Shadows on the horizon could dash Biden’s dream

The first two months of the Biden presidency have gone about as well as anyone in a new administration could reasonably hope. The policy battle over the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill managed the neat trick of simultaneously uniting the Democratic Party, energizing the Biden-skeptical left and putting the Republicans way on the wrong side of public opinion. The vaccination push continues to meet its targets and the “dark winter” wave of new cases receded much faster than the new administration probably anticipated. What will hereafter be known as the “Neera Tanden gambit” appears to have successfully provided cover for the rest of Joe Biden’s Cabinet to win approval. The president’s approval/disapproval averages sit around 55%/39%, and you can shave a few points off out of poll-skepticism without changing Biden’s enviable position.

There’s a possible future where this pattern just continues. The country enjoys a post-pandemic economic boom and an era of (relative) good feelings. Biden pushes popular economic policies against a Republican Party that can’t agree on what it stands for, let alone offer something a majority of voters might support. And as in the 1990s, culture war and foreign policy debates stir passions but don’t dent the popularity of the Democrat in the White House.

But it’s also possible, already, to see three places where a shadow might fall.

The most immediate is the crisis on the southern border, where the Biden White House is already facing the same challenges as its predecessors — trying to prevent a humane policy toward asylum-seekers from becoming an open door to all comers — but with unique stresses created by how liberals reacted to the Trump era.

All immigration policy short of open borders involves a certain degree of harshness, in which some sympathetic migrants are denied entry and the promise of detention and deportation persuades others not to make the trip. Before Donald Trump, mainstream liberal politics gave a certain latitude to Democratic presidents to act harshly.

The specific cruelty of Trump’s child-separation policy, though, forced liberals to confront detention policies and conditions that they had been more likely to ignore under Obama.

Then beyond immigration on the policy horizon is another of Trump’s issues: the ambitions of China. The Trump-era suite of debates, on trade policy and human rights, is likely to be a backdrop to U.S. domestic politics, not an agenda-setter. But Beijing may have more than trade war and domestic repression on its mind. The combination of the Communist regime’s sense of its own strengths and the palpable Western desire for a return to normalcy could create a window in which there’s a real danger of war over Taiwan.

To that longer-term peril for Biden’s presidency abroad, add one at home: the risk that instead of a Biden boom we get a Biden blip, a year or so of fast growth followed by a return to the middling economy we’ve had for much of the 21st century.

In the blip scenario, economic growth might not feel strong enough to compensate for America’s various forms of social crisis. The coronavirus era has made some of these unravelings worse — through the rising crime rate; the academic and psychological damage to children; the postponement of work, relationships, and families for young adults; the isolation of the old. The social liberalism of the Democratic Party doesn’t have obvious answers should its economic liberalism fail to get growth going faster than before.

Ross Douthat writes for The New York Times.