Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s economic agenda at Prince George’s Community College Center for Performing Arts, September 14, 2023, in Largo, Maryland.
Progressives have won the battle of ideas. And reality has been a useful ally.
No serious person any longer thinks that deregulation, privatization, globalization, and tax-cutting serve economic growth or a defensible distribution of income and wealth. “Free trade” has been revealed as a corporate scheme to outsource production and undermine domestic regulation of capitalism.
The neoliberal era that spanned three Democratic presidents deepened economic concentration and created political feedback loops that produced pressure for more neoliberalism. President Biden, surprisingly and mercifully, broke with this self-annihilating consensus.
The Prospect has gone from a prescient voice in the wilderness to an influencer of actual policy. People from our tribe are serving in senior posts in government.
Without a reliable majority in Congress, Biden worked miracles. Inflation has been tamed, we are at full employment, supply chains are being brought home, antitrust has been resurrected. Biden is taking on Big Pharma and Big Tech and promoting strong unions.
Yet he is languishing in the polls. As I’ve written in previous pieces, there are two big reasons. He looks too old for the job; and more importantly, even Biden’s accomplishments have not been nearly radical enough to change entrenched patterns in the American economy when it comes to jobs, paying for college, health care, and housing. There is little prospect of altering that, absent Roosevelt-scale majorities in Congress.
Beyond that problem, Republicans have become the party of nihilism. There’s an old saying: If you don’t want to wash the dishes, break the dishes. Republicans know they’ve lost public opinion on issue after issue, so their alternative is to destroy democracy.
Then there is Trump. In his interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, I expected sheer lunacy, but he sounded to me like a surprisingly effective candidate. Put aside the lying, and he’s quick with a riposte, energetic and sly. He’s nimble in debate. If you do the state-by-state analysis, the 2024 election is likely to be alarmingly close.
There has been a running argument in the pundit class about whether Biden should step aside. Do the following thought experiment: In an open 2024 primary, who among the likely alternatives to Biden would you rather have? Not Newsom, not Buttigieg, not Harris, not Pritzker, not Raimondo. The only one I’d rather have is Gretchen Whitmer, and there is no guarantee that she’d be the nominee. Barring a health emergency, Biden is who we have, for better or for worse.
As someone who has covered issues of political economy for half a century, I plead guilty to insisting that pocketbook issues are paramount in politics. It was the Democratic complicity in the economic wreckage of the average American over four decades that finally brought us Trump. There were compounding factors, but that was the essence.
There’s a terrific piece in The Atlantic by our friend Caroline Fredrickson, who was the longtime head of the American Constitution Society. It’s titled “What I Most Regret About My Decades of Legal Activism.”
She writes, “By focusing on civil liberties but ignoring economic issues, liberals like me got defeated on both.” And while Biden is trying to reduce corporate power, she concludes, “that hasn’t generated much excitement from a liberal base that is still more focused on social issues. Progressives, especially, must recognize that preserving constitutional freedoms depends on winning the fight for economic liberties. Treating them as separate goals will ultimately mean losing out on both.”
To win the politics, and begin the long journey of restoring both democracy and the economic credibility of democracy, will require everything to break right in 2024 and beyond, an immense turnout of a progressive electorate that is too passive, no tactical blunders, and a big dose of luck.
Just that.
