Sun Sentinel Broward Edition

Will a hard-left-turn agenda provoke another pushback?

- Victor Davis Hanson Distribute­d by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The corruption of the Renaissanc­e Church prompted the Reformatio­n, which in turn sparked a Counter-Reformatio­n of reformist, and more zealous, Catholics.

The cultural excesses and economic recklessne­ss of the Roaring ’20s were followed by the bleak, dour and impoverish­ed years of the Great Depression.

The 1960s countercul­ture led to Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, as “carefree hippies” turned into careerist “yuppies.”

So social, cultural, economic and political extremism prompt reactions — and sometimes counterrea­ctions.

The Bush-Clinton-Obama continuum of 24 years cemented the bipartisan fusion administra­tive state. Trump and his “Make America Great Again” agenda were its pushback.

The counterrea­ction to the populism of the Trump reset — or Trump himself — is as of yet unsure.

Joe Biden’s tenure may mark a return to business as usual of the Bush-Clinton years. Or, more likely, it will accelerate the current hard-left trajectory.

Either way, it seems that Biden is intent on provoking just such a pushback by his record number of early and often radical executive orders — a tactic candidate Biden condemned.

On almost every issue — open borders, blanket amnesties, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the Green New Deal and hard-left appointees — Biden is touting positions that likely do not earn 50 percent public support.

When Biden made a Faustian bargain with his party’s hard-left wing of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to win the election, he took on the commitment to absorb some of their agenda and to appoint their ideologues.

But he also soon became either unwilling or unable to stand up to them.

Now they — and the country — are in a revolution­ary frenzy. The San Francisco Board of Education has voted to rename more than 40 schools honoring the nation’s best — Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln — largely on racist grounds that they are dead, mostly white males.

Statues continue to fall. Names change. If Trump’s pushback tried to return to traditions ignored during the Obama years, Biden’s reset promises to become far more radical than Obama’s entire eight years.

Trump likely lost his second pushback term for two reasons — neither of which had anything to do with his reset agenda.

First, the sudden 2020 pandemic, quarantine, recession, summerlong demonstrat­ions and riots, and radical changes in voting laws all ensured that 100 million ballots were not cast on Election Day, derailed a booming economy and finally wore the people out.

Second, Trump underestim­ated the multitrill­ion-dollar power and furor of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the media, Hollywood and the progressiv­e rich. Those forces all coalesced against him and swamped his outspent and outmanned campaign.

With 24/7 blanket ads, news coverage, endorsemen­ts and social media messaging, Trump sometimes was easily caricature­d as a twittering disrupter. The inert and mute Biden in his basement was reinvented as the sober and judicious Washington “wise man” antidote to Trump’s unpredicta­bility.

Had Biden continued his moderate campaign veneer, the current left-wing radicalism might not have prompted a counterrea­ction.

Instead, Biden is now unapologet­ically leading the most radical left-wing movement in the nation’s history.

Will there be a reaction to this extremism?

The left is assured that radical changes in voting laws and demography, the fears of COVID-19, the antifa-Black Lives Matter uprising and anger at Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have all permanentl­y changed the electorate — and pushed it further leftward.

If they are wrong, they have instead alienated and insulted the American people, and will reap the whirlwind in 2022 of the wind they are now sowing.

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