Dear Reader (Including those of you who are Ancient Romans, in which case you would actually be “Dear Listeners” ),

So I started writing a very ambitious G-File about how the talk of a new progressive era is overblown. But it became too weighty and complicated to finish today. I figured I’d save it and move to some lighter fare. 

I’ll do that in a moment, but first I’d like to make one small point: I keep hearing about how the “Reagan era is over.” In fact, I hear it virtually every time I tune into MSNBC. Doyle McManus, writing in the Los Angeles Times—where I am a columnist—dubs President Biden the “anti-Reagan.” John Harris at Politico makes essentially the same argument. In fairness, this is a bipartisan observation; here’s former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker saying pretty much the same thing. 

The linchpin of this argument—which obviously has merit given Biden’s fairly radical plans to inflate the government and national debt—is that Reagan said “government is the problem,” and Biden thinks, to put it bluntly, that government is the solution. To what? Well, pretty much everything.