that, throughout a long career in politics, he has never given the slightest indication that he has such a compass. For him the tussles between conscience and political expediency always seem to result in an easy win for expediency. There’s a giant hole where the man’s principles should be.
No issue better captures this than his stance on abortion, a topic of renewed attention in the last week. Mr. Biden is a cradle Catholic, a weekly Mass-goer who is frequently photographed clutching a rosary. In his inaugural address he quoted St. Augustine. For all I know, he has a bathtub Madonna installed in the Rose Garden.
But like many Catholic Democrats in elective office, he has long found politically convenient ways to accommodate the church’s authority on some of the fundamental moral issues of the modern age — homosexuality, divorce, and above all abortion — to the ascendant social progressivism of his party.
In the past Mr. Biden has insisted that, while he personally opposed abortion, he couldn’t impose his views on others. But last week he responded to the arrival of the new Texas law that in effect bars abortion after six weeks with a much less nuanced denunciation, saying, “My administration is deeply committed to the constitutional right [to an abortion].”
I can’t know Mr. Biden’s conscience. Abortion is an issue that genuinely tortures the souls of many Catholics. They believe that God-given life begins at conception but recoil from actually criminalizing it. As a Catholic myself I find repugnant the easy certainty with which too many dogmatists seem to think this dilemma can be resolved. There’s much about the Texas law that repels even those who are strongly pro-life.
This is the Biden pattern; casting principles and values aside he slides comfortably into the slipstream of the most progressive Democratic ideology on issue after issue.
It’s hard to think of a single issue of importance in the past 30 years on which Mr. Biden has espoused views that are seriously at odds with his party. Whatever your faith, whatever your ideological priors, odds are that you’d find yourself diverging from the party line on at least some questions. But if he ever has, Mr. Biden certainly hasn’t let it be known. He has a record of seeking out the fulcrum of opinion among Democrats and then lashing himself to it.
Previous Democratic presidents have occasionally taken stands against the party line, even if only in pursuit of larger political advantage. Think of Bill Clinton in 1992 denouncing calls for racial violence from a black rapper and her enablers. Think of Barack Obama condemning the Iraq War in 2006.
But the concordat between Mr. Biden’s principles and the political demands of the Democratic Party is a one-sided surrender document. In the 1990s, as an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Clinton’s New Democratic politics, Mr. Biden shepherded the 1994 crime bill through the Senate. Now, he’s a passionate advocate of racial justice and a scourge of “systemic racism.”
In 1991, as a senator who had preached at length about the virtues of international law, he joined the majority of Senate Democrats in opposing President George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq — after Saddam Hussein clearly breached international law by occupying Kuwait. Twelve years later Mr. Biden joined the bulk of his colleagues in supporting George W. Bush’s Iraq War, premised on the shakiest of legal grounds.
This is not leadership. It is followership; and it helps explain the sudden collapse of the Biden presidency. The Afghan debacle over which he’s presiding is no issue of conscience, merely one of incompetence. Mr. Biden’s wider problems are born of his slavish devotion to a party whose lead he has chosen to follow.
In the opening scene of “A Man for All Seasons,” Robert Bolt’s electrifying account of the life of Thomas More, a Catholic politician of a very different age and mettle, the saint is chastised by the scheming cynic Cardinal Thomas Wolsey for insisting on placing his own conscience ahead of his political obligations. More answers: “When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”
Joe Biden is in no danger of losing his head, thankfully, but we’re well on course for that chaos.
WSJ
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