Biden is going big in his Liberalism in that he believes that big government is the solution rather than big government being the problem, which is what most Conservatives think. Big Liberalism thinks that government can provide money and programs that will alleviate inequities and discrimination between class and ethnic groups, as happened when Social Security and Medicare led to abolishing the fact that the elderly were poorer than the other age groups in the population. Laws to insure equal accommodation transformed the southern states. Conservatives may think that government might tweak the market system, such as by creating incentives whereby private companies could expand broadband to rural areas, but Liberals think that only a government effort can make broadband universal so that it can become the basis for educating young people through distance learning and so broadband has to be the equivalent of a public utility, part of the national infrastructure, rather than a luxury item for those able to buy the product. You can’t have elementary and middle school and high school students attend distance learning if broadband isn’t universal. The prior model was rural electrification, where the government had to step in because customers were far enough apart that it made no sense for private power companies to expand their reach to rural areas and the cost of some areas, should the private companies enter the field, were prohibitively expensive. The government, such as in the TVA, had to do it, and so does broadband today, where a third of rural areas do not have broadband.
Biden is also big on Liberalism in that he uses a Liberal policy approach in dealing with particular issues, such as border control. He will deport families who want to cross into the country just to be in a more economically favorable situation, but he will process quickly people who appeal for asylum on the basis of being endangered from their original countries. And unaccompanied minors (usually 16-18) will be given sanctuary just because they are alone. That is humanitarian in nature. There are also efforts to do programs in the Northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador so that people will find no need to emigrate, the conditions there stabilized in that American funded private security forces rather than governmental agencies will create civil order and counteract criminal gangs. So the Liberal idea is to combine being humane with indirect ways of achieving social ends by addressing root causes, while Conservatives tend to solve problems by being punitive in that they want to incarcerate emigres or just make life more difficult for them. That might seem a harsh judgment on Conservatives in that Trump was not a true Conservative and so a very bad example of the Conservative point of view, but Conservatives have for a very long time, going back to Joseph de Maistre in the early Nineteenth Century of having advocated harsh penalties as the way to create social order. Conservatives still look to guns and batons as the answer to violence, while Liberals ameliorate social distress even if they are criticized for coddling criminals. The Liberal idea is that it is better to help some out of crime rather than put a lot of criminals put in jail. Incarceration may be a last resort but it is always a failure in that the perpetrator has not otherwise become subject to self restraint. Liberals look for a way to turn corners, even if some plans are fruitless.
A clear example of Biden’s Liberal impulse can be seen in the executive orders he presented last week about gun control, perhaps in despair that any real gun legislation will take place until after the 2022 election which might give him a better than tied Senate between Republicans and Democrats, each party clearly either Liberal, as are the Democrats, or Conservative, as are the republicans. Remember that fifty years ago both parties had both Liberal and Conservative wings, but that is long gone now and so we might say that is progress in that you know what you are getting, Liberal or Conservative, when you vote for one party or the other, but that means that all that matters is which party will prevail rather than on the character of the elected Representative and Senator. Nothing to discuss once you have finished the election in that the objections about banning assault rifles are so bogus that they are offered only to fill out the blank for being against it, as Republicans do because their constituencies do. For example, Conservatives say that various semi automatic rifles can be easily altered and so no longer one of the guns proscribed by prior legislation or any newer lists of proscribed guns but it is easy enough to craft legislation that bans gun types by functionality rather than structure, banning guns that shoot a number of shots per minute, let us say, rather than because of a gun’s mechanism. But any excuse is an excuse if the bottom line is to say “no” on gun control, and so Biden uses executive orders because that is the only way, to do what is not about taxation and so not subject to reconciliation.
Much attention has been paid in the White House’s summary of Biden’s executive orders to banning the so-called “ghost” weapons. These are firearms made in plastic that have no serial numbers and require no security or background checks and are nonetheless lethal. Or the bump stocks that make a pistol more lethal. More important, however, and a very clear appeal to indirect and humane stategems, are the host of programs Biden has engaged with to deal with urban violence, where a lot of individuals are shot in random shootings and as part of gangland behavior rather than in the mass shootings which make all the headlines and which actually constitute only a very small number of those who die from firearms (the largest of which are suicides, but that is another matter). Advocates for justice to African Americans are loath to take on gangland killings lest they make crime seem the fault of the community, and perhaps because gangland has coopted even ministers as people trying to ease them only gently to pursuing less violent ways to continue in their illegal activities, just as Black ministers thought they had been productive in lessening southern lynching rather than just categorically opposing the system that allowed lynching to happen. Biden is direct in taking on gang violence, no apologies about it, but looking for humane and persuasive ways to accomplish it.
Biden begins by identifying young people who have experienced gun violations. Rather than punishing them or incarcerating them, following the Conservative view that a crime deserves a punishment, Biden opts to think of these as high risks to offend further and so will be given programs that are likely to lessen further gun offense, including killing people either inadvertently or not. These programs include educational training that allows people to get jobs, something that will keep them occupied rather than have time on their hands so that they can engage with gun violence as a “leisure” activity. They will also become part of anger management training. Experts on gang violence tell me that the youngsters will have to be captured for programmatic intervention by the time they are sixteen because by the time they are eighteen they have become so inveigled into the gang culture and structures that it is very likely they cannot any longer be extricated from it with such minor palliatives, but it does seem worth the effort, the goal not being to eliminate gun violence but the usual liberal view which is to moderate it until other and larger forces, such as stable families created through guaranteed family incomes, may in a generation or two break the back of American poverty.
In a similar vein, Biden provides a $3.5 billion dollar grant, still a substantial bit of change, for the Labor Department to support employment and training for low income adults, even if they have not had prior gun involvement, so as to dissuade them from doing so because they are at-risk youth, including those previously incarcerated. Rescue people rather than condemn them because these are the conditions that lead to gun violence.
Now trying to change aggregates by changing them one at a time is a tricky proposition. Notoriously, the War on Poverty was unsuccessful at getting people to eat better or to hold their families together despite government urging and assistance. At least such efforts were swamped by other forces so that the advances in nutrition and child care were not measurable. The real advances in the LBJ era of Liberalism were the voting act and the Equal Accommodations act that restructure institutions so as to eliminate discrimination. You deal with the category rather than the individuals within your category. So Conservatives might argue that these measures are too namby pamby to make a difference, but the point is that they can’t hurt and that they might make some incremental difference to reducing crime that is violent but not as spectacular as mass shootings. It might turn out that gangland behavior is too difficult a nut to crack, but it is plausible enough and without bad side effects so that it is worth trying. Or as Liberals are like to say: if one thing doesn’t work out, you don’t give up; you try again with a different program.
The theories of why youth engage in crime and violence are, with one exception, psychological rather than sociological in nature. Back in the Fifties, sociologists regarded juvenile delinquency as a social problem caused by aberrations in human development whereby teenagers and even older had not matured into adulthood, somehow fixated on the youth culture that led to experimentation and irresponsibility. These were “the rebels without a cause”. An example is “Doc” in “Street Corner Society''. He is getting a bit too old to hang out with his gang even if he had dominated his group because of his social artfulness and other skills. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in “The Negro Family” in the Sixties ascribed Black youth as at a disadvantage because family life had been thwarted by single family mothers which made their male children prone to becoming emotionally manipulative, as women would be, rather than as dobjective task oriented. Then there were the gang leaders who were downright psychopathic, feared for their arbitrary viciousness who collected fancy sneakers and bling for their girlfriends until they got so erratic that their fellow gang leaders brought them down. Then, in the Eighties, William Julius Wilson suggested a purely sociological theory. The depredations of youth were the result of residential segregation in that black neighborhoods had no supermarkets or movie theatres or other amenities and there were too few men, in that they were incarcerated or dead, for young women to find suitable people to marry. Men and women never left their neighborhoods and so were prey to drug gangs. The latest iteration of poverty youth is back to the psychological one, though this is about brain chemistry rather than distorted character. A recent University of Chicago study shows that poorly nourished young children do not develop the brain size of children who were well nourished. That can lead, among other things, for the malnourished to have poor impulse control, which is observable as associated with gun violence. Here we are back to the nutritional issue that the War on Poverty failed to address. The Biden administration is trying to remediate this problem by training in self control, but remediation is always a catchup because of not having solved the original problem, but that is the best remedy at the moment. The real takeaway is that gun violence is a symptom or a consequence of other issues that are much deeper than guns.