Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
President-elect Biden speaks after the Electoral College vote, December 14, 2020, at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware.
Trump and the Tea Partiers before him made gains with ordinary Americans because a corporatized Democratic Party stopped delivering for them. This was especially true in rural and small metro areas that were once manufacturing centers, where the falloff in support for Democrats in 2016 and 2020 was just sickening.
To some extent, Trump was able to use ethnic nationalism and racism as a proxy for economic populism. But Make America Great Again, however bogus, also signaled a concern for lost living standards and economic dignity.
Joe Biden comes out of the same neoliberal milieu that produced the vulnerabilities of Democrats in the Clinton and Obama eras. Most of his appointees are alums of those administrations.
But thankfully, events are pushing Biden to govern as more of a progressive than he may have intended. And public opinion wants him to do that.
A new, must-read report from Demand Progress, titled “Americans Want a Progressive Biden Administration,” is based on extensive polling that looked deeply into whether most Americans want a corporate-influenced Biden administration. They don’t.
You should read the entire report, but here are a few highlights.
By majorities of more than two to one, Americans don’t want Biden to appoint corporate execs, consultants, or lobbyists. The majorities are even larger when it comes to people from regulated industries or companies that have benefited from bailouts.
Biden has appointed most of his Cabinet, but there are still heads of regulatory agencies and more than 1,000 subcabinet officials to be named. Is it at this level that corporate types tend to burrow in.
As the Demand Progress report suggests, this is about far more than symbolism. Depending on who staffs his presidency, the actual policies will benefit either ordinary people or the powerful industries that have rigged the rules and commandeered nearly all the economy’s gains. If Biden views these people as toxic appointees, and makes that clear to the public, the voters will respond.
The Demand Progress report also found that large majorities of Americans, including 60 percent of Republicans, view the revolving door between industry and government as a big problem. And even larger majorities, the report found, were especially wary of Big Tech.
You should read the entire report. Even more importantly, Biden should—and act accordingly.
Among the report’s other findings:
More than three-quarters of Americans (77 percent) say Wall Street executives have too much influence over policy. Unfortunately, many such execs were donors and bundlers to Biden’s campaign. He needs the courage to look them in the eye and make clear that he is not going to appoint them, or their proxies, or follow their advice.
Notably, Republican voters are just as alarmed as self-identified Democrats at the excessive domination of Big Tech of so many areas of American life. Here is another area where courageous leadership can not only shift policy in the direction of the public interest but win back Trump voters.
During Trump’s era, Big Tech only got more powerful. The belated antitrust actions, where state attorneys general took the lead, potentially have wide bipartisan support, unless Biden flinches because of all the money he gets from Silicon Valley.
In the Demand Progress poll, 78 percent of Democrats said Big Tech had too much influence, but so did 81 percent of Republicans.
There is a great deal more insight in this report. Doing the right thing would be very smart politics for Biden. But it would require a rupture with the cozy connections between big-business money, bad regulatory appointees, and pro-corporate policy that has been a signature of the past two Democratic administrations.
The flip side of corporate domination of politics is the economic screwing of regular people, and—funny thing—they notice. Trump’s success in 2016, and very narrow loss in 2020, was partly about racism, the gun culture, and the religious right. But any Democrat or commentator who thinks it wasn’t also substantially about populist anti-corporate resentment is whistling Dixie.
Obviously, Democrats are not going to give up on racial justice. So Biden had better get serious about reclaiming the economic populism that was once the essence of the Democratic Party and the allegiance of its voters.
