Julio Cortez/AP Photo
When Joe Biden says, “I am the Democratic Party,” he doesn’t actually mean it in the way someone like Trump might, where “I am the party” really means, “the party is me.”
At the debate in Cleveland last week, Joe Biden spent a good deal of time getting shouted over by Donald Trump. But one exchange where the Democratic nominee was emphatic and clear came when Trump said, “Your party wants to go socialist medicine and socialist healthcare.” Biden made clear why that wouldn’t happen.
“I am the Democratic Party right now,” Biden said. “The platform of the Democratic Party is what I, in fact, approved of, what I approved of.”
Biden was both right and wrong, in ways that will define the next four years (at least) if he should become president.
On the immediate policy question, Biden was absolutely right. As he also noted, there was a rather recent primary campaign in which a number of candidates made the case that the party should pursue Medicare for all, and they lost the argument to Joe Biden, who proposed a significant expansion of government health insurance but one that nonetheless stops short of single payer.
Over the years, as the party became more liberal and more ideologically consistent, he grew more liberal as well.
Whether Biden won that argument on the policy merits or because of the political caution that gave him the nomination—with primary voters deciding that an older white man with a moderate image would be more palatable to the general electorate—is immaterial. If and when he takes office, Biden will submit a proposal to Congress modeled on his campaign plan. After it passes through the legislative digestive tract it may be substantially different, but what emerges on the other end won’t be single payer. It will, however, be the position of the Democratic Party.
The same will be true of most of Biden’s lengthy list of proposals: They will be the starting point for most of the policy battles to come. The policy space Biden currently occupies will help define the party.
But it’s a mistake to understand that as Biden bending the party to his will. His will is and always has been extremely variable. It has already changed and will continue to do so. There isn’t anything we could call Bidenism in the same way you could describe Trumpism or Obamaism or Reaganism, as a set of ideas joined to a style of politics. He can’t impose it on the party if it doesn’t really exist.
That’s in large part, ironically enough, because Joe Biden is in every way a Democratic Party creature, and he always has been. But unlike some other politicians with national ambitions, he never had a plan to remake the party in his image.
Instead, over his long career he moved as the party moved, always adjusting to position himself in its center. He began his time in the Senate opposing busing and favoring restrictions on abortion. When under Bill Clinton the party eagerly tried to portray itself as “tough on crime,” he led the charge. But over the years, as the party became more liberal and more ideologically consistent, he grew more liberal as well.
It culminated in the 2020 campaign, in which he embraced a set of policy ideas much more progressive and ambitious than anything the Obama administration seriously pursued. And even after he wrapped up the nomination, Biden kept shifting, endorsing Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan, forming task forces with supporters of Bernie Sanders, and generally trying to form a synthesis that incorporated enough of his opponents’ ideas to keep the whole party within his fold.
So when Joe Biden says, “I am the Democratic Party,” he doesn’t actually mean it in the way someone like Trump might, where “I am the party” really means, “the party is me.” Biden wants to incorporate all the party’s people and ideas, expanding himself until he covers it all. He may use that as an effective comeback to the charge that he’s being manipulated by “the radical left,” but in practice he’s working hard to maintain the faith of all the party’s factions.
Consider a similar exchange Biden and Trump had in the debate. Amid a lot of shouting and interrupting from Trump over the potential cost of Biden’s proposed environmental initiatives, Biden said that he doesn’t support the Green New Deal. “You just lost the radical left,” Trump shot back.
Which reflects how Trump views coalition politics: When it comes to some part of your party, you’ve either got them or you don’t, and you have to keep them. If Biden doesn’t give “the radical left” the symbolic gestures Trump thinks they thirst for, his coalition will fall apart and he’ll fail.
But what actually happened is that the parts of the Democratic Party that care most deeply about climate change don’t seem to be too concerned with whether Biden says, “I support the Green New Deal,” in a debate. They’ve paid close attention to his positioning on climate, and have been quite encouraged.
In fact, when he released his first climate plan in June 2019, it said “Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.” Since then, he may have backed away from the Green New Deal as a symbol but he has moved left on the substance of the issue.
So when Biden released a post-primary, updated climate plan in July 2020, it was far more aggressive than his first one, even if he wasn’t name-checking the Green New Deal anymore. Climate activists were pleasantly surprised; reflecting the sentiment, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement tweeted that Biden’s proposal to get to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 “is a VERY BIG DEAL, and is a huge victory for the #GreenNewDeal movement.”
By now, all parts of the Democratic coalition understand that Biden might do what they want on any given issue, but there are no guarantees. It will depend on what his incentives are, what sorts of pressure he feels, and where the clearest path to success seems to lie.
Which means they’ll have to do a lot more work than if they had a president who simply imposed his will from above whether they liked it or not—but it also means they’ll stand a better chance of getting their ideas translated into action. Governing is different from campaigning, but so far Biden’s strategy to hold together a party that contains multitudes seems to be working.
