Melina Mara/The Washington Post via AP
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Joe Biden peppered his first address before Congress with policies so popular they're hard to oppose.
A version of this article appears in the May/June 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
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 has made one thing clear in his first hundred days as president, it’s that he understands, and is a master of, sequencing.
In his first address to Congress, as in his 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. Tm Scott skipped lightly and quickly through his critique of Biden’s proposals for infrastructure, family assistance, and access to health care, and he was in such a rush because Republicans know that Biden’s case is compelling. Like his fellow GOPers, Scott spent much more time on racial, religious, and cultural wedge issues, proclaiming that America is not a racist nation, but rather one with Christianity and opposition to abortion at its core. This came after Biden had just presented 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 a quarter to a third of rank-and-file Republicans.
So long as the debate focuses on the lived experience of the American people, Republicans don’t have much to say. Scott offered faint 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 Act. As to any specific argument against 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 in general and Scott in particular have been largely mute. 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 clearly win in the court of public opinion. That’s still no guarantee he and his Democratic cohorts can get them through the Senate. But Republicans already sense they’ll 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 for now, his emphasis is on the creation of a more broadly shared prosperity. In his speech, Biden cited the research of the left-wing Economic Policy Institute (on the 320-to-1 ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay) and borrowed a phrase (what works isn’t trickle-down economics but middle-out economics) from one of America’s precious few left-wing billionaires (Nick Hanauer), but he quoted them because he knows the American public is ready for a de-plutocratization of their economy.
That all 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.
Throughout his speech—both in the written text and his own interpolations—Biden repeatedly stressed that the nation is in 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 re-create a vibrant and more inclusive middle class, he argues, 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 help him. Roosevelt took office at a time when autocracy was on the 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 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 now-challenged democracy, at a time when European and other democracies haven’t been particularly good at meeting their citizens’ needs.
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 the 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 Roosevelt-Truman-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 New Gingrich in Congress—redefined the party’s mission by stating 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 far less 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.
