I'm Skeptical of the "Deal" That Could Save Biden's Presidency

As 2023 winds down, Joe Biden is heading into the year that voters will formally judge his Presidency, and it's no secret that things are not looking good for him at all.  There are a lot of issues working against him, but the most intractable issue is that he just can't seem to control the influx of migration through (mostly) the southern border.  Last summer, border crossings had declined and it looked as though Biden's hawkish remedies from earlier in the year were producing favorable results, but as soon as the heat of summer waned, the surge of migrants resumed on pace with the previous year and has shown no signs of letting up.  Given the national security implications of 10,000 loosely monitored border crossings per day, it's a catastrophic problem, and the Biden administration realizes it.

With that in mind, the administration was wise to try to coax Congressional Republicans into going along with a massive spending deal that commingles immigration reform with financial aid to Ukraine and Israel.  It's clever politics given that loose bipartisan majorities exist for all three initiatives, but factions of both parties are stridently against any realistic solution.  Delusional progressives in the Democratic caucus continue to insist the nation's asylum process needs no reform at all.  The growing MAGA wing of the GOP loves Vladimir Putin as much as their movement's leader does and wants to see Ukraine defeated by the Russians.  And support for Israel seemed poised to collapse very quickly based on public opinion polls, which the politicians will soon catch up with.  

That's a bit of a strawman evaluation of the state of affairs, but it's also not that much of an exaggeration of where we stand.  Any kind of bipartisan deal would involve the shrinking "establishment wings" of both parties, who want to fix the border and provide continued military aid to allies Ukraine and Israel, to incur the wrath of their respective parties' bases who provide both the funding and the foot soldiers to win elections.  It's a tall order....and one I have a hard time seeing happening in an election year no matter how serious the consequences for the country.

To be sure, Mitch McConnell and his wing of the Republican Party would be thrilled with this deal in the abstract, but it's almost impossible to imagine anybody in the GOP willing to give Biden a win of this magnitude.  Twenty-eight years ago, Newt Gingrich's Congress gave Bill Clinton a big policy win on welfare reform just before the 1996 election, and Clinton was decisively re-elected months later because it blunted their message for "needing a change".  Particularly with Trump poised to be the GOP emissary again, he will pressure Republican lawmakers to resist any kind of deal that diminishes his hand on running against Biden over the border, and they can be expected to respond in effective unanimity with his demands.  Republican lawmakers will deduce that if there's nothing in the deal that will benefit Trump, there's nothing in it that will benefit the rest of them sharing the ticket with him in November.  Chaos on the border serves their short-term and long-term political purpose, and frankly a major terrorist attack wrought by someone who crossed the porous border would only strengthen their political hand.

It speaks volumes about how broken our two-party system is, and reinforces my suspicion that it's on the verge of collapse, with an authoritarian reconfiguration of the country engineered by Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller now looking like an inevitable deus ex machina ending.  That's not to say there aren't legitimate policy differences that could derail funding for the next wave of forever wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, or even a more hawkish immigration policy for that matter.  But when McConnell and dozens of other establishment Republicans in Congress agree with Biden on each of the three major policy items up for a vote in this deal yet are still poised to unanimously turn the deal down based on partisan trench warfare, then where do we go from here?  The American experiment is dead right?  Trump's promised "day one dictatorship" isn't gonna be the kind of deterrent it would have been at a time when our political system was semi-functional.

There's plenty of blame to go around on how we got here and no obvious turning points where this road could have been definitively avoided, but circling back to the issue that Biden recognizes as his biggest political problem, it's fair to point out that Democrats had a preview of what was coming nearly a generation earlier based on electoral realignment in Europe connected to immigration.  Marine Le Pen may not have ever won an election in France, but others who followed her template have been winning elections for some time, most famously in Hungary but, even in the past year, in lefty bastions such as Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

Twenty years before Donald Trump changed American politics forever, conservatives in Europe were changing their message to voters, shifting away from Margaret Thatcher-style plutocracy and toward populism.  Recognizing that the working-class of any society is inherently conservative because they correctly fear they have the most to lose if "change" has any kind of negative consequence at all, European conservatives altered their message toward the working-class to exploit that fear, raising alarms about immigration as the biggest threat to their status quo.  Without too much heavy lifting, European conservatives co-opted their nations' working class as a consequence, and were scoring some surprise wins in elections, even as the conservative party of the United States kept running candidates like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney who continued in the vein of Margaret Thatcher.  It was kind of strange that virtually nobody in the establishment wings of either party recognized the potential for the American electorate to be realigned the same way conservative populists realigned so many electorates in Europe.

Then along came Donald Trump.  Just as was the case in Europe, it was remarkable how easily the Democrats' base was snatched away right under their noses by the guy promising to "build a wall" to stop illegal immigration, even when the guy who did the realigning was quite obviously one of the worst human beings to ever run for higher office.  The working class responded to Trump just as the working-class responded to Trumpian figures that preceded him in Europe.  If not for the hardened racial fault lines that have long complicated American politics, the shift to Trump would have likely been even more comprehensive, and long-term, I suspect class schisms will transcend race to a greater degree than they do now.

And yet, even after the odious Trump proved how easily the electorate was moved by a hawkish message on immigration, the left doubled down and then tripled down in the opposite direction.  From "abolishing ICE" to "decriminalizing border crossings", the progressive consensus on illegal immigration kept getting more cartoonish and more dissonant from where voters were.  And by 2019, there was no longer any daylight between open borders activists and the Democratic Party, with a stage full of Democratic Presidential aspirants raising their hands in support of decriminalizing border crossings.  

There's a semantic debate whether Biden actually "intended to raise his hand or not" on that stage, but it's beside the point.  Biden ran against Trump's immigration hawkishness throughout the 2020 campaign and then proceeded to reverse them by executive order as one of his first orders of business as President.  Biden owned everything that happened after that politically, and what has happened was a predictable escalation of asylum abuse, followed by desperate efforts by Biden to clean up the mess, all of which served the purpose of validating Trump's immigration hawkishness to a majority of voters and moving the terms of the debate in Trump's direction heading into 2024.

The debate over illegal immigration is over, and Donald Trump has won it.  Biden has already reversed some of his 2021 policies in response to the surge of asylum-seekers, and the hypothetical "deal" Biden is trying to finesse amounts to a full concession.  Meanwhile, Trump's rhetoric on the issue in the 2024 campaign is even more hostile and visceral than it was in 2016 and 2020, also mirroring the trajectory of Europe's conservative parties.

It may be that no efforts to stop this mass migration of impoverished people from developing nations to wealthy nations, on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, have any chance of working in the modern connected world.  And it may well be that democracy as we know it will end up on the cutting room floor of Western society in a fruitless attempt to stop a flow of humanity that cannot be stopped by waves of increasingly hawkish political leaders responding to electorates that refuse to accept that flow of humanity arriving at their borders.  Nonetheless, every indication is that voters in the United States and Europe will continue to insist that they try.  After centuries of our species equating the crossing of borders with pending annihilation, it's too ingrained in our evolutionary experience to simply accept millions of people crossing the border every year.

It's possible that, because of other unprecedented and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Trump will fail to get elected to another term as President in November 2024, but even if he doesn't, expect the Republicans who follow in his footsteps and run on an immigration message just as strident.  Also expect the next guy to argue in defense of "being a dictator on day one" if necessary to restore an orderly border.  And expect a critical mass of voters to, at some point, decide to let them.  Republicans recognize that slowing the tide of outsiders from entering our shores without permission is poised to be the most pervasive political issue of the decades to come.  Democrats somehow failed to recognize that until very recently.  With that in mind, it makes no political sense for Republicans to yield this incredible leverage by making any kind of deal with Biden.  They know they're on the winning side of this issue, and from Mitt Romney to Marjorie Taylor Greene, it's not in their political interest to ever let voters forget that.