Joe Biden’s Democrats most wealthy and woke in history
The Biden administration is determined to force identity politics down Americans’ throats.
It reflects a new obsession with form over substance in left-of-centre policymaking the world over that papers over the transformation of the Democrats, and like-minded parties elsewhere, into the party of the wealthy.
Transport Secretary and rising Democrat star Pete Buttigieg returned from two months’ paternity leave in October amid a crippling shipping crisis at US ports to wax lyrical on the racism embedded in American roads.
Of the $US1.2 trillion ($1.6 trillion) infrastructure bill recently passed by congress, $US1bn would “address systemic racism in highway design”, he explained in remarks that likely did little to help his presidential ambitions.
A few days later Vice-President Kamala Harris, visiting NASA, inquired whether the space agency might use its satellites to “measure trees … it’s an issue of EJ, environmental justice – that you can also track by race their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighbourhoods where people live”.
Late last month, as inflation was rising to the highest level in 31 years, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appointed the first counsellor for racial equity as Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo lauded how more than 40 per cent of the department’s political appointees identified as people of colour.
And last week the White House nominated Saule Omarova, who studied Marxist economics at the University of Moscow, to lead a Treasury financial regulation agency. In February Omarova said she wanted US coal, oil and gas companies to go bankrupt to tackle climate change, remarks that have caused problems for her confirmation in a car-loving nation in which 80 per cent of electricity is generated by fossil fuels.
It’s proving infectious in corporate America, too, always eager to please Washington to ensure favourable regulation. In April United Airlines said 50 per cent of its next 5000 pilots would be women or people of colour.
These aren’t isolated cases. Hardly a week goes by without a government department flaunting a new LGBTI+ strategy or a gender equity framework. The Biden administration is seemingly hellbent on judging Americans at least as much by their race, sexuality and gender as their actual backgrounds.
The White House launched a national strategy on gender equity and equality that calls for nothing less than “a shift in the social and cultural norms”, “climate-resilient infrastructure projects that directly advance gender equality” and “preventing and responding to gender-based violence (which includes stalking spurned lovers) wherever it occurs”.
In the rare instances where the 42-page pipedream lays out concrete policies, it calls for “tracking the proportion of investments in women-led businesses” and “collection of sex-disaggregated data, including individual and household-level asset information, to better understand the ways that women and girls may be excluded within households”.
No other Western government goes to these lengths to signal its trendy devotion to identity politics. And no other Western nation has so much economic inequality, which could explain Democrats’ keenness to talk about something else.
Democrat strategists can’t really believe such decrees will make much difference to the lives of women or the LGBTI community, apart from creating jobs in human resources and diversity consulting. Even if the federal government had the constitutional powers for sweeping social engineering it would not be practically feasible.
Indeed, that Buttigieg – an openly gay former Rhodes scholar from South Bend, Indiana, who adopted twins with his husband – Yellen and Harris are all successful minorities surely suggests much of the supposed systemic prejudice is exaggerated.
Democrats, just as Labor is on track to be in Australia, overwhelmingly are the party of the wealthy. Tax data shows 65 per cent of households making $US500,000 or more last year were Democrats, while Republicans made up most households with incomes below $US100,000.
Joe Biden’s tax package includes a huge tax cut for high earners, an incredible development given the rhetoric about reducing inequality. Inequality arguably has never been greater in the US, yet the supposed party of the downtrodden is planning to make it worse, hoping the debate about race, sexuality and gender distracts from what’s going on.
Capping the state and local tax deduction at $US10,000 was the best part of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax package, ending an outrageous subsidy from poor households and states to the wealthy in big-taxing states. Democrats want to lift it to $US80,000, giving households earning $US500,000 to $US1m a $6700 tax cut. (And by the way, the bulk of those earners would be white men.)
At the same time, Biden wants to double the excise on cigarettes – taking a leaf out of Australia’s tax policy that overwhelmingly punishes the poor – making a mockery of the administration’s claim no one earning less than $US400,000 will pay more tax.
Deliberately making the rich richer while jabbering on about a bizarre political ideology foreign to most Americans has been a disastrous combination.
Biden and Harris’s approval ratings have fallen to embarrassingly low levels. The latest Washington Post poll found 51 per cent of voters will vote Republican in next year’s midterm elections – the highest share in the 40-year history of the poll. Almost 60 per cent polled said they were concerned (39 per cent very) that the Biden administration was doing too much to expand the reach of government.
You don’t need to be a political genius to realise Americans voted against Trump, not for Biden or for social engineering. They wanted a return to normality, not a 21st-century Franklin Roosevelt determined to remake social relations by fiat.
More Coverage
Jim calls spade a shovel on the road to reform
Jim Chalmers has revealed a bold ambition for major tax and economic reform. The question will be how much political capital Anthony Albanese will extend to deliver it.
Former attorney-general ‘bullied’ staffer, ex-judge finds
An inquiry report which has explosively emerged in the middle of the Tasmanian election finds former state attorney-general Elise Archer, who is seeking a return to parliament, ‘harassed’ a staffer.
The Biden administration has become without doubt the most woke of any government anywhere, ever, determined to force identity politics down Americans’ throats seemingly regardless of the electoral consequences.