BIDENISM’S ONE-TWO PUNCH BY HAROLD MEYERSON

Notebook

President Joe Biden gives his first address to a socially distanced joint session of Congress on April 28, 2021.

Bidenism’s One-Two Punch

The president’s case for his program rests on egalitarian nationalism and the value of democracy. That’s a more potent case than the Democrats have had in decades.

BY HAROLD MEYERSON

PERHAPS BECAUSE he was compelled to wait longer than any presidential aspirant in American history before actually winning the White House, Joe Biden understands timing. Not just the need to move quickly on his far-reaching agenda, but also the order in which he presents its components. If Biden made one thing clear during his first hundred days as president, it’s that he understands, and is a master of, sequencing.

In his first address to Congress, as he did throughout the first hundred days, he led with proposals for fundamental change, but particularly with proposals so popular that they’re hard to oppose. In the Republican response to Biden’s speech, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott skipped lightly and quickly through his critique of Biden’s proposals for infrastructure, family assistance, and access to health care. Like his fellow Republicans, Scott felt more comfortable decrying the horrors of cultural liberalism, despite the fact that Biden’s truly landmark proposals, the ones he wants to brand his presidency, are fundamentally economic. Cobbled together, as they were in Biden’s congressional address, they amount to the closest thing to a social democratic manifesto that any American president has ever delivered. But it’s precisely the social democratic aspects of Biden’s agenda that win the greatest popular support, including, polls show, from a quarter to a third of rank-and-file Republicans.

So long as the debate focuses on kitchen-table issues, on the lived experience of the American people, Republicans haven’t really had much to say. Scott offered praise for hardworking single mothers, but Biden concretely offered them affordable child care and an extension of the wildly popular child allowance included in the American Rescue Plan. Confronted with Biden’s proposals for universal pre-K, free community college, bigger exchange subsidies in the Affordable Care Act, paid sick and family leave, elimination of lead water pipes, America First purchasing policies, tax increases on billionaires and offshoring corporations, and sundry other Biden proposals, Republicans have tied themselves in knots to come up with oppositional arguments.

(Exhibit A: Responding to the president’s plan to make community colleges free, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn has accused him of forcing high school graduates to take two more years of school.) Biden has put a lot on the table, while Republicans prefer to argue about what he hasn’t put on the table (his nonexistent war on hamburgers, for instance).

Having established with his rollout of the COVID vaccination program that the federal government can actually get important things done, Biden is now leading with fights he knows he can win in the court of public opinion. That’s still no guarantee that he and his Democratic cohorts can get them through the Senate. But the Republicans’ eagerness to turn the discussion to other subjects suggests they know they could pay a price for blocking them.

Biden has also made clear his support for other important fights—voting rights, police reform, gun control, a rational immigration policy—but his emphasis in the early days of his presidency has clearly been on creating a more broadly shared prosperity. That reflects his sense of sequencing. He made clear in his speech that he’ll push legislation to reduce the price of prescription drugs by having the government negotiate down the prices, but he hasn’t actually introduced that legislation yet, and left drug-pricing reform out of the American Families Plan. He knows he’ll face a deluge of Big Pharma attacks when he does, and he wants the government’s credibility enhanced by its performance not just on the pandemic but also on its job creation and family assistance when he takes on the drug industry. Besides, if he can get a fight going next year that pits Democrats on the side of consumers against Republicans defending the drug companies, that wouldn’t be a bad thing for voters to think about as the midterm elections approach. (In an act of real heroism, Biden demonstrated that he’s not afraid to take on Pharma when he rejected the advice of many of his own officials and supported a humanitarian waiver of the companies’ intellectual-property rights to manufacture and distribute COVID vaccines globally.)

Throughout his congressional address and on numerous other occasions, Biden has repeatedly stressed that the United States is in an epochal competition with others (mostly China) on the question of which will thrive and which will sink in the 21st-century economy. Failing to use the government’s power to reshore research and industry, to recreate a vibrant and more inclusive middle class, he’s argued, is a prescription for national decline.

Biden’s is an argument with potentially wide political appeal. In one sense, it’s an appeal to a sane American nationalism. Unlike any previous president since the current era of financial globalization began, he states that the past 40 years of government acquiescence in and even encouragement of corporate flight and offshore investment has proven to be a national disaster, and he puts forth policies that would reverse that dynamic. In another sense, it’s an appeal to the nation’s commitment to democracy, recognizing that the rising challenge to the nation isn’t simply coming from other countries, but from autocracy itself, from the claims that autocracy provides a better path to progress than democracy does. If there is such a thing as Bidenism, it is this, a one-two punch aimed at financial globalism and oppressive autocracy, an affirmation of the value of both an egalitarian national interest and liberal democracy.

There have been a lot of comparisons of the size and scope of Biden’s domestic proposals to Franklin Roosevelt’s, but Biden and the people around him seem to have realized that there’s one other parallel, one that helped Roosevelt and can now help him. Roosevelt took office at a time when autocracy was on the

Biden’s emphasis in the early days of his presidency has clearly been on creating a more broadly shared prosperity.

rise. Hitler had come to power in Germany just one month before FDR was sworn in as president. Democracy stood in disrepute, as the governments of Europe and Herbert Hoover’s United States had utterly failed to find remedies for the worldwide depression.

Roosevelt’s case for governmental activism—as he put it in one 1932 campaign speech, his program boiled down to its simplest form was “Try something!”—often made note that the survival of democracy itself depended on the adoption of the policies that comprised the New Deal. Biden has realized that the world now faces at least an echo of that same challenge, perhaps more than an echo. And like Roosevelt, he isn’t hesitating to make the case that the adoption of his policies will make a strong case for the viability of a nowchallenged democracy, at a time when European and other democracies haven’t been particularly good at meeting their citizens’ needs.

In one important sense, the argument for nationalism and the case for democracy can overlap: Democracies’ greatest successes have come at the level of the nation-state, and when corporations have gone global, there’s been no supranational democratic polity that could really rein them in. In the current political discourse, a Democrat and a Trump-era Republican may both condemn corporate flight from the Midwest, but the Democrat will also note that corporations are fleeing labor and environmental regulations and tax rates enacted and enforced by a democratic national government, while the Republican wants to lure those corporations back by reducing governmental controls and standards to the levels of the tax havens and low-government-oversight nations to which the corporations have fled. That’s a distinction that makes Biden’s nationalism at once more democratic and more materially rewarding than that of his Republican critics.

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ROUTLEDGE

So constituted, Bidenism offers two strong challenges to Republicans. First, opposing his proposals to revitalize industry and rebuild the middle class can lay Republicans open to charges of being China’s useful idiots. That’s a term Biden would never use, but it comports nicely with reality nonetheless. Second, Bidenism challenges the primacy and legitimacy of the internal civil war and its accompanying demonizations that Republicans have promoted ever since the Soviet Union collapsed. Throughout the Cold War, Republicans defined themselves by fighting the scourge of Soviet communism, both in itself and because they could argue that the RooseveltTruman-Kennedy-Johnson reforms were really a slippery slope to socialism, communism, and the gulag. (They still do that to an extent, though it’s lost its bite.) When the Cold War ended, two Republican leaders—Pat Buchanan on the hustings and Newt Gingrich in Congress—redefined the party’s mission by proclaiming the substitute for the commies were the Democrats, whose social liberalism and statism, timid though it was, posed an even greater threat to the nation than communism ever had. Since the mid-1990s, with rising hysteria, Republicans have centered their politics on waging this war.

Against this, Biden is arguing that we do have an enemy that threatens our democracy. That doesn’t mean he’s going to lead us into war with China, but it does enable him to redirect the nation’s attention to a conflict—or as he prefers to call it, a competition—that’s both more real and less internally divisive than the one the Republicans are waging against liberal sins both real and (mainly) imagined.

Wrapped in the armor of both egalitarian nationalism and liberal democracy, Bidenism bids fair to have wider appeal than any defining Democratic ideology since, perhaps, the New Deal. Getting the actual proposals through the Senate and into the lives of the American people will be a challenge. But through skillful sequencing, the initial plans enter the fray with broad public support. n