Joe Biden is a failure — or, depending on how you look at it, too much of a success. Historian Victor Davis Hanson argues that failure is a better description, though not without deliberate work to fail.

Do not expect the radical left to survey the wreckage of socialism and communism in history and accept that statism impoverishes people and erodes their freedoms. There will never be admissions by our elite that progressivism exists mainly for the acquisition of power by the utopian and virtue-signaling few, who ensure that they are never subject to the baleful implementation of their ideological agendas on the rest of us.

Still, leftists look around at what they have done to America in the last four years and implicitly know that the plan did not work, the people detested it, or both.

He says “a variety of barometers” show this to be true.

None of the major Biden “achievements"—10 million illegal aliens across a nonexistent border, key components of the cost of living 25-30 percent higher than in 2020, wars and chaos abroad, DEI racial and tribal obsessions, wars on fossil fuels—poll at even 40-45 percent. Biden’s own approval ratings, as the nominal architect of the most left-wing agenda since the Roosevelt administration, hover between 36 and 34 percent.

But most importantly, the left is not running on its record of the last three-and-a-half years but instead studiously ignoring it, at least temporarily through November. Suddenly, we aren’t hearing so much about cancelling pipelines and freezing federal oil leases, or so much demonization of the "greedy” oil companies. Instead, Biden is further draining the strategic petroleum reserve and begging OPEC in general and the no-longer-demonized Saudi Arabia in particular to pump oil as fast as possible.

When it comes to the border, the biggest admission of failure is that “Biden is suddenly reinstating the very Trump executive orders that once, despite deep state and court obstruction, finally closed the border — and which Biden himself had originally overturned.”

Hanson also recounts leftist revisionism or quiet disavowal on COVID, police and crime, speech suppression, DEI, and even the attacks on the judicial system.

In short, the policies that the left has given us over the last years—hyperinflation, spiking staple and gas prices, racial and tribal chauvinism, dangerous streets, an emasculated and politicized military, and wars abroad—did not work, and are now being masked to retain power, put on hold, or even reversed.

The reasons for the failure are ancient, given that socialism and progressivism are contrary to human nature.

He concludes:

We sometimes forget all that unpleasant human baggage, due to irrelevant distractions, or the utopianism that is the handmaiden of affluence and leisure. Often, the opulence and freedom arising from free-market economies and limited constitutional government create so much prosperity and liberty that its beneficiaries believe such good fortune to be their natural and commonplace birthright and so begin destroying the very system that blessed them.

But if Biden and his handlers have taught us anything, human nature cannot be fooled, and the current four-year experiment will have to end before it ends us — and soon.

Read the whole thing here.