We are living in what seem to me to be terribly fraught times, times that are even more worrisome than those at the height of Cold War tensions, when we schoolchildren were drilled on what to do in case of a nuclear attack--an attack that was in fact highly unlikely to occur. Why do I say this? What are these overweening concerns?

Many relate to government policies. The Biden administration seems hell bent on reversing every Trump administration policy, even those policies that were quite successful.

On illegal immigration, which the Trump team managed to reduce significantly, team Biden seeks to make illegal entry easier and its legal consequences less of a deterrent. This will almost assuredly result in a significant influx of the unskilled, themselves infiltrated by gang members, cartel mules, parentless children, and perhaps even foreign terrorists.

Where the Trump administration managed to achieve energy independence, team Biden has now halted drilling on federal lands and offshore and has killed the Keystone pipeline -- which won’t reduce the supply of oil coming into the U.S. but will require it to be transported via carbon-emitting trucks and trains. Insane! With respect to the climate, which saw carbon emissions decrease during the Trump years, team Biden has rejoined the Paris accord, which will have no effect on the world’s major polluters but will impose needless costs on Americans. (And why, if team Biden is really concerned with greenhouse gases, does it not push for nuclear power, which is clean and less an eyesore than wind farms and acres of solar panels?)

The Trump administration pre-pandemic engineered a very good economy with spectacularly low unemployment rates and widespread increases of incomes. It did so with a combination of deregulation and lower taxes. Team Biden appears to favor a large influx of foreign unskilled labor, a more than doubling of the minimum wage, the elimination of energy sector jobs, higher taxes, and more regulation. This is a witches’ brew of anti-employment, anti-growth policies.

Violent crime is spiking in every major city controlled by Democrats, surely fueled by Democrats’ attacks on the police -- attacks belied by the statistics -- and by their turning a blind eye to the true natures of Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Will things change now that a Democrat is in the White House? So far, Democrats seem to be strong supporters of law and order only when Republicans are the miscreants.

In terms of foreign policy, the Trump administration pushed back hard against our major geopolitical adversary, the People’s Republic of China -- its theft of intellectual property, its currency manipulation, its militarism, and its attack on Hong Kong’s autonomy. Given the Biden family’s financial ties to the PRC as well as the dependence of many of Biden’s corporate supporters on doing business in the PRC, can we expect the same of team Biden? 

Will team Biden be as supportive of Israel and its better relations with its Sunni Arab neighbors as was the Trump administration? Or will it prefer to make concessions to their enemy, Iran? It looks like the latter.

And will team Biden, like the Trump administration, put a premium on military readiness, or will it see the military as an arena for woke social engineering rather than as an institution whose sole mission is to defeat adversaries? There are disturbing signs that team Biden will sacrifice having the best fighting force in order to have the most politically correct one.

On the cultural front, if it’s possible, things look even more dire. Team Biden is driving a stake through the heart of women’s athletics, as well as ignoring natural concerns for modesty, by opening women’s sports teams and their locker rooms to biological males. Where the Trump administration brought due process to campus disciplinary proceedings, team Biden seeks to restore the procedural inadequacies of the Obama era.

And where the Trump administration supported school choice, team Biden seeks to do the bidding of the teachers union, which opposes any means for escaping the failing public schools, and which, contrary to the scientific consensus, opposed, and still opposes, opening schools during the pandemic.

Team Biden, in opposition to the Trump administration’s position, seeks to re-impose mandatory “diversity training” on federal employees, which frequently amounts to indoctrination in the grotesque racism of “critical race theory.”

So, this is why I contemplate the coming Biden years with great anxiety.

So those are the reasons I find the current times more troubling than any I have lived through. Those reasons consist of the things team Biden has done or will do, and the things that team Biden should do but won’t. Until law and order, both in our cities and at the border, is highly prized; until the military is de-politicized; until jobs are a legislative priority; until differing opinions are not censored and their advocates not de-platformed or fired; and until the quintessential bourgeois values of two parents for children, education, and hard work are widely esteemed, I will fear for my country and the fate of my children and grandchildren.

In some ways, given the very remote possibility that the Soviets would have launched a nuclear strike, and the far greater possibility that we are witnessing a national descent into a poisonous and dysfunctional future, I’d prefer to have to get under my school desk.

Caricature by Donkey Hotey CC BY-2.0 license

Larry Alexander is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego