What a Relief: Norms, Normalcy, Caring and Competence Make a Comeback Under Biden

Who Cares?

While the quality of governance varies greatly across the globe, it’s normal for national leaders to care, or at least pretend to care, about putting in place policies that benefit their people. Even some authoritarian regimes advance their citizens’ well-being in some ways – though that does not excuse their rapaciousness, repression or human rights abuses.

In that autocratic vein, Vietnam, China, Uganda and Rwanda come to mind, given their achievements in economic growth, public health and other fields. Thus, though mainly motivated by self-interest, even certain otherwise execrable leaders try to do some good.

And then we had Joe Biden’s predecessor. Throughout his four years in office, his focus was on little but himself. He normalized lies, hate, fear, indifference to suffering, ignorance about policy, hostility toward expertise and negation of our norms.

This was most clearly the case after he lost the election. He could have spent his final weeks in office combating a historically horrible plague. Instead, even as Covid deaths soared above 4,000 per day, he did almost nothing but spew bile about a supposedly stolen election.

Am I saying that our last president was worse than even certain autocrats in some (though certainly not all) ways?

You bet.

And Then There’s Joe

But now we have Joe Biden, as illuminated by some insightful observations from Jonathan Last of the conservative site The Bulwark:

I kind of doubt that Biden even knows about the Meghan-Harry-Oprah [British Royal Family] thing, let alone has an opinion on it.

Why do I say that? Because the guy seems pretty focused on other stuff:

“At the White House on the Monday before that, the president held a candlelight vigil for those lost to the pandemic. He reached into his pocket and took out a note. It contained the precise coronavirus death toll as of the date, February 22: 500,071. His staff updates the note each day”…

And then there’s the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which the Biden administration is about to sign into law…

What I’m trying to underline is that America has one gigantic, immediate problem and that the president of the United States has spent the last seven weeks actually doing real-world stuff to address this problem.

He isn’t creating culture wars. He isn’t dominating the media. He isn’t calling in to cable shows or sitting up at 1:00 a.m. tweeting.

He’s working. For us. For all of us—even the people who didn’t vote for him.

Once upon a time this would have been unremarkable.

But we should pause to appreciate it, now and again.

Amen.

Relief

Of all the good lines in Last’s essay, the last two ring truest for me.

We’ve been through four years in which the abnormal became normal, in which values were shredded and spat on.

In contrast, tonight Biden addresses the nation to mark the first anniversary of the Covid shutdown, the first steps in our return to post-Covid normalcy and the massive relief legislation that he’ll sign on Friday.

Whatever he specifically says, the speech won’t be about himself or his enemies or who’s to blame for our problems. It will likely be about precautions, positive plans and, Biden being Biden, his conviction that there’s nothing Americans can’t do if we set our minds to it.

We now have a government giving us guidance on what to do regarding Covid, instead of telling us there’s nothing we can do or that Covid will all go away or that hundreds of thousands of deaths are the price we must pay for freedom.

In the months and years to come, there will be no shortage of reminders of ways in which Biden is by no means perfect. On both the health and political fronts, things remain too far from normal to claim we’re yet close to that.

But he’s reminding us of the norms abandoned by his abhorrently abnormal predecessor. And what competence is. What caring is. What normal is.

That’s a huge relief.