Single Issue Governance in Biden's Presidency

In the 1970s, single issue politics came to dominate the landscape. Senators, governors, and congressmen rose or fell based on their opinions about one issue, be it abortion, tax limitation, nuclear power, school prayer, capital punishment, etc..

But it fell to Joe Biden to introduce its sequel: single issue governance. Two issues, really: COVID mandates and climate change. He has premised his entire administration on these two issues.

His policy on anything else is but a subset of his positions on these questions. His entire domestic policy — and the bulk of his communications with the public — are about the former and his spending priorities — in the trillions of dollars — are based on the latter.

In confronting each of these challenges, advocates liken their crusade to a war where the general can have only one goal: victory.

But, in the "Road to Serfdom," Friedrich Hayek underscores the difference between the total commitment necessitated by war with the nuanced, layered response required of public policy which must reflect a choice among “conflicting or competing ends of different people … some of which will have to be sacrificed if we want to achieve certain ends.”

To vaccinate everybody, you’ll have to sacrifice civil liberties. To spend enough to reverse climate change will trigger inflation and either higher taxes or larger debt.

But the single issue governance of Biden brushes aside the element of choice in a headlong charge at the objectives. No matter how it distorts the Constitution or our overall economy, these two objectives are going to be met or we will die trying.

As Hayek notes, such a singular focus wants to “organize the whole of society and all its resources for a unitary end.” In doing so, it refuses “to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individual are supreme.” Hayek describes this approach, aptly, as “totalitarian.”

He says that setting a single societal objective — as Biden has — “unites all the single-minded idealists, all the people who have devoted their entire lives to a single task.” These folks he calls “specialists … who follow a very limited view of [society’s needs], often the result of a great exaggeration of the importance of the ends they place first and foremost.”

He decries the potential for tyranny in harnessing our public policies to such single-minded priorities.

To justify so intense and exclusive a focus there must be a consensus about the consequences of not doing so. But any such agreement that there might once have been has evaporated in the light of our experience with climate change and scientific advances in dealing with COVID.

Our commitment to fight climate change originated — and is still grounded in — dire predictions by distinguished people who turned out to be wrong.

• In 2008, former vice president Al Gore warned of an “ice free Arctic by 2013.”
• In 1982 , the executive director of the United Nations Environmental program predicted: "By 2000 inaction on climate change will cause an ecological catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust."
• In 2000, David Viner, senior research scientist claimed: "Within a few years winter snowfall in the UK will become a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren't going to know what snow is.”
• In 2004, a Pentagon report said "European cities will be plunged beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020.”
• And in 1970 Dr. Paul Ehrlich, an outspoken ecologist, predicted that "America will be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980."

Were these predictions accurate, Biden’s obsessive focus on climate change — to the exclusion of other issues like inflation, the economy, job creation, energy reliability and independence, and the national debt — would be understandable and commendable. But the administration neither diluted its focus nor trimmed its ambitions as reality began to douse the panic of the last century.

On COVID, Biden fights the battle to contain the disease without reference to the fact that it is a new disease — the omicron variant — with a far, far lower death rate than in any previous incarnation. Only 79 people passed away from COVID on December 26th, 2021 and the moving seven-day average deaths was 1,436. Compare with 11,120 cancer deaths and 12,600 heart disease fatalities over an equivalent period of time.

That Biden still applies policies formulated when the disease cost us tens of thousands of deaths every day is a great example of what was said of the French generals: “They went into each new war, perfectly prepared to win the last one.”

He has doubled down on his threat to take away the jobs of anyone with the temerity to want to control what is injected into their bodies. Its the ultimate dis on the pro-choice movement. Vaccinated or not, we are denied access to public accommodations without a mask.

But Hayek’s larger point is that there is no tyranny more severe than that of the expert. As CS Lewis wrote:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”