Why shouldn’t conservatives be enraged by Biden’s win?

Four years ago, liberal heads exploded when Donald Trump was elected president. At colleges across America, students needed counseling and teddy bears to cope with their grief. Trump’s inauguration sparked protests, some of them violent.

If the election of a nasty, dishonest conservative outsider by slim margins in key states caused grief and rage in 2016, why shouldn’t the election of a nasty, dishonest liberal establishment hack by slim margins in key states , and in a race fraught with the possibility of fraud, cause rage among those who voted for President Trump this year?

One big difference from four years ago is that the GOP will probably control the Senate. The 2016 election left Democrats on the outs in both chambers of Congress.

But the president exercises enormous power even when his party doesn’t control the Senate. He runs foreign policy and can direct important aspects of domestic policy through fiat. He can populate the executive branch with leftists who will undo the good, conservative work of Trump’s appointees and create new left-liberal mischief on a large scale.

I hope and expect the Senate to obstruct the confirmation of many of these nominees, as the Dems did after 2016, even though they lacked a Senate majority. (This will be subject of an upcoming post.) But eventually, Biden’s left-liberals will take control, through recess appointments, if necessary. And because the permanent bureaucracy is dominated by left-liberals, it’s less important for a Democratic president to put his nominees in place than it is for a Republican.

All in all, then, conservatives have good reason to be enraged by Biden’s victory. If we are less angry than the left was four years ago, it’s because we’re more stable emotionally.

Personally, I’m not enraged. I won’t be unless it becomes clear that the election was stolen.

Most of the candidates I’ve voted for in presidential elections since I came of age have lost. Life goes on. As long as the ground rules don’t change, we can always look forward to the next election.

The Democrats wanted to change the ground rules (e.g., court packing and ending the filibuster), but won’t be able to change them [note, though, that they seem already to have changed them on the crucial matter of election procedures]. That’s the main significance of Republicans winning the Senate (assuming they do).

Though not enraged by Biden’s victory, I’m offended by it — offended that this mediocre man will become the president of our great country.

It’s been exactly 100 years since Americans chose anyone even arguably as mediocre as Biden for our highest office. And at least Warren Harding had a distinguished vice president. Biden has Kamala Harris. Nor was Harding in a state of mental decline.

The ascendency of Joe Biden to the presidency is an unmistakable sign of our national decline. That’s cause for sadness, though maybe not intense anger.

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