Minimalism is about the ends: partisan politics is about the means.
The Biden White House is going to be a novel event. Sure the place will look the same from the outside looking in [see photo]. But it will be completely different from the inside looking out.
I have played the role a political hack in a former life. I have spent time being a tenured public servant. And I have experience as a card-carrying academic. The political hacks will run the Biden White House. The academics inside the place will struggle to keep up with the pressures of the day-to-day chaos that is part of governing a nation. And the tenured public servants will bring a mixture of competence and incompetence to this particular jungle.
I expect the Chief of Staff to run the place and by default the nation. The President will be kept wrapped in cotton wool and brought out for ceremonial occasions. Biden will have moral control of the place but not be in charge of the process. And it is the process that Democrats use to govern. In this White House that process will be a partisan political event.
The Vice President will be ineffective although she will try to disrupt the policy process at every turn. This will lead to a war between the Harris and the Biden clans in the West Wing. Harris will never win this war and; indeed, she will struggle to even prevail in the myriad of battles that will rage for the next four years. And. I fully expect that Biden will last in office for his four year term.
The Chief of Staff will run the country with the help of some key Cabinet members. Secretary of State, Attorney General, Secretary of Treasury, and Secretary of Defence. This cabal will largely ignore the Congress because the Senate is held by Republicans. Lip service will be paid to ideas like a new Paris Accord, The Green New Deal, Reform of the Supreme Court, Medicare for all, etc. Instead the Biden White House will govern through the power of funding Democrat States and new alliances with China, Iran, Turkey, etc.
The Biden White House will expect to be supported by the mainstream media and the titans of social media in Silicon Valley. They will be accommodating to the increasing influence of China in the domestic media infrastructure within the US. But in essence this will be an opaque White House and so the domestic media will become less and less friendly over the course of the Biden term.
Not much of the progressive agenda will get enacted through the quagmire inside the Biden White House. Running battles between the power brokers in the various factions inside the West Wing will ensure that nothing of real substance gets done. There will be an attempted coup against Biden by the Harris mob but it will fail.
Richard.
Minimalists can survive and thrive in Biden's America.
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