Let’s do some comparison.
The Biden Approach – if you want to improve America, figure out what’s needed and build it. The Trump Approach – if you want to improve America, destroy something else. Biden passed major legislation to develop new and growing industries. Trump has put all his efforts into throwing tariff barriers in the way of American companies and ignored the need to support growing industry.
Biden supported the education people need to run crucial industry. Trump tore down our major educational institutions including the Department of Education. And Trump dismantled our major scientific institutions and put untrained sycophants in charge of those that remain.
The Biden approach – if you want to help Americans, build out the services they need. The Trump approach – if you want to help Americans, tear down the services they depend on.
Biden and his supporters BUILD UP. Trump and his people TEAR DOWN.
Biden kept the doors open to knowledge from wherever acquired. Trump and his Maga-tistas don’t think there’s anything worth learning abroad. If you’ve traveled abroad, you know that’s nonsense. Europe, for example, has a much stronger and better transportation system than we do, whether Americans like that or not. It takes 13 hours to get from Albany to Cincinnati whether you fly, drive or take the train. In that amount of time Europe would be a distant sight in the rear-view mirror. We talk about high-speed rail and can’t bring ourselves to build it. We talk about teaching, training and housing people and our only tool is the veto. If we can’t criticize our country we can’t improve it. If we can’t take advantage of knowledge gained elsewhere, we will fall further and further behind.
America was built on the foundation of the intellectual tools developed in the age of Enlightenment that flourished in Europe in the Eighteenth century. And it absorbed the advances of the industrial revolution that developed in England and in other European countries in the nineteenth century. But for people like Trump, heaven forbid we should learn anything from the advances people make anywhere else. That would be un-American. Apparently, for people like him, only Americans have brains, so nothing people figure out elsewhere is worth examining. Of course that means we don’t have the brains, humility or intellectual honesty to learn from what people discover and learn elsewhere.
Did Biden do enough? Given how many opposed what he was trying to do, he had to use all his energy to accomplish what he did. Democrats and indeed all Americans should be proud of Biden and ashamed of Republican opposition lest a Democrat take credit for making America run better. That’s politics run riot – politics for the sake of party and not for the sake of America.
OK, Biden was and is old and we needed a younger man. But this guy is not that guy. And if you want to evaluate Biden by his age, what he accomplished was fantastic. Democrats should be proud of his approach and his successes. And we should not be blinded by the repeated Republican nonsense about his performance.
What we need now is a leader who will build American up instead of tearing it down.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran. He enjoys the help of his editor, Jeanette Gottlieb
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