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Has Biden buried the American left?

Scattered and listless, the movement this defeated president leaves behind must regroup quickly.

By Justin H Vassallo

In his farewell address last week, Joe Biden tried once more to summon the gravitas that eluded his presidency when he warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence”. It was a despairing coda for a leader who aspired to Franklin Roosevelt’s stature but failed to prevent ever-widening disparities in wealth. Biden entered office on the unlikely promise to effect the economic transformation that progressives had long urged. He leaves behind a country that has entrusted its future to robber barons. As he shuffles from the political stage, the rebirth of the Rooseveltian tradition has never seemed more remote.

The shadow cast by Biden’s unsteady tenure is bound to haunt his party for many years. Democrats are now forced to reconcile themselves to the fact that this time around Trump eked out a victory in the popular vote with a coalition that was unusually diverse for a Republican, a shift that has splintered the Democrats’ established coalition. For this reason, history may prove less forgiving of him than it was of the last one-term Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, whose funeral Biden attended this January. Elected in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, Carter was a Southern outsider who promised a new era of trustworthy and accountable government in Washington. But while urgent, the “crisis of confidence” that Carter famously articulated and struggled to end had not entailed the rise of extreme inequality and anti-system politics. Even as industrial decline was gaining pace in the late 1970s, the “American century” was still an article of faith for many Americans.

By contrast, Biden was tasked with healing a deeply polarised nation as his final act in public life. He staged his presidency as a “bridge” to the next generation of progressive leaders, but also as a chance to repair the steep costs of globalisation and revitalise his party in the Rust Belt. Though admirable, these goals proved unrealistic, hampered by Biden’s own hubris and failures of judgement. His final months have been filled with speculation that he has been, at best, a half-engaged figurehead since the summer of 2021. That, and the sense that global disorder has increased on Biden’s watch, noticeably more than Trump’s term, has hammered his and his Democrats’ image. The result is a party without a compass. Bidenism was framed as a rousing capstone to Biden’s long career, but it is not a mantle anyone in his party is eager to claim.

The coincidence of Carter’s death, Biden’s exit, and Trump’s resurgence marks the end of an epoch bookended by narratives of national decline. In between the “stagflation” that doomed Carter and the anxious Covid recovery that vexed Biden, the United States ushered in the hi-tech revolution and briefly enjoyed a “unipolar” moment at the end of the Cold War that promised to spread markets, bolster human rights, and raise developmental outcomes. But leaders from both political parties squandered this “peace dividend” at home and abroad. Inequality in liberal democracies spiked, monopolists gained unprecedented global reach, and Washington’s military adventurism made a mockery of international law.

Restoring domestic confidence and international credibility would have taxed a leader of the calibre of Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party’s rising stars in the post-Cold War period were either unprepared for or unconvinced of the depth of America’s problems. Barack Obama’s feckless deference to Wall Street and Silicon Valley after the Great Recession vapourised popular belief in his “once in a lifetime” political talent, leaving working-class Americans hungry for a brawler, even one as dishonest and demagogic as Trump. The impending doom of the American experiment then became an obsession of the liberal establishment. Rather perversely, however, it took the pandemic to push establishment Democrats like Biden to consider programmatic change on a scale not contemplated since Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan.

Biden pledged that if elected he would renew American leadership and rebuild the middle class. He invoked FDR’s New Deal to explain his plans for a manufacturing renaissance and a competition policy that favoured workers and smaller enterprises. His accommodation of progressives in Congress early in his term was an auspicious enough start. But while the legislative packages passed under his administration promised trillions in desperately needed investment, they were only dramatic relative to what the political order had permitted since the Reagan revolution. And by largely opting for massive subsidies and tax credits to “de-risk” new plant construction and entice Wall Street, Biden had to lean on a smattering of political appointees and a handful of executive orders to uphold the “pro-worker” end of the bargain.

It will be left to historians to discern the exact sequence of miscalculations that made Bidenism inconsequential to Americans’ everyday lives. But one thing is for sure: in the rush to return to normal and reopen the economy, the administration was much too sanguine about how working Americans would handle the loss of emergency Covid-era social protections amid soaring living costs. The Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes then compounded Biden’s political woes by driving household debt to new heights. For an administration that proudly declared its intent to challenge economic orthodoxies, it was utterly conventional in its respect for the supremacy of traditional monetary policy over other actions.

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In hindsight, it was preposterous to think under such whiplash conditions that an increasingly sheltered Biden could rapidly change the country’s sense of direction and purpose. Yet the fanfare over Biden’s stewardship only increased the more enfeebled he appeared. The promise of a New Deal-style presidency was something progressives had dreamt of for at least a generation. Eager to boost morale, friendly analysts and centre-left wonks rationalised Biden’s suitability for such a task; he was such an ancient creature of Washington, some implied, that he had the rare wisdom of being “pre-neoliberal”. This defence could not obscure or justify what was unfolding in the White House. Ron Klain, Jared Bernstein, Lael Brainard, and Jake Sullivan, among other advisors, did their best to solder Biden’s policies in a way that would resonate with average workers. But this would never substitute for the leadership Biden struggled to project – and perhaps was never capable of delivering. He had the Brain Trust, but not the bully pulpit.

Most elected Democrats were wilfully blind to the challenges before them. Before Biden’s fateful June debate, the seeming ingratitude of the electorate had become a leitmotif of liberal commentary. Biden allies in the press, led by economist Paul Krugman, diligently cheered monthly economic data, insisting that wage-earners were enjoying the bargaining power and relative security generated by tight labour markets. They found it unnerving, if not flatly stupid, that many Americans reported believing the country was in a recession. In most cases they ignored the fact that labour force participation was struggling to rebound and that the much-vaunted low unemployment rate had been previously reached under Trump before Covid struck. A gradual hiring freeze in 2024 further indicated the recovery was not all it seemed.

Frustrated progressives warned that Biden loyalists were misreading the electorate. When Biden’s decline became impossible to ignore, however, the opening was there for the party’s chief donors to thwart talk of strengthening his agenda, particularly antitrust measures that had heartened economic populists and consumer protection advocates. If Kamala Harris, upon taking over the top of the Democratic ticket, sensed there was an ominous disconnect between her party and lower-income Americans, she nevertheless caved to those who wanted to discredit Biden’s experimentation tout court.

[See also: The truth about Sleepy Joe]

The closing of the Biden era carries with it the air of a greater finality. As the public bids farewell in different ways to Carter and Biden, the Democratic Party’s metamorphosis over the last half century has come into stark view. New Deal liberalism had rested on a unique coalition of “white ethnic” and Catholic industrial workers, Protestant agrarian populists, and liberal internationalists. By Obama’s presidency, the party had come to represent a mélange of secular urban professionals, service workers, academics, racial and sexual minorities, and environmentalists. It had also grown much closer to powerful financial interests while becoming all but synonymous with the expanding NGO sector. This was a remarkable development even in the context of Western centre-left parties shifting, in near-unison, from a proletarian base to a more educated, more cosmopolitan, and more affluent electorate.

At surface level the explanations may seem logical, even reflecting the inexorable force of history. Some changes were the result of urbanisation and concurrent with major technological shifts in the 20th century; others stemmed from dismantling Jim Crow and ostracising the racists and bigots who once dominated the party’s Southern wing and certain urban machines. There was also a strong belief that America’s large post-war middle class was regenerative. Its supposed adaptability to the “knowledge economy” boosted American liberals’ attraction to “market solutions” for social problems. As with other centre-left parties that struggled to mesh globalisation with social solidarity, it seemed imperative for Democrats to prioritise openness, innovation, and individual freedom if they were to successfully compete with the Reaganite alternative.

Yet the party’s fading commitment to an egalitarian economy was not simply the product of external forces and new electoral cleavages. A Whiggish sense of progress has always inflected America’s party system, impelling Democrats, not just Republicans, to administer hard medicine if it was believed that doing so would ultimately make the country more powerful and dynamic. Carter was no exception to this. In fact, he helped lay the foundation for policies that Reagan and his neoliberal successors advanced. Although Carter can hardly be held responsible for the failures and neglect of subsequent administrations, he nevertheless hastened the fall of the New Deal order.

It is poignant, in its way, that Biden tried to undo what started with Carter decades ago. In November, Trump won a narrow majority of households earning less than $50,000 – a seismic shift that defied Biden’s efforts to lift his party’s standing with the working class. This suggests a level of estrangement that cannot simply be solved through “better messaging”. But it is also true that it should have never fallen to Biden to revise the doctrine that frayed America’s social contract and led Democrats to only timidly mitigate the loss of secure jobs and steady upward transfer of wealth. The party elite was not only fatally mistaken in what Biden could achieve, but arrogant too. A party that truly grasped what gave rise to illiberal populism would not descend into gerontocracy; nor would it dare award the presidential medal of freedom to celebrities and donors while quietly forfeiting control of the National Labor Relations Board, a cornerstone of the New Deal, before Trump takes the oath of office.

As the debate over what went wrong lets up in the face of Trump’s expected transgressions, top Democrats will push to close ranks. But defeat at the hands of Trump, no matter how bitter, can only be seen as a chance for party reform. The question is whether Democratic grandees are ready to yield to new leaders, and whether those new leaders can reckon with all that has been abdicated. Ultimately, the party of “compassion” and “hope” must confront the hypocrisy that has plagued its mission. Let us hope that, unlike Biden, those who have the courage to act do so before it’s too late.

[See also: Joe Biden’s tragedy of errors]


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