Mongrel wrote:I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I know morality is independent of legality, I don't think it's independent of legitimacy. Without real or at least perceived legitimacy you have massive problems trying to make you do anything stick in the long run, and you're also just running the risk of palace coup round robin. And then boom, you've got a failed state. This has happened in plenty of places - some of which even fell into it without the CIA's help!
Note that legitimacy in this case is separate from legality as well.
I think Biden could push things a lot harder and still be considered legitimate. Most of the country (including me and, presumably, everybody else here) considers the current SCOTUS to be illegitimate, but Biden's unwilling to pull an Andrew Jackson "let's see them enforce it", or to even begin to talk about expanding the Court like FDR threatened to do.
And I wouldn't even call that the biggest disappointment of this administration; I'd have to go with immigration policy for that. Biden's border policy is downright regressive; he manages to clear the extremely low bar of "better than Trump" but I can't really think of any fainter praise I could possibly damn him with. I really don't know what he's thinking there; I know public opinion on the whole is still pretty racist and anti-immigrant, particularly in some of the purple states that got him over the line in 2020, but even looking at it from a coldly pragmatic perspective he could be a
lot more humane without losing support. Where he triangulates to "center of the Democratic Party" on most issues, I think he's been substantially to the right of that on immigration and it's infuriating.
To the question of whether an inexperienced firebrand could do better, it's complicated. Biden is
really good at politics, maybe the best of any president in my lifetime. ("Best at politics" is not the same thing as "most effective"; Reagan was unquestionably the most effective president of my lifetime. He fundamentally reshaped both parties and we're still paying for that.) His successes have, on the one hand, been modest in the grand scheme of things, but on the other it's impressive that he's managed to squeeze even that much out of a razor-thin Senate majority and an opposition made up of literal insurrectionists.
A more progressive but less experienced president could do a lot of things Biden's not willing to do, from long-term ideological moves like pushing the Overton window, to more concrete policy moves involving executive power, but on the other hand it's hard to see somebody like that getting the kind of traction with Congress that Biden has.
I can't imagine being president and not telling Sinema to go fuck herself. And there are 271 people in Congress who are worse than she is.