Decisions made by progressive Democrats over the past two years have greatly damaged our nation. How should Americans address these policy mistakes, so they do not happen again?

When a commercial business makes a bad decision, feedback is obvious – it loses money. The market holds the business accountable and teaches a lesson. The business learns not to make the same mistake again. 

Apparently, this accountable-feedback-learn sequence doesn’t occur in Washington. Accountability is widely dispersed or obfuscated.  Ambiguous accountability effectively immunizes Democrats from the consequences of their actions. While there are a host of recent examples, three stand out: CoViD, inflation, and loss of trust. 

CoViD response 

Drs. Fauci, Birx, and Walensky knew the following by mid-2021. Yet, they imposed pseudo-martial law and shut down the country with disastrous consequences.  

CoViD is medically dangerous only to those who are elderly, obese, have diabetes, and other life-threatening comorbidities.  Otherwise, CoViD is as risky as the flu.  Children are in less danger from CoViD than an auto crash. Most important, there are no long-term data on mRNA vaccination.  

Despite having all the scientific evidence above, Washington (note the dispersed accountability of writing “Washington”) claimed CoViD was an existential threat to the nation. They imposed a nation-wide quarantine with masking, social distancing, and lockdowns. There was no epidemiologic basis for quarantine of the healthy population during a pandemic. No one had ever done this before. 

Democrats’ anti-science, supposedly anti-CoViD policies caused more than 200,000 small businesses to close, millions lost their jobs, and thousands died needlessly. Millions of American children lost the opportunity to learn because of enforced school closures. 

When a person commits a crime, burglary for instance, that individual is charged (held accountable), convicted (given feedback), and learns (placed in jail by Department of Corrections). 

The livelihoods of millions of Americans were stolen by progressive Democrats. Which named person or persons should be held accountable, receive feedback, and learn? 

Fauci says he just provided advice; Biden did everything. Biden says he didn’t do it; Democrat governors imposed the mandates. Healthcare workers say hospitals fired them, but hospitals assert they were just following orders. CDC denies doing anything: they just provide data.  

Defusing accountability is how bureaucrats immunize themselves against taking responsibility and receiving feedback.

Inflation

Gasoline now costs on average more than $4 per gallon. Two years ago, it was less than $2. Americans are suffering the worst inflation in more than 40 years: 9.1 percent in July 2022. Inflation is a hidden and highly regressive tax. It hurts lower income families more than high earners. Who is accountable for inflation?

The Biden administration never admits its policies are responsible for inflation, such as suppression of domestic oil and gas production and spending several trillion dollars. Biden claims the following are to blame: greedy meatpackers, venal oil companies, mercenary physicians, Donald Trump, Putin’s war in Ukraine, amongst others. Never, ever blame his Day One executive orders!

Federal politicians, bureaucrats, and their complicit media avoid paying for their egregious acts by dispersing accountability and thus avoiding feedback. 

Trust gone

On Aug. 8, 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant on former President Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago. Subsequently, the Wall Street Journal reported, “secret U.S. files were seized.” Search warrants were always executed with the property owners or their lawyers present. Yet FBI agents removed Trump’s lawyer and all other people from the residence at gunpoint, so no one witnessed what the FBI agents did during the nine-hour search. 

Did they truly find national security risks? Might the agents have planted files? Did they install secret listening devices? In the past, such questions would be unthinkable.  Americans trusted in the FBI’s integrity and objectivity. They believed the FBI and DOJ upheld the rule of law. Americans never imagined these agencies would abrogate equal justice under the law and become political arms of the Democrat party. 

Officials such as James Comey, Robert Mueller, Christopher Wray, and Merrick Garland have so corrupted the judicial process that Americans no longer trust there is equal justice under law. People out of favor like Donald Trump and Roger Stone are persecuted and prosecuted, while others such as Comey, Garland, Hillary Clinton, and Hunter Biden are not held accountable for their improper, illegal acts.  

Americans have lost trust in public education. Parents are up in arms because teachers are indoctrinating their children with ideologies such as CRT and alternate sexuality (in kindergarten?!) against parents’ wishes. Parents rightly assert teachers are accountable to teach what parents want and not subvert parents’ values and beliefs.

In the past, the CDC and NIH were held in high regard for their singular commitment to the health of Americans. They destroyed our trust by supporting Washington’s draconian, unscientific, and unnecessary CoViD mandates while censoring or belittling reports that showed the medical errors and outright lies of Fauci, Birx, Walensky, and Pfizer pharmaceuticals. 

On Oct. 8, 2020, Francis Collins, then Director of NIH, emailed Anthony Fauci to create a “quick and devastating public take-down” of the Great Barrington Declaration. Fauci in turn surreptitiously urged others to publish these take-down pieces. In this way, accountability was widely dispersed, each person pointing the finger away from self.  

Conclusion

When it comes to lack of trust, Congress may top all others. More than 80 percent of the American people disapprove of the job that our Representatives and Senators are doing. How long would a store remain in business if 80 percent of their customers didn’t trust the salespeople?

While members of Congress should be held accountable for their actions, who should provide the appropriate feedback? We should – American voters. 

We are bad parents. We disapprove of what the children – people with political power – do, yet we don’t discipline them. We keep returning them to Washington. Without providing the necessary feedback – removing them from office – they are not held accountable – they cannot learn and will never change their behavior.  

Ultimately, We the People must accept responsibility for the harm Washington has done to us.

Deane Waldman, M.D., MBA is Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics, Pathology, and Decision Science; former director of the Center for Healthcare Policy at Texas Public Policy Foundation; and author of the multi-award-winning book Curing the Cancer in U.S. Healthcare: StatesCare and Market-Based Medicine.  

Graphic credit: Jernej Furman CC BY 2.0 license