MEGHAN ’N’ JOE’S EMPIRE OF THE SENTIMENTS:
If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable.
He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.
It doesn’t matter whether Biden means what he says, any more that it matters whether Meghan Markle told the truth when she implied that her son was denied a prince’s title because he might have dark skin. It’s the feelings that matter: feelings of security, empathy and contentment, and especially the feeling that Nietzsche correctly foresaw as the root feeling of modern life, resentment.
The result is the rule of sentiment over thought and symbols over reality. The Biden administration didn’t invent the moral and humanitarian disaster at the southern border. But it has produced a new crisis by altering the laws to satisfy sentiment.
It feels cruel to return unaccompanied minors, as the Trump administration did, and to hold them in prison-like conditions, as both the Obama and Trump administrations did. But the fact is, Biden’s policies have fostered a greater cruelty.
Biden has created new incentives for human trafficking and the worse kinds of child exploitation. The result is a surge in border crossings that even a professional euphemist like secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas calls ‘overwhelming’, and the spectacle of would-be illegal immigrants kneeling at the border while wearing t-shirts reading ‘Biden let us in’.
This is what Biden gets for taking a knee as a craven genuflection to BLM. This is what he gets for accusing Donald Trump of being a racist and sadist for caging unaccompanied minors — even though Biden was vice president when the cages were built, and even though Biden now presides over a greater influx. And this is what we get: a theater of the sentiments, in which the actors and audience are so jaded that their senses and check books can only be stimulated by that reliable and obscene soap-opera trick, putting children’s lives in the balance.
In a 2005 article in the New Criterion, James Piereson explored “Lyndon Johnson and the Cult of Sentimentality:”
Needless to say, Lyndon Johnson did not believe for a second the foolishness he uttered in the campaign ad against Goldwater. He certainly did not waste any love on his Republican opponent, whom he was eager to demolish in the election. Johnson recognized sentimental humbug when he heard it, and he was known to despise the hippies when they arrived on the public scene a few years later. He reckoned, in good Machiavellian fashion, that a sentimental appeal to love would be effective in a culture that, in the wake of the assasination of President Kennedy, was being overtaken by sentimental platitudes of all kinds. The surprising thing is that Johnson, perhaps guided by his advertising men, saw this culture emerging in 1964 a few years before it really came into open view.
It is perhaps too easy to draw the lesson from this that sentimentalists are destined to be ruled by Machiavellians who know how to exploit their attachment to sentiment and emotional expressions like “We must love one another, or we must die.” Yet, just as Johnson sought to exploit the emerging culture of sentimentality, he was also brought down by it because he was so obviously ill-suited to the role of pied-piper to the young and sensitive. The sentimentalists were hard-headed enough to see (leaving Vietnam aside) that Johnson was not one of them. Johnson, no matter how hard he tried or how much liberal legislation he passed, was simply not convincing as an exemplar of peace and love.
No, the growing army of sentimentalists of the time preferred to march behind Robert Kennedy — a far more Machiavellian figure because Kennedy, unlike Johnson, understood that a politician in a sentimental age must not only say sensitive things, but must also appear authentically to be sad, mournful, and burdened by the tragedies of the world. Robert Kennedy appealed to this emerging culture because he looked like the real thing, a man broken by the tragic but senseless death of his brother. Yet, if this was the case, as to come extent it was, it did not stop Kennedy from exploiting it in his own quest for power and high office. Perhaps the only lesson to be learned from this bizarre period is that, in the end, sentimentality can never answer nor succeed in putting aside the permanent questions of politics, namely: conflict, ambition, and the pursuit of power.
So far, the Biden administration appears on-track to end as badly as LBJ’s did, if not far worse.