Morning Joe Thrilled By Hope of Biden ‘Shattering the Age of Reagan’

On Apr 14, 2021

On Wednesday, the left-wing hacks on MSNBC’s Morning Joe were excited over the possibility that President Biden would be able to exploit the “once-in-a-generation political opportunity” of a deadly pandemic to shove through radical policies and end up “shattering the age of Reagan.” One pundit gleefully declared: “…the idea of government as a redemptive force to make people’s lives better is back.”

“MSNBC political analyst and publisher of the newsletter entitled The Ink, Anand Giridharadas….we want to start with your new piece for The Atlantic, entitled, Welcome to the New Progressive Era,” co-host Mika Brzezinski gushed at the top of the segment. She then eagerly recited from the leftist screed: “The conversation I’ve had in recent weeks have painted a portrait of an improbable coming-together of people and forces: a moderate president, with an ascendant progressive movement at his back and at his throat, facing a once-in-a-generation window of opportunity.”

In response to Brzezinski hailing his work, Giridharadas proclaimed of the Biden presidency: “I think what you’re seeing is a strange marriage of man and movement and moment.” Minutes later, he explained that the deaths of over half a million Americans were actually a great “opportunity” for the far-left to push its radical agenda:

Lots of people died, but at least Democrats can exploit the crisis.

Giridharadas went on to hope that the Biden administration would bring about a permanent end to conservatism: “And it amounts, in my view, to potentially – potentially 2021 being a break not just from 2017 and Trumpism, not just from 2009 and the kind of limited response to a previous crisis, but really a break from 1981 and the dawn of the age of Reagan with its fundamental assumption that government is the problem.” He happily announced: “…the idea of government as a redemptive force to make people’s lives better is back.”

Continuing to worship at the altar of big government, Giridharadas kept up his anti-Reagan tirade: “And I think that ends up being an incredibly powerful combination that could spell a transformational presidency and a presidency against all odds, given Biden’s record, that ends up shattering the age of Reagan, the consensus of the Reagan era in a way that the Obama and Clinton presidencies ended up not.”

As the discussion came to an end, Giridharadas wailed: “…for 40 years, from 1981 to 2021, the cultural wave of the country has been an anti-government wave….the fundamental set of assumptions is government is kind of regrettable at best and evil at worst and we should rein it in or not rely on it that much.” He then broke some news by revealing the true intent of the Biden presidency: “Mike Donilon from the White House, on the record, said to me, ‘I think this is the moment where we finally break out of how government has operated since Reagan.’”

Just one week earlier, co-host Joe Scarborough bizarrely argued that Biden was the “mirror image of Ronald Reagan” and claimed: “You can’t paint him out to be a radical because he’s good old Joe…” Now, according Giridharadas, Biden is a left-wing radical in sheep’s clothing.

The repeated Reagan bashing was brought to viewers by Liberty Mutual and Amazon. You can fight back by letting these advertisers know what you think of them sponsoring such content.

8:38 AM ET

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Let’s bring into the conversation Boston Globe columnist and co-host of the #Sisters-in-Law podcast, Kimberly Atkins, she’s an MSNBC contributor. And author of Winners Take All, MSNBC political analyst and publisher of the newsletter entitled The Ink, Anand Giridharadas. Mike Barnicle and Kasie Hunt are back with us as well. And Anand, we want to start with your new piece for The Atlantic, entitled, Welcome to the New Progressive Era. And you write in part this, “The conversation I’ve had in recent weeks have painted a portrait of an improbable coming-together of people and forces: a moderate president, with an ascendant progressive movement at his back and at his throat, facing a once-in-a-generation window of opportunity. It’s still early. It remains to be seen if this momentum will continue, if the infrastructure plan musters the votes, if the ungainly Sanders-to-Manchin coalition holds. But for now, a capital that has been defined in recent years by the absence of useful action bubbles with generative possibility. And many of us who thought we knew what a Biden presidency would look like, and didn’t expect much from it, are suddenly asking ourselves: How did we get him so wrong?”

Anand, it seems like Biden’s experience over the past 30, 40, 50 years has led to a lot of stories and sort of stereotypes of what a Biden presidency might look like, but the man who is president now is a whole lot different than the Biden we knew 20, 30, 40 years ago. And perhaps that’s why there is this window of opportunity.

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Absolutely. You know, I decided to – you know, homebound as I am – decided to just spend a lot of time on the phone in recent weeks, talking to the campers in this big tent. And talked to everybody from, you know, Manchin to Larry Summers to progressives, Congresswoman Jayapal and other progressives, and the thing that I heard again and again was surprise, all manner of surprise. And I think what you’re seeing is a strange marriage of man and movement and moment.

So the man is, as you said, a historically moderate person, someone associated with the centrist wing of the party, more corporate friendly wing of the party. He ran and won despite a second thing going on, which is a progressive movement that increasingly has set the terms of the conversation and won a battle of ideas in the party, as many moderates told me for this piece, even though they didn’t win the primary.

And so you got the man and the movement in somewhat tension but also, as I said in the piece, at his back and at his throat, the movement is.

And then finally the moment, and there’s kind of two components of the moment. There’s the acute moment we’re in of COVID, the plague, this kind of once-in-a-generation political opportunity to do something big because of how bad things are, but also the accumulation of chronic crises, the death of the American dream frankly over the last generation, and without COVID, perhaps there wouldn’t be the political will to do big things.

And so ultimately, the kind of picture I found of Joe Biden throw all these conversations was someone who is a coalitional politician, not a star. Someone who is actually willing to kind of be the sum of the parts of his coalition, someone who’s making progressives, moderates, business folks, others feel heard and seen and listened to in ways that, you know, Richard Trumka from the AFL-CIO told me, “Other administrations used to call us and tell us a decision. This administration calls us to ask us what the decision should be.” And it amounts, in my view, to potentially – potentially 2021 being a break not just from 2017 and Trumpism, not just from 2009 and the kind of limited response to a previous crisis, but really a break from 1981 and the dawn of the age of Reagan with its fundamental assumption that government is the problem. Government – the idea of government as a redemptive force to make people’s lives better is back.

(…)

8:44 AM ET

WILLIE GEIST: Anand, as you say, one of the criticisms of Joe Biden in the primary season was that he was going to be too centrist, that he wouldn’t be the vessel for progressive ideas that the progressive wing of the party had hoped for and that most Democrats had hoped for. And in fact, when he was criticized by Donald Trump as being too progressive or a part of the “radical left,” to use his term, I think voters sort of shrugged that off looking at Joe Biden’s long record as not being ultra-progressive. So does that contribute to the surprise, the fact that he was seen as the guy in that big field of candidates as the one who may not, in fact, be most representative of the modern Democratic Party?

GIRIDHARADAS: Yeah, and I think there’s a funny dynamic where, first of all, to his credit, I think Biden is something incredibly counter-cultural in the age of polarization and certitude, which is he’s persuadable, right? So as someone who worked for him for a long time told me, you know, he was in Iowa back in the primary, and although he ended up winning the overall race, he saw that it was the Sanders and Warren camps in Iowa that had big boisterous crowds, and his, as the media reported at the time, were quite thin. So he saw, like a stand-up comic in a room noticing when you’re getting the laughs, he saw where the energy was, he prevailed, and then he was willing, through the unity task forces that he had with the Sanders folks onward, to incorporate a…