Defeat in Virginia presents Biden with a choice: is he for or against America?
(Alamy)
Poor old Joe. No sooner has the President of the United States strutted (or shuffled) back onto the international stage in Rome and Glasgow than he suffers humiliation at home. The defeat of the Democratic Governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, by Glenn Youngkin, a rank outsider who had been endorsed by Donald Trump, is the biggest electoral setback for the Biden Administration so far. At the time of writing, the gubernatorial election in New Jersey, an even more symbolic bastion of the Democrats, was too close to call. The fact that the Republicans are even contesting, let alone winning, states that Biden won by double-figure margins only a year ago does not bode well for the President in next year’s mid-term elections.
How did Youngkin pull off such an upset? This was a classic example of the culture war strategy in action. The clue came in his victory speech: “We are going to press forward with a curriculum that includes listening to parents’ input, that allows our children to run as fast as they can, teaching them how to think, enabling their dreams to soar. Friends, we are going to re-establish excellence in our schools.”
By weaponising the “wedge issue” of education, Youngkin was able to destroy a hitherto well-liked senior Democrat who had made the mistake of taking ordinary, middle-of-the-road Americans for granted. By endorsing the teaching of “critical race theory”, McAuliffe signed his own political death warrant. He overestimated popular support for Black Lives Matter and underestimated rising frustration over the creeping takeover of the curriculum by “woke” ideas that even Black, Hispanic and other ethnic minorities reject. The recent revelation that huge numbers of white students applying for university places are pretending to belong to minorities (often Native Americans) may have marked a tipping point in this battle, if not in the wider culture war. Youngkin’s triumph is a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that schools are vehicles for indoctrination rather than ladders to success.
Ironically, the one bright spot for the Democrats on an otherwise dreadful night only reinforces this point. The election of Eric Adams as Mayor of New York is a victory for the traditional Democratic ideal of extending the American dream to communities that had almost lost hope of realising it. Adams reminded New Yorkers that he had been raised by a single mother in Queens as one of six children. He had been arrested and beaten by police at 15. Yet he had become a police officer, had risen through the ranks to take charge of the NYPD, and would now be responsible for the whole city. The election of Mayor Adams, who succeeds the arch-advocate of wokery Bill de Blasio, is an implicit rebuke to those on the Left-wing of the Democrats who have demanded the “defunding” of police.
If Joe Biden has learned anything in his uniquely long career in politics — which is not necessarily the case, despite the fact that he will turn 79 later this month — then he will learn a lesson from last night’s elections at state and city level for next year’s national contest. The Republicans have little in the way of positive policies to offer except the prospect of four more years of Trump. But by denouncing the takeover of the Democrats — and thereby of the US government — by extremists of the Left, they are touching a raw nerve. Given the choice, Americans would rather vote for reactionaries than for radicals.
Biden is neither of these things, but after only a year in office he has allowed the impression to gain hold that he is a puppet of those who hate America and everything it stands for. Unless he can dispel this notion by actively demonstrating that it is an illusion, he will go down in history not merely as the oldest but also the weakest President in history. Joe Biden has a choice. He can listen to the likes of Eric Adams, who has swept into City Hall by his own efforts and on his own merits, or he can side with Terry McAuliffe and the critical race theorists. It really is that simple: American patriotism or anti-Americanism. If Joe Biden makes the wrong choice, he risks the possibility that his presidency will be even more ignominious than his predecessor’s.
