this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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What do you suppose Biden should have done with the rest of the legislative and judiciary systems stacked against him, blocking almost any change?
Seeing as all room they had to manevuer was through brow beating and bending orders/budgets, they got a lot of good done...
Biden kept quite a few of the tariffs Trump did in his first term. Even increased some of them.
I mean, tariffs are a long term economic stimulus tool, changing them every week gets the economy, allies, and the private sector very nervous as you might have noticed these last few months.
You might even have heard that companies protest investing in new production capabilites as they don't know what the tariffs will be in 3 years when the production facility is done.
I'll state the same as in the other comment. Not flip-flopping is the expected norm to maintain stability, relationships and long term governance. Poor choices have effects over many years, as drastic changes every 4 years have even more damaging effects.
95% of what he did was through executive power, which he had full control over.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/trump-biden-trump-foreign-policy
So you're upset that the government doesn't flip-flop with each president?
I can report that this is the norm for non-autocratic societies. Maintaining stability, relations, and long term governance.
I'm not sure in which bubble you are living in, but US is notorious for flip flopping on their policies with each new presidency. Each new president that comes in and reverses most of the things the last president did. That's literally has been the case since the country's founding exactly because of the separation of power.
That is why Biden keeping many of the previous Trumop policies was noteworthy and scary for the rest of the world.
Oh please. Biden didn't just live with the Trump aftermath, in many cases he chose to keep pushing it. He was a mixed bag, doing a lot of great things that Trump never would have, but he did a lot of bad without anybody twisting his arm.
Agreed.
But I don't get why the expectation is that Biden would be the hero to save 50 years of progressively worse governance by the republicans. Even if he was altogether the ideal (which I'm not sure any politician could be), he's still human and also has a huge government apparatus with considerable inertia to overcome. And replacing people leads to the same behaviours we see now, entrenched resistance, passive resistance, loss of knowledge, loss of service/communication/trust/reliability, wasted resources, etc.
Constructive politics needs to create a stable environment, that can't be done by drastic changes, and especially not in every facet every 4 years. Isn't that why there's now so much chaos, uncertainty and loss of trust both nationally and overseas?
I don't think anybody expected Biden to be that good and, no, that's not the point of the criticisms at all. The point is that the establishment is guaranteed to wheel out another Biden in 3 years and it's critical that we shut that down.
You are far from the only person operating on that theory of gradual change, but it's dead wrong and exactly what brought us to where we are today. In fact, it's exactly what leads to fascism every single time it ascends. Weak neoliberals fail to take care of people, and the people turn against them.
Look at how much gradual change the fascists are able to tear down in the span of a few months. What are they afraid to tear down? Social Security and Medicare. It's the big changes that rapidly gain the popularity needed to survive right wing onslaught. Everything else dies.
I think that positive change takes time, patience and planning. Destruction and plundering next to none.
Even if a messiah would force through single payer universal healthcare working through all the hurdles, teething problems and upheaval to get something in place. It doesn't take more than a Musk-Trump to tear it down in a month.
The Republicans have been tearing stuff down for a long while and for decades not building anything worthwhile. But apparently that's the way the country wants it
The general principle that building takes more time than destroying is pretty solid - in general. However, applying it to politics is absolutely insane.
You ever hear that war is politics by other means? That's a good principle too, and the reverse is what applies here. Politics is war by other means. Republicans know that. They are fighting a war and Democrats are dutifully putting up villages they can't defend. The clever villagers are defecting before the tanks roll in.
As I already pointed out, what you "think" stands in absolute contrast with everything that's happened in politics in this country and globally for at least the last 100 years. If you and people like you don't wake up, we are all fucked. (Assuming we aren't already).
Reasserting what you think, instead of addressing my arguments, puts you at the same level of rationality as MAGA. The country didn't get the way it is by magic. Democrats hollowed out voters skulls, then Republicans filled them. Remember that when you complain about what the country wants.
Your argument was that fascists can destroy a lot of incremental change in a short while. I'm agreeing with you.
Although your assertion that it doesn't apply to politics is tenuous. I would say there's plenty of evidence against it from the dawn of civilisation: Ur, the Aztecs, Babylon, Ancient Greece, Persia, the Nordic countries, China, Enlightenment France, the Roman Empire, the Empire of Japan, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. All rode to ages of political dominance on the backs of stability, even the ones who resorted to genocide or purging opposition.
Cuba, Poland, Iraq, the EU and Australia have all also had immense growth and development in the last century in tandem with stability. In contrast to Afghanistan, ISIS, Palestine or the African warlord regions who haven't had as much.
So my point still stands, in the US, at least one party has spent decades tearing down, and from the looks of it one of them never tried to build anything up.
Yet, the population continues to vote this way. It's hard not to see it as voluntary; In that much time, accessing as much free information and thought as the US has, you can't really claim to be ignorant of differing information, other than willfully.
If both ruling parties are that obviously corrupt, why is there no action? It's been done in the country before, as well as in many other places, including in the last decade (Arab spring, South Korean president, BLM).
The argument points toward willfull acceptance if not outright choice.
If you disagree, give me evidence, not just your feelings.
If you don't, but don't accept the consequence - get out there and do something about it.