People tell you who they are, and these days, they tell you on a podcast. Joe Biden’s interview series Here’s the Deal has earned some mockery in left circles as “the verbal equivalent of someone falling down a rocky hill.” But beyond the fractured syntax and low production values, you get real-time insight into how the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee understands the political moment.
And what you hear is a man at war with himself. Biden mostly defers to his guests: activists, advisers, and here and there a possible future Cabinet member or vice-presidential nominee. But he also whipsaws back and forth between the message he delivered throughout his campaign, the one that earned him the nomination, and a new narrative, hastily developed amid the catastrophe of the past couple of months.
To Ron Klain, former Ebola czar and likely White House chief of staff, Biden says that crisis response “should not be political.” To potential center-left running mates Gretchen Whitmer and Amy Klobuchar, he praises their capacity for bipartisanship, which he laments has “become a dirty word in our politics lately.”
But as the episodes have worn on, another Biden has emerged. He’ll note that it’s hard for Republicans (not just Donald Trump) to make government work, when they “have no respect for government to begin with.” He’s discussed the coronavirus tragedy as holding up a mirror to the nation’s inability to soothe hardships borne by the working classes. “People are getting their eyes open,” he tells anti-poverty crusader Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. “No matter how well off you are, you’re better off if everybody’s better off.” To Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, he enthusiastically embraced a moon-shot green stimulus package; to Barber, a suite of basic economic and social rights for all Americans.
No political figure comes up more than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom Biden repeatedly lauds. The longest episode of the first six features presidential historian Jon Meacham, who gave what amounted to a lecture on FDR’s leadership. “American history from 1933 to 2016,” Meacham tells Biden, can be seen as “a figurative conversation between FDR and Reagan. You were on a field that was marked off by Reagan on one end and FDR on the other.”
How a Biden presidency will proceed, and succeed, depends upon his placement on that field. Does he stay on the 50-yard line, splitting the difference between anti-government conservatism and progressive populism, and cutting bipartisan deals? Or does he surge toward the end zone with “Roosevelt” written on it, transforming the nation through “bold, persistent experimentation” that fills in all the cracks the coronavirus exposed?
A good reporter is supposed to supply a definitive answer. But I’ve talked to a dozen people inside the campaign and out, those with the ear of the president and those being wooed by his team, and it’s too soon to know how this will break. Not even Biden knows yet. Judging by his personal record, you could envision his presidency as another round of triangulating disappointment. Hopes over the campaign’s widespread outreach to progressive leaders and adoption of liberal policy planks are tempered by the presence of Larry Summers at economic-policy meetings.
But listen to one particular call-and-response with Rev. Barber about the transformative power of this moment, and your confidence in the outcome may waver. “This pandemic [is] almost like the Great Depression, which allowed Roosevelt to do things that he hadn’t imagined doing prior to the Great Depression,” Barber explains. “Exactly,” Biden replies. “If we cannot guarantee health care for everyone and have a universal form of health care, and basic living wages and basic sick leave, we are missing the lesson of this moment,” Barber thunders. Biden responds, “Exactly right, and that’s why I think we can do it.”
You could argue that this was a practiced politician humoring an idealist. But the evidence we have from crises as profound as we face today is that the idealists force the politicians to dream bigger and reach higher.
HISTORIAN CHRISTOPHER SHAW’S 2019 book Money, Power, and the People narrowly focuses on banking policy in the Progressive and New Deal eras. But its value lies in giving voice to the forgotten public anger of the times, and how this moved the political system. The book reinforces the promise of democratic responsiveness, particularly in moments where the public is so brazenly robbed in broad daylight.
Organized by farmer and labor groups, populists channeled their outrage by envisioning a better world. “There can never be a permanent and secure prosperity,” noted National Farmers Union President John A. Simpson in 1932, “until we have destroyed the money power of the country.” Labor leader David Levine echoed this sentiment: “The Nation must own the Banks or the Banks will own the Nation.”
The evidence we have from crises is that the idealists force the politicians to dream bigger and reach higher.
Aggressive demands amid banking panics and the speculative crash of 1929—most prominently, total nationalization of the financial system, with government control of credit and currency— scrambled policymakers. Sen. Carter Glass, a reactionary conservative Democrat from Virginia who operated largely as a stand-in for financial interests throughout his career, proposed the separation of commercial and investment banks, ostensibly to prevent rampant speculation, but also as a counter-offer to more wide-reaching reforms. “He was aware that there were lots of other radical proposals out there,” Shaw explains in an interview. “Investment bankers were being blamed for the entire Depression.” One resolution out of West Virginia literally called for the beheading of any banker whose institution failed.
The Banking Act of 1933, like the establishment of the Federal Reserve Act before it, was a triumph of what Shaw calls “banking politics,” the collective action of a hostile yet organized constituency. The bank lobby initially opposed the Glass proposal outright; they eventually succumbed to it, along with much bigger political lifts like federal deposit insurance and removal from the gold standard, opting for survival instead of being tossed to the pitchforks.
In other words, what we now know as Glass-Steagall (Henry Steagall, a Democrat from Alabama, was Glass’s House counterpart on the legislation) was a compromise measure, not the liberal wish-list item we think of today. Co-author Carter Glass was not a progressive hero but a Wall Street stooge, forced by circumstance into devising one of the most effective reforms in American financial history. Shaw credits the farmer and labor agitators, “this vibrant and rich force serving as a counterweight to the bankers,” for making the impossible possible.
This is a familiar trajectory in moments of crisis. From the Black Death to the Spanish flu, pandemics have coincided with overthrown power systems and reduced inequality. The Depression didn’t reorder just the financial system but numerous elements of society. World wars and economic collapses leave mass public need in their wake, and the ensuing outcry can spur big changes to fill those needs, permanently.
AP Photo
Desperation during the Depression triggered public anger that forced politicians to respond to their needs.
Franklin Roosevelt’s interventions into oligarchic power set the stage for a half-century of prosperity and security. But it was not obvious that this patrician would become a hero of the downtrodden. Roosevelt ran against Herbert Hoover in 1932 promising to balance the budget. But the state of the country, the 25 percent unemployment, the human desperation, weighed on his decision-making. “New conditions,” Roosevelt would say in 1933, “impose new requirements upon government and those who conduct government.”
THE CIRCUMSTANCES NOW EXIST for a potential replay of the New Deal dynamic: relentless economic carnage, a restive population given to rage, an overmatched Republican rapidly losing his grip on power, and a Democratic challenger with none of the attributes expected in a revolutionary. Can Joe Biden rise to meet the moment as Franklin Roosevelt did?
A reasonable reading of Biden’s career, from his 1973 Senate swearing-in until the day of the first confirmed U.S. case of COVID-19, would suggest that he has quite a journey ahead of him. Throughout his Senate days, Biden would oddly insist that Delaware was on the Confederacy’s side in the Civil War. It’s not true, but it speaks to Biden’s conception of the place he represented for 36 years. He seemed to consider himself a Southern-state senator.
To some degree, this informs his old position on busing, his office’s press release in 1998 touting him as “one of the top five conservative Democrats,” and his repeated runs at Social Security benefits in the name of fiscal responsibility. It informs his 1990s-era belief that Clintonian Third Way politics were the only path to Democratic success. The South is a more conservative place, and a self-styled Southern Democrat acts accordingly. Add to that the dominating influence of Delaware’s banking industry, and you understand how Biden could marry hawkish foreign policy, tough-on-crime rhetoric, and fiscal stinginess with support for financial deregulation, in particular, raising hurdles for poor people to access bankruptcy.
Despite leaving the clutches of Delaware politics when becoming vice president, Biden still cut bad deals with Mitch McConnell, one that kept nearly all of the Bush tax cuts intact. He ran in three presidential campaigns as a moderate, doing little to challenge or subvert party orthodoxy.
Yet Biden also started his political career on the New Castle County Council fighting oil polluters and suburban sprawl, while boosting public-housing construction. He won his Senate seat in 1972 on a platform of removing ground troops from Vietnam, protecting environmental wetlands, expanding cost-of-living increases for Social Security, raising taxes on millionaires and corporations, and supporting labor unions. Many of those planks are in his 2020 platform. And his moments of social progressivism, from writing the Violence Against Women Act to getting ahead of President Obama on same-sex marriage, should be part of his story as well.
The four decades after the McGovern defeat in 1972 saw a rightward drift within the Democratic Party, and Biden was all too willing to drift with it. But he also has the capacity to drift back, and reflect the party he wants to lead. “The wonk class is more liberal than it was five, ten, fifteen years ago,” notes Sean McElwee of Data for Progress, who has had discussions with the Biden campaign. “[Hillary] Clinton was very wonkish, she had pretty strong opinions about policy that Biden doesn’t have.”
Biden, if nothing else, is a mainstream Democrat. He has habitually positioned himself in the center of the caucus, wherever that center moves. In the neoliberal and neoconservative eras, he obliged. In a more progressive era, particularly a time of crisis that demands activist government, he can do the same.
“The magnitude of the pandemic is so huge that there’s no way you can’t see these giant problems ... everybody’s a socialist during a pandemic.”
As a 2020 candidate, Biden made half-steps in this direction. While going beyond where he or even Barack Obama was in 2008, his health care, climate, and education policies were all underweighted by design, to set contrasts with the Sanders left. He rejected Medicare for All, free public colleges, student debt cancellation, and phasing out fossil fuel emissions by 2030. By contrast, his labor proposals have earned high marks, particularly for holding corporate executives personally liable for union busting. He’s proposed scaling up German-style subsidized work sharing. He endorsed Social Security expansion. And he wants to roll back nearly all of the Trump tax cuts.
In the 2020 primaries, Biden downplayed his policy agenda, sticking to a core message of ridding the nation of the Trump cancer and returning to the halcyon days of bipartisan compromise. The effective close of the primaries after a series of Biden wins in March, however, coincided with a deadly pandemic that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. And nothing in the country, or the Biden campaign, has been quite the same since.
BERNIE SANDERS DROPPED OUT of the presidential race on April 8. Like every presidential nominee in recent memory except for Donald Trump, Biden reacted warmly. “Senator Sanders and his supporters have changed the dialogue in America. Issues which had been given little attention—or little hope of ever passing—are now at the center of the political debate,” Biden said in a statement, highlighting topics like income inequality, universal health care, free public college, student debt relief, and the climate emergency. “And while Bernie and I may not agree on how we might get there, we agree on the ultimate goal for these issues and many more.”
ELISE AMENDOLA/AP PHOTO
Since the pandemic, Biden has sounded more Sanders-like, urging fixes to “cracks in the social safety net.”
But Biden went beyond the usual celebratory elegy to a vanquished foe. He stressed the “enormous fear and pain and loss being felt all across the country.” After the principal work of ending the public-health crisis and ensuring people’s basic survival, Biden added: “We also need to take a hard look at what we need to fix and change in this country. Many of the biggest cracks in the social safety net have been laid bare … We will need to address these.”
We’ve all been seeing what Biden has, the kinds of spectacles that fuel populist fury. Miles-long lines of cars snaking around food banks just a few weeks after lockdowns, a testament to the precarity large segments of the population live with. Shortages in groceries and hospitals revealing breakdowns in supply chains and just-in-time logistics. States and the federal government fighting over basic medical supplies as price-gougers profit. Black Americans dying at much higher rates than white counterparts, reflecting their existing health risks and societal inequities. Rural families cut off from society because they lack access to broadband internet. The lack of national paid sick leave forcing newly “essential” workers, many making minimum wage, to choose between a paycheck and their health. Over 150 workplace strikes protesting hazardous conditions, and cartoonishly villainous retaliation against organizers. Reports of banks stealing stimulus checks to pay off debts. Chain restaurants and Fortune 500 companies grabbing so-called “small business” loans. The investor class saved by guaranteed Federal Reserve support, leading to the stock market having its best April in decades amid the highest unemployment in nearly a century. Tone-deaf celebrities Instagramming about difficult quarantines in mansions or yachts, while millions struggle to find food.
A day before Biden’s speech, the Financial Times released an out-of-character editorial demanding “radical reforms” sufficient to “revers[e] the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades,” a shot at the neoliberal consensus. Serious discussions were being held about the end of globalization and the urgency of decoupling manufacturing away from China. There was a broad sense that the virus was provoking a serious reckoning about the state of the nation.
“The magnitude of this pandemic is so huge that there’s no way you can’t see these giant problems,” says Alex Lawson, a progressive leader with Social Security Works. And no tax-advantaged savings program or enterprise zone is likely to pull the nation from the tailspin. “The idea we can leave things to the miracle of the markets is just a fraud,” Lawson notes. “Everybody’s a socialist during a pandemic.”
Biden repeated these themes of how the crisis exposed the need for structural changes throughout April, broadening the critique to denounce corporate greed and worker deprivation. Maybe it was an extension of his party unification strategy. By this point, his campaign had spent several weeks in talks with Sanders officials, top progressive politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and movement leaders, from established organizations like MoveOn and Planned Parenthood to younger groups like the Sunrise Movement and Indivisible. Three high-level staffers have led the talks: policy director Stef Feldman, and senior advisers Symone Sanders and Cristóbal Alex. All three had roots in climate policy, voting rights, and other progressive issues, and links to many of the figures they were courting.
Biden’s lack of a fixed ideology makes personnel—who will have significant discretion to aggressively advance policies—that much more important.
Democratic campaign veterans have been impressed with the depth of the outreach. Symone Sanders, who was national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016, told me in an interview, “The approach is straightforward. This is where we are, tell us about your plans, and where do we align? … When it comes to working with organizations, they find they have more in common with the vice president than they think.”
The practical need for this flows from Biden’s underwhelming performance with voters under 45, and the imperative of bringing them into the fold in November. There’s also a recognition that, even before the coronavirus, the policy energy within the party has been ceded to the left. Biden seems to understand that if he wants to lead the party as it’s constructed today, he must bring in progressives, and give them real responsibility to help set the agenda.
Instead of pivoting to the center to capture the middle for the general election, the campaign has pivoted, if modestly, to the left. Biden endorsed lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and forgiving student debt for lower-income graduates, as well as an immediate $10,000 forgiveness for everyone during the pandemic. He also endorsed Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan, after spending a decade in the Senate on the opposite side of the debate, and a variant of the Sanders/Warren plan for free public college (means-tested for families earning up to $125,000 a year).
Those minor shifts accompany much broader goals to respond to what the pandemic has laid bare. Biden and his advisers have proposed immediate boosts to Social Security, added worker protections, paid sick leave, and expanded (and possibly federalized) unemployment insurance. His recent proposal for Black America invests in minority-owned businesses and impoverished communities of color.
Three of Biden’s policy advisers stressed to me that manufacturing changes to increase domestic capacity and remove the hidden risk from broken supply chains were vital. “We can never again be in the position we are in right now,” said policy director Stef Feldman. “We need to do everything in government’s power to make sure of that, including addressing the supply chain.”
Some progressives are wary but recognize the opportunity. “We’ve sent them what we think they need to do for a second bite of the apple on climate,” said Julian Brave NoiseCat of Data for Progress. “A whole bunch of assumptions that felt fairly safe as trends in politics are being upended in weird ways.”
In an interview with Politico’s Michael Grunwald, Biden sounded like the fire-breathing liberal he spent the campaign trying to oppose. He expressed support for trillions of dollars for green infrastructure, from mass transit to electric-vehicle charging stations, while condemning big banks for favoring bigger businesses with lending relief after “this is the second time we bailed their asses out.” He denounced corporate greed and reiterated the need for big change. “I think there’s going to be a willingness to fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time … Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”
But that begs one crucial question—who is running the show?
IN LATE APRIL, Biden announced that Ted Kaufman would lead his transition team. Kaufman, Biden’s longtime chief of staff, succeeded him in the Senate after he won the vice presidency in 2008. In a remarkable two-year run, aided by the fact that Kaufman would never face re-election in Delaware, Kaufman charged after the financial industry, seeking size caps on the largest banks, urging reform of high-frequency trading, and pressing Obama’s law enforcement team on why no bank executive was being indicted for the mountain of fraud perpetrated during the housing bubble. For many, the hopes of Biden’s capacity for bold policy ambitions on a national stage lie with Kaufman.
“The coronavirus has exposed many problems that the vice president and I have been concerned about for a long time, that he can help solve,” Kaufman told me in an interview. He was somewhat circumspect, ever mindful of what the political system and the makeup of Congress will bear. But what he did stress repeatedly was the need for the right personnel to turn promises into reality.
“If you have the Democrats on the SEC that Biden will appoint, the SEC will be a lot different place,” Kaufman said. “If you have the right Secretary, the Treasury Department will be a different place.”
This is particularly true with Biden, who can sound like a firebrand or a bipartisan conciliator depending on who he’s in the room with. He is a big-picture politician who leaves the details to associates. His penchant for delegating responsibilities and lack of a fixed ideology make decisions on personnel—who will have significant discretion to aggressively advance a president’s policies—that much more important.
Progressives have taken up the rallying cry of “personnel is policy,” as they did during Hillary Clinton’s nomination in 2016. “The people who serve your presidential transition team will shape the future of your administration,” opens a letter to Biden that several progressive groups signed on to. The letter asked Biden to reject corporate lobbyists and industry executives, instead opting for people with the public interest at heart. Biden’s campaign has talked about an executive branch that “looks like America,” but the groups urged an embrace of diversity in all its forms, including diversity of experience and perspective, outside the Beltway and the corporate boardroom. A separate letter from youth leaders highlights appointments as well.
Personnel “is the clearest way [Biden] can signal that there is no business as usual,” Alex Lawson says. “No Wall Street bankers in charge of Wall Street. No pharma bros in charge of pharma.”
On his podcast, Biden told Jon Meacham that he valued expertise, arguing that as president, you should be “willing to surround yourself with people with skills you don’t have.” But advisers stressed that Biden also puts a premium on life experience. “You need people in office who understand what happens to people when they lose their job,” Kaufman says.
But expertise, especially on economic issues, is never neutral. The campaign record, thus far, has been decidedly mixed. Biden 2020 didn’t have much of a policy team, incredibly enough. But he was powered by a litany of special-interest backers in fundraising. Biden’s first campaign event was held at the home of David Cohen, a top Comcast executive. The skeleton staff he had featured Steve Ricchetti, who founded a lobbying firm for health care and other corporate clients, and Bruce Reed, literally the head of the Democratic Leadership Council, the primary Clintonite policy organization for two decades.
The first set of potential Cabinet selections floated by the Biden campaign included both Wall Street foe Warren and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon for Treasury Secretary (donors later added BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, one of the most powerful people on Wall Street). Mega-billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley executive Tom Nides, and Bank of America Vice Chair Anne Finucane were also on the list, along with Ricchetti. The campaign later called the list "fantasy football for politics" and disavowed it as "laughable speculation."
To guide his vice-presidential selection, Biden chose longtime aide Cynthia Hogan, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, centrist Delaware Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester, and former Senate colleague Chris Dodd. The Dodd selection was an unfortunate reminder of a Mad Men era on Capitol Hill that is the last thing a presidential candidate accused of sexual assault needs. But Dodd was also partially responsible for denying Elizabeth Warren a shot at running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
When Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden on April 13, the two campaigns promised joint “task forces,” with members of both staffs working on key policy issues like immigration, climate change, and economic justice. A few weeks in, those task forces were not formed, as Biden’s campaign confirmed. Instead, Biden explained on one of his Here’s the Deal podcasts, the main policy activity is happening through two daily briefings, one with public-health advisers and another with the economic team.
There are a few progressive voices on that economic team, including Biden’s former economic adviser Jared Bernstein, former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, and Heather Boushey of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Kaufman’s elevation as transition director gives hope that more progressives will be seeded throughout the campaign.
But Biden’s team was tight-lipped about who else attended the briefings. Finally, word got out that Larry Summers, an avatar of Clinton-era triangulation and fealty to Wall Street who has been flitting around the corridors of Democratic power for nearly 30 years, was sitting in on the calls. The Prospect has learned that two Summers allies, co-author Natasha Sarin and Obama White House and Hamilton Project veteran Adam Looney, were also brought into the campaign.
No force has been more responsible for Democratic enthusiasm for financial deregulation, corporate outsourcing, climate neglect, fiscal austerity, and privatization of public assets than Summers. His miscalculations have had tragic consequences, from shutting down oversight of derivatives in the Clinton years to lowballing the Great Recession stimulus while giving priority to reflating bank assets over saving homeowners under Obama. Wherever Democrats took a wrong turn in the last three decades, Summers was at the wheel.
At best, you have a team of rivals: Summers and his protégés battling progressives on the inside. But Summers, a consummate bureaucratic infighter, knows how to charm powerful people, and ensure they support his positions. He looms larger than merely someone in the mix on conference calls, especially given his ties to those with experience in past White Houses.
The Summers news damages everything Biden has done to prove to progressives that his presidency will be transformative. Summers has already denounced the wealth tax in ways that suggest waning interest in progressive taxation in general: The rich were “smart enough to accumulate it in the first place,” he told one forum last year. The great labor proposal Biden has assembled will not survive contact with an economic team that values investors and financiers. Summers’s presence does not inspire confidence in the forthcoming agenda, unless you work in the financial industry, in which case you’re breathing a sigh of relief.
Progressive commentators have denounced Summers, and Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement have called on Biden to remove him from the economic-policy team, saying that “the trust of our generation” was at stake. Biden’s campaign insists that the policy staff is a “well-rounded informal network,” and that the candidate will have “the most progressive agenda of any president in generations.” But platforms matter less than the people tasked to carry them out. With signals in both directions, the case for Biden as a progressive president comes down to what he really wants to do with the job.
WHAT COMES ACROSS in discussions with Biden staff and advisers is that he wants government to work. He took public transit to work every day for 40-plus years and he wants those trains to run on time, across the government. His pandemic response recommendations focus mostly on how to get the money out to families and small businesses quickly. In public comments, he beams with pride about shepherding the 2009 stimulus package and keeping it free of fraud. And he reserves his anger for Trump’s mismanagement of government, his lifelong avocation. Lack of oversight leads to robbery, and Biden seethes at that irresponsibility.
Amid this crisis, an emphasis on good government and competence could lead to transformations that in other contexts may be seen as radical. “The idea that our system has underperformed along so many critical dimensions is precisely the sort of things that he cares about,” says Jared Bernstein, who served as Biden’s chief economist when he was vice president. “This is the more granular retail politician side of Biden, he just really thinks that programs should work. He was always incensed by that.”
There’s a progressive critique that maintains that neoliberal policy prescriptions, though sometimes premised on making government more efficient, actually cause breakdowns in governmental capacity. Outsourcing and privatization created the choppy response to the pandemic; underfunded priorities like state unemployment insurance systems and the Small Business Administration cannot keep up with sudden demand. Faith in free markets to serve every need falls aground amid the emptiness of the national stockpile for medical supplies, or the lack of health insurance for every American during a disease outbreak. Belief in self-regulation leaves workers unprotected from workplace hazards, and leaves regulators outgunned by corporate giants. So-called “fiscal responsibility” hollowed out the functions of government across all levels.
Amid the pandemic, an emphasis on good government and competence could lead to transformations that in other contexts may be seen as radical.
A Biden presidency that seeks to make government functional will simply have to take on these sacred cows. Wanting taxpayers to get their money’s worth out of government should mean ending costly privatization that has proven ineffective in the crisis. Meeting market failures like supply-chain chaos with a competent response should mean reinvigorating industrial policy. “We cannot depend on far-flung supply chains for important goods when they are vulnerable to supply shocks,” says Bernstein, who as Biden’s chief economist was often detailed to meetings to stand up for the manufacturing sector. Recognizing the importance of Keynesian spending in a crisis should mean rejecting the forces of austerity when they emerge. And if the point is to make the economy functional for everyone, you’re going to have to do a series of critical policy interventions.
We’re watching in real time what distracted, unmotivated, indifferent, and corrupted governance looks like, at the worst possible moment. If Biden wants to be defined by the opposite, he must fund government, allow it to act, and make it impenetrable to the inevitable attacks and attempts at capture from the business sector.
There’s no guarantee that a presidency predicated on government functionality becomes transformatively progressive. Bill Clinton charged his vice president with “reinventing government,” in line with ideological preferences toward outsourcing and some forms of deregulation. Obama frequently stated that he was only interested in “what works,” and then his economic advisers defined what works as the mild technocratic tweaks that restored the financial system after it collapsed.
But even the financial crash fails to compare to what the next man to take the oath of office will face, and what the street will demand. What is sometimes derided as the “professional left” has yet to find its voice in the crisis. But in catastrophe, leaders tend to sprout organically. Alex Lawson of Social Security Works finds historical precedent in retired physician Francis Townsend, who called for a monthly pension of $150 or more in a 1933 letter to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Within two years, thousands of “Townsend clubs” sprang up around the nation, and their namesake delivered a petition of support for old-age insurance to FDR, a miracle in the pre-internet age. Roosevelt got Congress to agree on a weaker version of the Townsend plan, which we now know as Social Security.
“The reason why that worked wasn’t that Townsend said, ‘I’m going to do this,’” Lawson maintains. “Things were so bad that something needed to happen. I just think it will be a very real, citizen-led populist push for big changes, not because we want to be fair to everybody, but because we have to do this.”
Regardless of the demands from the outside, the man who makes the decisions must determine whether to cede to them. Biden is a bundle of contradictions on this front. He wants government to work but until recently did not espouse policies that would hit that mark. He has pivoted to the left but isn’t loyal to any one premise about how to govern, conforming his beliefs to whatever he finds politically necessary. He seems inspired by the pandemic to make big changes, but retains policy advisers who live to shoot such ambitions down.
And then there’s Joe Biden the man. FDR was barely 50 when he rose to the presidency, and altered his goals in response to the Depression. Biden will be 77, with a lifetime of narrow policy thinking that never signaled a reformation. It’s asking a lot of him to grow into a radical in office. And yet events may give him no choice.
The answer to this question—Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Biden—could determine whether he is seen as a hiccup on the road to authoritarian fascism, or the leader at the moment America changed course and decided to protect the least of its citizens. The presidential race is likely to be a referendum on Donald Trump’s handling of the public-health emergency and the subsequent economic depression; how Biden campaigns may only matter at the margins. A Biden presidency, however, would be a hinge point in history, and the choices he makes will have world-historical impact.
The public can and will make their demands known, and give politicians few avenues of escape. But in the end, it’s really up to one man, and the presidency he decides to create.
