In Joe Biden’s speech last week, there was a moment that seems to have gone entirely unnoticed when the president of the United States came close to “quiet quitting,” the latest trend obsessed over, as if it were the onset of a second Industrial Revolution, by a desperately trend-hopping liberal media. At one point, Biden declared, “I made a bet on you, the American people, and that bet is paying off.”
Now wait a minute. An American president “made a bet” on the American people—not the other way around? The implication was that Biden became president because he had decided, after grave doubts, to take a big chance and trust the American people; it implied that he was going to do his job as president for only so long as the American people did not disappoint him and his “bet” kept “paying off.” I thought of Brecht’s cynical poem, “The Solution,” written after the failed East German uprising in 1953, in which East German construction workers went on strike to protest an increase in what they were expected to produce. Brecht’s poem imagines an official East German response after the rebellion was quickly suppressed by Soviet troops.
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