Biden admin looks like one more try at liberal technocratic government

Technocracy, climate cultism & dumb wars

Are you ready for the Great Reset? It’s the Great Leap Forward of 21st-century technocracy. It’s time, we are told by the likes of Davos guru Klaus Schwab, to reboot our passé, 18th-century ideas about rights, democracy and constitutions — and surrender to the smooth rule of the ­experts and the climate cultists, not forgetting, of course, their financial advisers.

The reality, however, is less Great Reset than Great Preset. What elites who talk this way really want is to turn the clock back to circa 2014, before Donald Trump’s ascent, before Brexit, before populists swept to power across the West on a wave of discontent with the liberal-technocratic order.

Look at who Joe Biden, the great hope of resetters, wants to drive the economic recovery. Janet Yellen, who was President Barack Obama’s choice at the Federal Reserve, for Treasury. Neera Tanden, the corporatist Clinton sidekick, for the Office of Management and Budget. Adewale Adeyemo, president of the Obama Foundation, as Yellen’s deputy.

It’s Obama Time all over again in defense and diplomacy too. Antony Blinken, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, is Biden’s nominee for secretary of state. Michèle Flournoy, who managed Obama’s failed counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and advocated for the disastrous demolition of Libya, is Biden’s likely nominee for defense secretary.

Failure falls upward as well as backward. The Great Reset is a fantasy that our operating systems can be reset to the Obama 2.0 program from 2016, if not the original, notoriously flawed Obama 1.0 from 2008.

But even Joe Biden must know that when you reset a device, you return it to its original settings. In this case, the original settings are those of technocratic liberalism.

Technocratic liberalism was the default American system since the New Deal and the default system of Western Europe during the Cold War. It remains the established and preferred system in the Western bureaucracies. Democrats revere it, and it is the substitute religion of the European Union. It unites moderates, centrists and freeloaders of all parties in a shared suspicion of the voters.

The vulgar fly in this elitist ointment is that the voters don’t like it. The British rejected it in the Brexit referendum of 2016. American voters rejected it that year when they elected Donald Trump. And the blue ripple of the 2020 elections, with its heavy red undertow in the House, shows that the voters still don’t trust it.

Biden wants to take us back to the future, to before the financial crash and Obama’s feeble recovery. Before the Obama administration let off Wall Street scot-free, left the poorest to drown with their underwater mortgages and lumbered small businesses with ObamaCare. Before, above all, the election of Trump as the unacceptable face of “hope and change.”

The failed personnel of the Obama years are crawling out of their hiding places in the Swamp. The failed ideas of the Obama years are being reheated by the Blob and hyped by the same propagandist media who sold us Russia “collusion.” Even John Kerry is back, as our ambassador to the climate: an old man shouting at the clouds.

But there can be no going back. And who wants to go back there anyway?

We already know how this Great Preset will go. A low-growth, high-regulation economy couldn’t deliver the recovery that Americans needed after 2008. It’s going to fail worse after the COVID-19 crash. A foreign policy of dumb regime-change wars failed last time around. With China and Iran on the rise and Biden boasting that we’re “back in the game,” the belligerence, bombing and bumbling are back. Followed, inevitably, by the body bags containing young Americans who ­fatally forgot to attend Ivy League colleges.

We also already know how this Great Preset will end. Most Americans have no intention of allowing the lunatics to take over the asylum. They refuse to outsource their morals to the UN. They see “amnesty” for illegal immigrants as a vote-buying scam. They resent the cranks and commissars of the Democrats’ loony left: the speech police, the BLM hustlers, the gender-reassignment cranks, the fluffy-lipped Stalinists.

The result of the Great Preset won’t be the Obama 3.0 that Biden, Harris and, by the looks of it, Obama himself have in mind. In 2010, the voters responded to Obama’s first two years by flipping the House to the Republicans. They will do the same in 2022.

Dominic Green is deputy editor of The Spectator’s US edition.

Twitter: @DrDominicGreen

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