Joe Biden is no conservative. He’s a hack who did anything to get elected. If Mussolinimania took over the country tomorrow he’d be doning a black shirt.

But he may be quietly selling out his leftist allies. Despite earlier pronouncements and hints, he passed over Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for Cabinet posts, saying he needed them in the Senate to pass “progressive” legislation. His move on Neera Tanden to OMB is dead on arrival in the Senate. Even Mittens and Murkowski may sink her. Just way too Bolshevik. Biden and his team had to know this.

Biden is inviting a civil war inside his party if he proceeds on this course. Is that his aim? Is he trying to pull a Sister Soljah move? You may remember, in 1992 Bill Clinton trashed an anti-cop rap singer, Sistah Soljah, at a black outreach event to show moderates and conservatives he was no cultural Bolshie. It worked, at least for campaign purposes.

However, Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the Politburo won’t take too kindly to getting the Kleenex treatment, used and thrown away. They could mount primary challenges to moderates in Congress, something they might do anyway, or sit on their hands on important legislative votes. The press would be in a quandary. Support the left wing establishment, their usual position, or back the hard left insurgents? Hard leftists could even challenge Biden in 2024 Democrat primaries. If Harris is a Biden team player, being more left than Biden, that could put her in a tough position as well.

Where does that leave the president and his prospective 2024 run? In a nice slot. He can take advantage of Democrat internal disarray to divide and conquer. A close friend, a sharp British watcher of the American political scene, thinks the resumption of the neo-liberal order will provoke rebellion on the hard left, as those Bolsheviks live to rebel at anything and everything. He may be correct.

But all this talk of 2024 already has normal Americans putting their fingers in their ears. Says one relatively apolitical financial professional in Pennsylvania, “Does it ever end? Are we in the land of never-ending elections? Does anybody get a chance to succeed anymore or they are just attacked from the other side as soon as they win?”

He has a point. Since the early part of this century, right after the 2000 election and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, both parties have gone rabid. Even before that, during the Clinton impeachment saga, the game got ugly and personal. Will this attitude end anytime soon? Nope. If the Monroe administration was the “era of good feelings”, welcome to the opposite for a while to come.