In mid-April, Bernie Sanders bowed to the inevitable and endorsed Joe Biden. By then, the Democratic left was well into its quadrennial search for culprits. The party establishment had undercut Sanders from the start; primary voters, fixated on “electability,” were excessively risk-averse; the field consolidated in unprecedented fashion after Biden took South Carolina; Elizabeth Warren, after succumbing to sexism, declined to endorse her fellow progressive.
None of this could distract from the fact that Biden was as far from a revolutionary as could be imagined. Throughout his up-and-down-and-up campaign, the former vice president offered a message of restoration, not transformation, playing on nostalgia for a president who had spent six of his eight years in office hindered by a ruthless, unified opposition. Perhaps most worrying, Biden portrayed the Trump presidency as an “aberrant moment,” rather than the culmination of the ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party amid skyrocketing inequality.
Trump’s catastrophic response to the pandemic has made a Biden win in November look more probable (assuming a relatively free and fair election, which is far from assured). Yet it also makes the Biden agenda look more timid. COVID-19 has laid bare the inequalities, insecurities, and collapse of effective governance caused by the long slide of the GOP toward what Paul Pierson and I call “plutocratic populism,” a poisonous mix of upward redistribution and ethno-nationalist resentment. In its wake, we need more than ever a Democratic leader who is clear-eyed about the nature of the problem and the immense changes needed to tackle it.
In short, we need a stronger Biden candidacy. Can we get one? And what would it look like?
OF ALL THE COMFORTING half-truths that progressives are now telling themselves, the most reassuring is that the pandemic handed Biden the nomination. It’s true that the crisis ended the contest, but Biden already enjoyed a nearly insurmountable lead. More important, his advantages were clear to America’s smartest political analysis well before then.
Indeed, the most trenchant exploration of the party’s internecine battle was published when Sanders was leading the race: E.J. Dionne’s Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country. A past Prospect contributor and one of America’s best public intellectuals, Dionne has repeatedly displayed a keen sense of timing: His breakout book, Why Americans Hate Politics, appeared amid the 1991 recession, as Bill Clinton channeled backlash against George H.W. Bush into the closure of 12 years of GOP rule.
RICK BOWMER/AP PHOTO
Long queues at food banks mirror Depression-era breadlines, and demonstrate the challenges facing the next president.
Dionne’s latest book arrived this February at a similarly opportune moment—just in time to catch the fall of despairing progressives. Though admirably fair-minded, Code Red reminds readers that moderates like Biden have two formidable advantages: They win elections, and they get things done. Moreover, Dionne points out, they tend to co-opt the ideas of progressives. After reading his balanced discussion of the 2018 midterms and crowded 2020 field, it’s hard not to conclude that a candidate like Biden was likely to be the party’s standard-bearer and that such a candidate would likely end up positioned well to the left of recent Democratic nominees.
These expectations are bearing out. As David Dayen writes in this issue, Biden—now the virtually certain nominee—has been reaching out to progressives and pivoting left on several important fronts. But, as Dionne’s analysis also makes clear, the challenges that Biden will face as president will fall far outside his comfort zone as a conciliator and dealmaker.
When Biden entered the race, he warned, “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.” That’s true, which is why the fight will be so ugly. But the converse isn’t: Defeating Trump will not defeat Trumpism. Trump is an outgrowth and intensifier of the long-term shift of the GOP to the right, and the conditions that gave rise to his presidency (particularly America’s runaway inequality) will not disappear with him. Republicans have so radicalized over the last quarter-century that reform will be fiercely partisan before it has any chance of being bipartisan. If Democrats are fortunate enough to hold effective power again, they will need to use it aggressively to create a fairer economy and more vibrant democracy—or risk losing both in the future.
BIDEN’S HISTORY IS complicated. On foreign policy, he’s hawkish but also multilateralist. On economic policy, he’s backed bad ideas (bankruptcy “reform,” financial deregulation, a balanced-budget amendment) but also displayed a strong pro-labor streak. Two of the nation’s best progressive economic thinkers, Jared Bernstein (who worked for Biden when he was vice president) and Larry Mishel, have praised Biden’s labor agenda and vouched for his commitment to economic reform.
In general, Biden does not seem particularly ideological—comfortably placing himself near the center of his party wherever it happens to be at the moment. He’s into process and people, not policy, which helps explain why his most successful policy foray to date was his able management of Obama’s economic recovery package. His most powerful moments during the campaign also have a process-and-people feel—for instance, when he’s spoken about how government can be an ally of everyday Americans when leaders come together despite their differences.
But Biden’s familiar world of cross-partisan cooperation is gone, and it won’t come back absent a fundamental shift in the balance of partisan and economic power, as well as a serious rehabilitation of government capacity. Does Biden recognize this? His overtures to Warren and Sanders—free public college for less-affluent families; endorsement of Warren’s bankruptcy bill; opening up Medicare to Americans aged 60 and up—suggest he might. So too his most recent statements in response to the pandemic. At a virtual town hall in mid-April, Biden’s opening remarks went explicitly beyond his prior restorationist rhetoric.
“When we get through this crisis, we’re going to have an enormous amount of work to do. Not just to rebuild our country, but to transform it,” Biden said, leaning in to the urgency of the moment. “To make the investments we’ve needed to make for so long for our workers. To create a more just and more fair economy, where everyone has the opportunity to build a middle-class life for their families. To make sure everyone in this country earns a living wage and is treated with dignity and respect they deserve.”
Neither FDR nor LBJ looked like progressive champions when they ran for or ascended to the presidency.
Finally, it’s worth noting that despite his long status as a front-runner, Biden has run his campaign until now with a skeletal policy staff, and he is rapidly bringing on expats from rival camps—including those of Warren and Sanders. There’s good reason to believe that many of them will argue the current crisis calls for a much more robust agenda of political and economic reform. Whether they’ll carry the day will depend, in part, on whether progressives outside the campaign—who mobilized behind Sanders and Warren and who have shown that their vision can inspire the next generation of activists and leaders—reinforce the case.
WHAT WOULD A successful marriage of moderate and progressive ideals look like? At a minimum, it would cast the challenge appropriately. In Code Red, Dionne argues that progressivism’s biggest contribution has been a vision that goes beyond what may be immediately possible, a picture of a better society that seems out of reach until committed reformers bring it into focus. Neither FDR nor LBJ looked like progressive champions when they ran for or ascended to the presidency. They responded to tireless, visionary advocates within government like Robert Wagner and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., as well as the pressures of outside movements.
Dionne suggests a rough division of labor: Progressives lay out the ends, moderates figure out how to pursue these goals in realistic ways, and progressives bring constant outside pressure on the political system to aim higher. He thinks that progressives have won the debate over structural change: It’s now clear that we need to restructure our economy fundamentally. He also thinks that three of the progressive breakthroughs of the past decade—the convergence on Medicare expansion as the route to affordable health care for all; the idea that we need steeply higher taxes on the rich, perhaps through a wealth tax; and the Green New Deal—all fit within this division of labor, with progressives lighting the path for moderates who will find workable intermediate steps.
This is easier said than done. In my own work on health care, for example, I have argued for using the public option as a means for gradually expanding Medicare to a much larger share of Americans. I’ve also emphasized that a public option must be designed to ensure that universality and cost control are baked in from the start. Biden has made the same sorts of arguments. Yet his public option, while a big step forward, fails to achieve universal coverage—a tragedy given the health insecurity revealed and intensified by the pandemic. It also lacks most of the necessary cost-containment measures. Presumably his advisers were wary of using the power of government to restrain prices or auto-enroll (and require income-based premiums from) those without alternative coverage. But without advocating for these measures, there’s no chance they’ll happen. Biden’s health plan doesn’t embody a division of labor so much as a difference in priorities: an unwillingness to take (modest) political risks to set the nation down the right path.
The one real weakness of Dionne’s prescriptions—and, coincidentally, of Biden’s, too—is the lack of serious attention to the politics of power-building. As a number of astute political scientists have shown (most notably, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University), the right has focused its institutional and policy choices on weakening the left. Republicans consistently and relentlessly pursue power-aggrandizing measures whenever they manage to obtain the slightest legislative majority—measures like weakening unions, manipulating elections, limiting access to voting, starving government coffers, stacking the courts in favor of business power, and injecting more money into politics.
What are the Democratic equivalents? Historically, building union power, but recent Democrats in the White House have put this goal way down the list. Even big public policies have been designed in ways that undercut Democrats’ capacity to create supportive constituencies. The payroll tax cut in the 2009 recovery package, for example, was specifically designed to be unnoticed (it was), and the Affordable Care Act, for all its strengths, did much less to provide visible benefits to a substantial swath of Americans than it could have. If the next Democrat in the White House follows the same script, progressives will find themselves locked out of governance with weakened allies once again—this time perhaps for good.
THE PARTY'S MOST savvy thinker on the topic of power-building is surely Elizabeth Warren. Her “transition” plan to Medicare for All—really, a robust public option designed to create political momentum toward a universal Medicare program—emerged too late to protect her from moderate attacks and journalistic skepticism. But while more ambitious than anything Biden is likely to endorse, it was visionary in thinking through how initial steps could create momentum for future progress toward a system comparable to those of other wealthy democracies.
Similarly, Warren’s thinking about how to restructure corporate governance to ensure worker representation, her policies for building labor power, and her wealth tax all make explicit that discouraging large concentrations of economic power can provide huge tangible benefits to most Americans. What unites these proposals isn’t that they’re well thought out, though they are; it’s that they see policy primarily as a vehicle for changing the balance of power.
One of Warren’s favorite sayings is that “personnel is policy,” and given the divisions within the Democratic Party, that’s more true today than ever. Obama surrounded himself with many of the familiar faces within the party’s policy circles who had contributed to the neglect of labor, the dismissal of vital progressive goals like paid family leave, and the catastrophic deregulation of finance. Looking at federal economic policy, the political scientist Patrick O’Brien has shown that personnel choices—whether presidents have the latitude and willingness to bring in advisers and officials who break with the party’s past—are often more important than popular support or margins in Congress when it comes to creating lasting legacies. He tells the story of Obama asking Tim Geithner to draw up a plan for nationalizing the banks amid the financial crisis, and Geithner temporizing and deflecting the president until he dropped the request.
The current fixation on the former VP’s VP pick is understandable, but also woefully incomplete. It is the president’s close advisers and key Cabinet officials who are most crucial. In these pages, Bob Kuttner has produced a “do-not-reappoint list” that should be heeded by anyone who cares about progressive economic policy. For the “do-appoint list,” progressive groups should be insisting on the inclusion not just of people of color and women, but of people who understand that political and economic reform is a prerequisite for policy success. Especially given the pressure on Biden to name his top advisers early, the time for such advocacy is now.
Indeed, the debate over Biden’s running mate has highlighted a risk that Dionne’s book deftly engages: the confusion of descriptive and substantive representation. The central reality of American politics today is that Trump and his allies use racial, ethnic, and gender backlash to retain the loyalty of voters they are abandoning economically. Democrats need to call this out, as Ian Haney López has argued in his recent book Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America. But they also need to offer a program that shows what true populism really looks like. The long-term challenge for Democrats isn’t just to win back working-class whites. It’s also how to forge a coalition of upscale white professionals and less-affluent nonwhite voters on grounds that recognize the many ways in which the latter have been left out of the economic gains and policy aims of the former.
If the pandemic has had any salutary effects beyond making Trump’s defeat more likely, it is that it has highlighted the bonds that unite all Americans. These bonds will be tested by Trump and his allies in the weeks ahead. Already, they have tried to activate anti-urban sentiment and racism to repeat the polarizing path to victory of 2016. Yet Biden—second-in-command under the nation’s first black president and the candidate with the greatest symbolic affiliation with the white working class—is better poised than almost anyone to turn these strategies back on the president. To do so, he’ll need his two greatest assets: an ability to connect and empathize with Americans from every walk of life, and an understanding that government isn’t a swamp but a source of solidarity and prosperity. Yet he’ll also need something that comes much less naturally: a vision not just of how to win an election, but of how to remake a broken system.
