Peggy Noonan:

It is startling when two speeches within 24 hours, neither much heralded in advance—the second wouldn’t even have been given without the first—leave you knowing you have witnessed a seminal moment in the history of an administration, but it happened this week. The president’s Tuesday speech in Atlanta, on voting rights, was a disaster for him. By the end of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s answering speech on Wednesday you knew some new break point had occurred, that President Biden might have thought he was just crooning to part of his base but the repercussions were greater than that; he was breaking in some new way with others—and didn’t know it. It is poor political practice when you fail to guess the effects of your actions. He meant to mollify an important constituency but instead he filled his opponents with honest indignation and, I suspect, encouraged in that fractured group some new unity.

The speech itself was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels. Presidents more than others in politics have to maintain an even strain, as astronauts used to say. If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—“In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time”—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges

By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center. This can be fatal to a presidency.

He was hardly done speaking when a new Quinnipiac poll showed the usual low Biden numbers, but, most pertinently, that 49% of respondents say he is doing more to divide the country, and only 42% see him as unifying it.

In the speech Mr. Biden claimed he stands against “the forces in America that value power over principle.” Last year Georgia elected two Democratic senators. “And what’s been the reaction of Republicans in Georgia? Choose the wrong way, the undemocratic way. To them, too many people voting in a democracy is a problem.” They want to “suppress the right to vote.” They want to “subvert the election.

This is “Jim Crow 2.0,” it’s “insidious,” it’s “the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies.”

The problem is greater than Georgia. “The United States Senate . . . has been rendered a shell of its former self.” Its rules must be changed. “The filibuster is not used by Republicans to bring the Senate together but to pull it further apart. The filibuster has been weaponized and abused.” Senators will now “declare where they stand, not just for the moment, but for the ages.”

Most wince-inducing: “Will you stand against election subversion? Yes or no? . . . Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

If a speech can be full of itself this speech was.

From the floor of the Senate the next day came Mr. McConnell’s rebuke. It was stinging, indignant to the point of seething. He didn’t attempt to scale any rhetorical heights. The plainness of his language was ferocious.

Mr. Biden’s speech was “profoundly unpresidential,” “deliberately divisive” and “designed to pull our country further apart.” “I have known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday.” Mr. Biden had entered office calling on Americans to stop the shouting and lower the temperature. “Yesterday, he called millions of Americans his domestic ‘enemies.’ ” That, a week after he “gave a January 6th lecture about not stoking political violence.”

“Twelve months ago, this president said that ‘disagreement must not lead to disunion.’ But yesterday, he invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors.”

“Twelve months ago, the president said that ‘politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.’ . . . Yesterday he poured a giant can of gasoline on that fire.”

“In less than a year, ‘restoring the soul of America’ has become: Agree with me, or you’re a bigot.”

“This inflammatory rhetoric was not an attempt to persuade skeptical Democratic or Republican senators. In fact, you could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure demagoguery.”

American voters, said Mr. McConnell, “did not give President Biden a mandate for very much.” They didn’t give him big majorities in Congress. But they did arguably give him a mandate to bridge a divided country. “It is the one job citizens actually hired him to do.” He has failed to do it

Then Mr. McConnell looked at Mr. Biden’s specific claims regarding state voting laws. “The sitting president of the United States of America compared American states to ‘totalitarian states.’ He said our country will be an ‘autocracy’ if he does not get his way.” The world has now seen an American president “propagandize against his own country to a degree that would have made Pravda blush.”

James Freeman:

There’s no reason for Kamala Harris to participate any longer in the failing presidency of Joe Biden. If she chooses to assert her constitutional authority and seeks to build a majority political coalition, she can unify the country, ensure American prosperity and win election to the presidency in 2024. Starting today she can simply decide unilaterally to dominate policy-making in what’s left of the Biden era.

This week brings more reports of her struggle to add value to Team Biden. But this team is losing and she can best help the country and herself by entering the political equivalent of the NCAA transfer portal.

Recent polling finds that Americans increasingly view President Biden as incompetent, untrustworthy, and partisan. His hateful and dishonest rhetoric this week on the subject of voting laws gives voters no reason to alter their views.

As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) ably described the problem on Wednesday:

Twelve months ago, a newly-inaugurated President Biden stood on the West Front of the Capitol and said this: “My whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, and uniting our nation.” Yesterday, the same man delivered a deliberately divisive speech that was designed to pull our country farther apart

Twelve months ago, this President said we should “see each other not as adversaries, but as neighbors.” Yesterday, he called millions of Americans his domestic “enemies.”

…Twelve months ago, this President said that “disagreement must not lead to disunion.” But, yesterday, he invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared a bipartisan majority of Senators to literal traitors…

He used the phrase “Jim Crow 2.0” to demagogue a law that makes the franchise more accessible than in his own state of Delaware. He blasted Georgia’s procedures regarding local elections officials while pushing national legislation with almost identical language on that issue.

The President implied things like widely-popular voter I.D. laws are “totalitarian” on the same day Washington D.C.’s Democratic mayor told citizens to bring both a photo I.D. and a vaccine card anytime they leave their house.

The President repeatedly invoked the January 6th riot while himself using irresponsible, delegitimizing rhetoric that undermines our democracy.

The sitting President of the United States of America compared American states to “totalitarian states”. He said our country will be an “autocracy” if he does not get his way.

The world saw our sitting Commander-in-Chief propagandize against his own country to a degree that would have made Pravda blush.

Vice President Harris has also engaged in destructive rhetoric and she may even believe it, but she enjoys a historic political opportunity to cast it aside, move toward centrism and sensibility, and be the leader who unites America.

First, she needs to reject the modern Beltway conventions of her office. In yet another press account about efforts to overhaul her role in the Biden administration and her public image, Francesca Chambers of McClatchy reports:

In interviews, 11 people familiar with Harris’ operation — some of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations — described the effort to reshape the narrative around her vice presidency. A White House official said that no dramatic shift in direction was underway, even as Harris hired a new communications director and worked to fill other high-level press and public relations positions…

Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a senior policy adviser to former Vice President Al Gore, said higher visibility could help with public criticism, but Harris is supposed to be “invisible.” If Harris draws more attention to herself, Kamarck said, she could jeopardize her relationship with Biden and make him look weak.

“I think that there’s been a profound misunderstanding — and it comes from some of her supporters as well as from some of her critics — about what this job is,” Kamarck said.

Kamarck said Harris backers who thought the job would be different because she is the first woman and person of color to hold the position were mistaken.

“Things are not going to be different about the job itself,” Kamarck said. “The job is still to support Joe Biden and what Joe Biden does.”

No, it is not. The vice president, who has expressed a refreshing desire to literally spend more time outside of Washington, should also spend more time figuratively standing outside the Beltway. She might wish to reread a New York Sun editorial from November:

Could Kamala Harris become a truly radical vice president, meaning one who would restore the highest office in the Senate to its original constitutional concept? We ask because of the reports that the relationship between her and President Biden has collapsed…

Our own suggestion is that Ms. Harris should quit. We don’t mean that she should resign the vice presidency. On the contrary, she should quit the White House. The thing for her to remember is that — constitutionally — the vice president doesn’t report to the president. The vice president can’t be fired by the president. She can’t even be told what to do. She was elected in her own right.

The fact is that in some technical sense it’s not clear whether she is even part of the executive branch. We grasp that there are differences of opinion on this head. Her one constitutional assignment, though, is as president of the Senate, where she has the not-so-insignificant power to break ties. One would think that in a divided Senate in which each party has 50 seats, she could make quite an impact.

So the logic, in our view, is for her to pack up her desk in the Executive Office Building and the other desk in the West Wing, pick up her brief case, get in her limo, and go to the Senate. It happens that one of the stateliest offices in Washington, known as the vice president’s room, is always there for her. She could then send a note to Mr. Biden (and the newspapers) letting them know that she’s moved her base of operations.

Observing how poorly voters have reacted to Mr. Biden’s effort to govern from the left, Ms. Harris should recognize the power she holds to move Washington lawmaking toward the center. By putting her vote in play she can take the leading role in fashioning federal legislation. Leave Mr. Biden the chore of trying to run all the dysfunctional programs already enacted and take over the fun job of deciding what gets enacted next week.

She could not be dismissed by fellow Democrats as an ambassador from Trump country. Ms. Harris’s history as a politician of the left from deep-blue California would give her the leverage to break the progressive left’s disastrous lock on Democratic policy-making and poisonous anti-American rhetoric.

And she wouldn’t need to move all that far toward the center to appear reasonable and become formidable as a 2024 contender. Stop pretending that voter ID requirements amount to tyranny. Stop trying to tear up the structure and traditions of American governance. Stop casting political opponents as enemies. Stop trying to enact a Sandernista revolution in the U.S. economy.

It’s really not that hard picturing Kamala Harris as the most powerful person in the country. Perhaps some people already do. Andrew Mark Miller reports for Fox News:

President Biden Tuesday referred to his vice president, Kamala Harris, as “President Harris” in yet another verbal flub by the gaffe-prone leader…

Biden, who was speaking about voting rights to students at the Atlanta University Center Consortium on the campus of Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College, apparently didn’t notice his mistake, not bothering to correct himself.

Mr. Biden could be on to something.

Jonah Goldberg:

Apparently, there’s a hilarious debate in Democratic ovals and rhomboids (who says people talk only in “circles” anyway?), about whether Democratic politicians should use the word “transformative”  or “transformational” to describe the Build Back Better bill.

The whole thing is very weird to me because even a logophile like myself fails to see a significant difference between the two words, at least not for political purposes. One means a radical change of some kind, usually positive, and the other is an adjective that describes, uh, transformative things. Also, last I checked, Build Back Better—while not wholly dead—is, as Miracle Max might say, “mostly dead.” So why Democrats should be talking about it at all is a bit of a mystery to me.

Lastly, color me dubious that using “transformative” loses public support for BBB but “transformational” doesn’t—or vice versa. I’d love to meet the voter who is opposed to the massive “human infrastructure” bill when told the most apt suffix to the prefix “trans” is “formative” but suddenly supports it with the abracadabra suffix “formational.”

Now I am tempted to argue that the government shouldn’t be in the transformation business at all. But intellectual honesty compels me to admit that there have been “transformational” moments in American history and that some of those moments were good. Freeing the slaves was pretty transformational, and that was a good thing. Giving women the vote, integrating the military, heck, even the building interstate was transformative or -formational. But such moments are rare and should be.

The problem with Democrats for a very long time and Republicans more recently, is that they think they’re simply in the transformation business.

American statolatry.

Let’s start with the Democrats. Normally, I’d begin with Woodrow Wilson, but let’s rewind a bit further back. William Jennings Bryan, one could argue (if one were me), started it. Bryan never became president, thank goodness. But he managed to get the Democratic nomination three times—in 1896, 1900, and 1908—so it’s fair to say he had quite an impact on the party’s outlook. Bryan was America’s most famous populist, but he was also arguably it’s most influential revivalist. And the two sides were as one in his heart. He saw politics as an expression of his sweeping religious vision. He was a crusader, but to his credit not an imperialist. He thought he could transform the world with laws and redemptive rhetoric, not ironclads.

Bryan definitely had strong policy views, but he was not exactly a wonk. When railing against populism’s anti-intellectualism, I often quote his “argument” for free silver. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” But my favorite Jenningsism was about his heartfelt commitment to Prohibition. In 1923 he proclaimed, “Our Nation will be saloonless for evermore and will lead the world in the great crusade which will drive intoxicating liquor from the globe.”

Fortunately, he lost that fight. But the point is that Jennings was a sincere Christian who saw his political work as both downstream, and as an extension, of his religious vision. “Christians have no other alternative; they must believe that the teachings of Christ can be successfully applied to every problem that the individual has to meet and to every problem with which governments have to deal.”

Jennings’ last bid for the White House came in 1908. Four years later, Wilson got elected and while his messianism was different than Bryan’s, he shared his belief that government should be in the transformation business and that he, too, was an “instrument of God.” No wonder H.L. Mencken dubbed him “The Archangel Woodrow.”  Wilson thought that the point of education was the retail process of making students as unlike their fathers as possible and the point of government was to do the same thing wholesale. “America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.” That might sound nice, but in the context of his view that the Bill of Rights should be considered a dead letter and that every unit of society should work together, under his direction, it’s actually quite sinister. America is something precisely because it lets “each of us” pursue happiness as we define it.

FDR, likewise, was a transformation guy. The “New Deal” itself was conceived as a do-over, a reinvention, an exercise in turning the page on the past and rewriting the social compact from scratch. Its conceptual culmination was his “Second Bill of Rights” which, thankfully, never got very far.

What started as a religious mission imported into politics over time became a political mission that took the place of a religion.

The Great Society was in many ways the apotheosis of this transformation. LBJ pushed the Great Society out of an indomitable faith in the wonder-working powers of government itself. Johnson painted his mission as one of good—liberalism—versus evil—dissent from liberalism. During the 1964 campaign he painted the choice in Manichean terms:

“We will do all these things because we love people instead of hate them . . . because you know it takes a man who loves his country to build a house instead of a raving, ranting demagogue who wants to tear down one. Beware of those who fear and doubt and those who rave and rant about the dangers of progress,” Johnson railed.

“Americans,” he said, “are not presented with a choice of parties. Americans are not presented with a choice of liberalism and conservatism. Americans are faced with a concerted bid for power by factions which oppose all that both parties have supported. It is a choice between the center and the fringe, between the responsible mainstream of American experience and the reckless and rejected extremes of American life.”

Once elected, however, LBJ had a problem. The Great Society guys knew they wanted to transform America but they lacked the vocabulary to explain it in non-religious terms. In the summer of 1965 Goodwin offered what the New York Times called “the most sophisticated and revealing commentary to date” on the question, what is the Great Society? His answer lay in the need for the state to give “meaning” to individuals and “make the world a more enjoyable and above all enriching place to live in.”

“The Great Society,” Goodwin explained, “is concerned not with the quantity of our goods but the quality of our lives.”

The problem for the Great Society crowd is they didn’t know how to do it. And many of the problems of the late 1960s and 1970s—inflation, family breakdown, runaway crime, social unrest—were at least partly the result of trying to transform a nation without knowing how. Not everything they did was bad or a failure, of course. But the greatest of Johnson’s successes—the Civil Rights Act of 1964—was successful for two reasons. First, it was bipartisan. Indeed, Republicans voted for it at a higher rate than Democrats. Second, it wasn’t so much an attempt at social engineering but an effort to repeal bad social engineering. It got government out of the way and let the fundamental rules of a free society operate. Sure, there were enforcement mechanisms involved, but these were essentially remedial in nature, seeking to ensure that we lived up to our highest ideals.

In short, radically transforming society is difficult even if you think it’s desirable. Barack Obama learned this the hard way. He improved greatly on Great Society rhetoric, infusing it with a kind quasi-religious messianism—“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and all that—but, as even a lot of lefties will now admit, he came up very short of the “fundamental transformation” he promised.

But he did succeed in getting his opponents—including yours truly—to take all of that talk seriously. In fairness, it wasn’t hard given some of the creepier stuff people said about Obama being “The One” and a “Lightworker” and all that. Obama campaign volunteers were taught that they shouldn’t talk about the issues but instead “testify” about how they “came to Obama.” Michelle Obama insisted that her husband “is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.” Barbara Walters admitted that “we thought he was the next messiah.”

I still cringe whenever I watch this kind of stuff.

One consequence of the creepy cult of personality surrounding Barack Obama is that Republicans were primed to get in on the act. I don’t want to venture too far into David French’s turf, but the willingness of many evangelicals—and people who play them on TV—to embrace Archangel Donald was among the most shocking features of the Trump presidency. He was a “modern day Cyrus” and a new “King David.”  Trump was in his own Manichean struggle against Satan, against witchcraft, etc.

Of course, not everyone embraced the religious version of Trumpism. But the secular MAGAs were no less committed to the idea that Trump would be a transformational, messianic, redemptive force—and quite a few are still committed to this stuff. They think that through sheer force of will a handful of politicians and the scribblers who love them can “Make America Great.” I left off the “Again” because the most passionate partisans in this struggle have given up on making America more like the 1950s, as impossible and silly as that was (if you haven’t noticed 2022 Hungary doesn’t look a lot like 1955 Cleveland). They now bat around batty ideas about making America more like Prussia in the 1550s.

I used to argue that the problem with George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was that it wasn’t an alternative to Bill Clinton’s “feel your pain” liberalism, but a Republican version of it. I think with the benefit of hindsight that’s becoming even more obvious. I suspect historians of the future will see a similar continuity in the transition from Obamaism to Trumpism.

Now, I think this statement probably pisses off partisans across the ideological spectrum. And I’m the first to concede that just as there are significant differences between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—just ask their wives—there are significant differences between Obama and Trump.

But the through-line is this increasingly bipartisan hunger for “transformational” politics and the belief that the presidency is less a political and policy position and more of a metaphysical or even mystical talisman. As Kevin Williamson has long argued, there’s a good deal of idolatry in how we think of the presidency these days. In short what people want from the president, and politics generally, isn’t actually “transformation” but “transmogrification”—the magical process of transformation.

And it’s all nonsense.

Do your jobs.

Which brings me to the rank punditry. Progressives have convinced themselves that they should concentrate on making government the engine of transubstantiation of the body politic. And, increasingly, conservatives have internalized this conception of politics as their own. And, again, it’s all so incredibly stupid.

The great irony is that even if you buy this buncombe, the smartest thing for either party to do is engage in a vigorous, serious, campaign to simply make government do the stuff it’s supposed to do: fight crime, get a handle on inflation and the pandemic, keep the schools open etc. Ron DeSantis isn’t popular with normal voters because he’s “transformative,” he’s popular because he’s doing a passably good job of being a normal governor. Glenn Youngkin won a brilliant campaign by being aggressively normal. Biden himself won by promising normalcy and competence.

If you want Americans to be receptive to sweeping new government initiatives—I don’t, but that’s not the point—the first thing to do is your job. Give people basic confidence that you know how to clear the snow, run the schools, collect the garbage, evacuate from Afghanistan in non-humiliating fashion, reduce the homicide rate, etc., and maybe they’ll give you a shot at taking on more ambitious projects.

But no, the Democratic Party, ever the cargo cult to the New Deal, went a different way despite the clear message from the voters they didn’t want a new New Deal.

(I don’t want to pick on Nicholas Kristof but he’s such a great example of what I’m talking about. A decent and idealistic liberal, he made a great show of quitting his perch at the New York Times to run for governor in Oregon. He publicly wrestled with the idea like MacBeth for what seems like years. He thought about all the wonderful transformative things he’d do as governor of Oregon. But he never bothered to investigate whether he was eligible to run—until after he quit his job and moved out there. Why should we trust a sincere liberal to be able to transform the lives of Oregonians if he can’t be bothered to do the minimal homework required to run for office?)

The same goes for Republicans. But they’d rather suck up the oxygen on cable shows defending or minimizing January 6, or pretending that maybe the election was stolen, or babbling about how COVID vaccinations are some kind of Satanic plot. Kevin McCarthy has already announced his top priority when he takes the speaker’s gavel is t0 act like he’s the captain of an alien spaceship on a mission to anally probe Democrats at every opportunity.

The quasi-religious obsession with making government an engine of social transformation is a direct byproduct of the government’s inability or unwillingness to do the simple, normal, work of government. Talking about “transformation,” “making America great,” fighting Frankfurt School Marxism, white supremacy, structural racism, the deep state, and all the other abstract hobgoblins that consume our imaginations is what you get when politicians don’t know—or don’t care—about doing their jobs.

The problem with “do your jobs” is that that has become to mean undoing what the previous administration did, which disenfranchised those who voted for that administration, as 2020 Trump voters have witnessed since Jan. 20.

Beyond that, the biggest group of American voters are neither Republican (or right-leaders), nor are they Democrats (or left-leaners). They vote based on who they think will make their lives better, not merely different, and not “transformed” in a negative way.