The intra-Democratic debate about Joe Biden’s presidency, so
far, pits a growing camp of Biden enthusiasts who are harking back to
liberalism’s golden age — comparing the new president’s free-spending ambitions
to Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s — against a shrinking cadre of
leftists who insist that Biden is still just another neoliberal centrist, another
Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
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Here’s a somewhat different, more provoking way of thinking:
We should regard Bidenism, in its current outline, as an attempt to build on
Donald Trump’s half-formed, never-finished policy agenda, in the way that
elements of Jimmy Carter’s program found their fullest expression in Ronald
Reagan’s presidency.
I’m borrowing this idea from the Bloomberg opinion columnist
Karl W. Smith, who recently called Biden’s economic proposals “the coherent
manifestation of MAGAism in the same way that Reaganism was a coherent
manifestation of Carter-era deregulation.”
For instance, the Reagan military buildup really began under
Carter, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: It was Carter’s CIA that
armed the mujahedeen, and Carter who fatefully involved the United States in
the Persian Gulf. In addition to pushing through the deregulation of major
industries.
Basically you could say that in the late 1970s there was an
opportunity for a politician who could credibly promise to restore US strength
abroad while whipping inflation and unleashing dynamism at home. That leader
could have been a Democrat had the Carter presidency turned out differently,
had Carter managed his own coalition more effectively, made better policy
choices, enjoyed better luck. Instead Reagan took the opportunity and ran with
it, creating a multidecade realignment.
In a similar way, you might say that in the middle of the
2010s there was an opportunity for a politician to promise a kind of American
rebuilding effort — a turn against globalization and overseas nation-building,
in which deficit hawkishness would be discarded, industrial policy would make a
comeback and there would be redistribution from the new economy’s winners to
the American worker and working-class families.
That opportunity was the basis of Trump’s 2016 campaign, and
at times his presidential agenda tried to seize the chance: in his support for
a loose-money, full-employment monetary policy; in his tax bill’s child tax
credit expansion and its stealth tax increases (via caps on the home-mortgage
and state-and-local-tax deductions) on the blue-state professional class; in
his trade protectionism; and in his attempts to draw down US commitments in
Afghanistan and Syria.
But like Carter before him, Trump couldn’t make it work. His
congressional party preferred its old agenda of business tax cuts and Obamacare
repeal, he preferred bigotry and bluster to policymaking of any kind, and
instead of consolidating a new majority, he ended up defeated.
So now comes Biden, in a sense, to simply scoop up elements
of Trumpian populism and try the trick himself. He’s entrenching protectionism
in trade policy and arguably broadening the last administration’s China
hawkishness. He’s trying to do the trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that
Steve Bannon promised but the Trump administration never delivered. And he’s
taking the Senate GOP’s inchoate ideas on family policy and outbidding them
with new child spending.
You can tell that these moves are well suited to the political
moment because the Republicans don’t know how to counter them. They’re stuck
betwixt and between, unable to fully revert to their pre-Trump positioning as
deficit hawks (who would believe them anymore?) and unsure how to counter Biden
when he just seems to be making good on Trump’s promises.
So you get Republican attacks on the infrastructure proposal
for including too much noninfrastructure spending or conservative attacks on
the family benefit for undermining work incentives. These are detail-oriented critiques,
and sometimes reasonable ones — but they effectively concede a lot of ground to
Biden’s general vision instead of setting up a sharp ideological contrast.
Are there any limitations on this fulfill-Trump’s-promises
approach? The immediate one is in immigration policy, where Biden’s coalition
won’t permit him to co-opt Trump’s hawkishness or even revert to the policies
of the Obama era. So it’s the Biden White House that’s caught between
approaches, trying to deliver both a humanitarian welcome and enough border
security to keep the flow of migrants manageable.
The Biden bet seems to be that you can have a version of
economic nationalism without its usual anti-immigration component — that
protectionism via tariffs and industrial policy can go together with a looser
immigration policy. If unemployment rates get low enough, this might be right.
But a plausible liberal nationalism still probably requires a sense of basic
order and stability at the border, which is eludes Biden for now.
Then the longer-term issue with Bidenism as Trumpism 2.0 is
that since the Democratic Party increasingly represents the winners of
globalization, from wealthy suburbanites to Wall Street and Silicon Valley
elites, a politics that requires these interests to sacrifice for the sake of
redistribution will eventually create fissures inside its coalition.
Yes, Biden can probably get a modest corporate tax hike and
a higher tax rate on the highest earners. But his party’s eagerness to restore
the state and local tax breaks that Trump curbed tells you something important
about where power lies in liberal politics, and how little appetite there is
among Democrats for tax increases that really bite the upper middle class.
So just as Trumpism depended on deficit spending to avoid
any conflict with his party’s donors and anti-tax activists, Bidenism depends
on deficit spending to avoid having to soak his professional-class
constituents.
But whether Biden can simply expand upon his predecessor’s
agenda without putting his own coalition to the test — well, that depends on
just how long we stay in an era of money for nothing, and populism for free.
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