This is an age old cry. It was made about Obama and it was made about Clinton and while I wasn’t following politics then, no doubt it was made about Carter.
In my adult lifetime it hasn’t worked that way. Certainly Obama had no interest in what the left thought, except perhaps as a marker of what not to do. In fact, Obama’s first steps included choking off money to left wing organizations and operatives, I know operatives whose careers were ended by Obama. He got in power, and he made it clear that anyone left wing wasn’t to be hired. BOOM. Done.
Obama not only wasn’t open to left wing influence, he was actively hostile to it.
Biden spent most of the election season bragging about how he beat a socialist in the primary.
Carl Bejier decided to use cabinet appointments to see how much left wing influence Biden was accepting. Is he being influenced from the left? An organization called Data For Progress, pre-election, put out their picks for cabinet positions. How many did they get?
Data For Progress Tracker Dec 17 2020 by Carl Bejier
Yeah…
Biden is one of the architects of the neoliberal order. It’s really impossible to overstate how he was there all the way, doing all the worst things. The way the world and America runs is his legacy, why would he listen to his political enemies, the people he helped destroy in the 70s and 80s, who he drove into the political wilderness with his allies who followed the so-called Third Way? (Reaganism for a different set of nasty rich people.)
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It does help.
There’s going to be a lot of gaslighting during the Biden regime. A lot of pretending that he’s doing left wing things, when he isn’t. A lot of outright lying. Oh, I imagine he’ll do some half decent things, even Trump and Bush and Obama did, but it’s highly unlikely he’ll be progressive in any significant way.
This idiocy is often bolstered by an FDR quote, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”
What fools don’t understand is that FDR AGREED. Agreed. Agreed. When he said “make me do it” he was asking for a PR and pressure campaign to give him cover to do something he wanted to do anyway, but which he didn’t have enough legislative or popular support to do yet.
Biden doesn’t want to do most progressive or left wing things. He doesn’t agree with them. “Making” someone do something they want to do anyway isn’t the same as trying to force the most powerful person in the world to do something they disagree with, indeed, something(s) they have spent their entire life fighting against.
Biden’s career is about destroying left-wingers, even very mild left wingers, then bulldozing over their bodies in the New Deal mass grave he helped created. That’s who he is, that’s his legacy and he believes in it.
Again, I expect Biden to be better than Trump in some ways (and worse in others, sorry Venezuela), but he isn’t open to left wing influence, and he never was going to be. He was, at best, the lesser evil.