Ross Douthat built a brand as a pundit on his opposition to the secular liberal establishment. In his last column for the NYT, he continues to maintain that position, although he admits that right-wing populist governments have been inept, corrupt, and capricious, and he loathes left-wing populist culture with a passion. Is he right about the supposed failures of the liberal establishment? What does the record in the 21st century tell us?
George W. Bush built his administration on the deregulation of business, the promotion of Christian values, and activism in the Middle East. He gave us the Great Recession and the Iraq War. Barack Obama saved the country from the ravages of the former, put an end to the latter, and started no more wars, unless you count his very brief aerial campaign against the Libyan regime, for which our European partners were the chief advocates, not him. It is true that the recovery from the Great Recession was longer and slower than one would have liked, due largely to opposition to additional government spending by Republicans, and that the bad guys were largely unpunished, but Obama also managed to get an ambitious health care program through the system that improved the lives of millions and is popular today. Does that sound like a failure to you?
Joe Biden, for his part, was elected mostly as a reaction to Trump’s chaotic response to the pandemic. He succeeded in making the vaccine (financed by Trump in one of his few admirable moves) widely available to the public as quickly as possible, which undoubtedly saved millions of lives, although the value of the vaccine is widely disparaged by the right today. He also engineered a recovery that was much faster and more robust than those of our allies, managed to slow Russian aggression in Ukraine at minimal cost to ourselves, and avoided participating in new foreign wars. His failures revolved around his refusal to restrain Israel in Gaza and some unnecessary spending that made inflation, most of which was caused by supply chain problems, slightly worse than it needed to be. On balance, is that a terrible record?
If you think the answer is yes, here’s a thought experiment: what do you think would happen if we had a new pandemic with Trump and RFK in charge of public health? Right-wing populists despise vaccines, which are inevitably created by liberal elites, so there wouldn’t be one. Would Jesus and cures hawked by quacks on the internet save the day?
I think not.