From The Rebels (Joshua Green, 2024) pp174-6
IN RETROSPECT, the notion that most Democratic voters would base their choice on anything other than their perception of a nominee’s likelihood of beating Donald Trump was probably far-fetched. Casting the primaries as a high-stakes intraparty ideological battle didn’t comport with how most people saw the race: they were furious at Trump, wanted him gone from the White House, and were dubious of reformers touting utopian ideas, however appealing those were in the abstract. This posed a particular problem for Warren, because the group that felt strongest that defeating Trump should outweigh personal ideological preferences was also her core constituency: college-educated white women. By nearly a two-to-one margin, Gallup found, they preferred the nominee with the best chance of winning. When Warren faded, many of them moved to Biden, not Sanders.
From the grand, abstract perspective, the primary appeared to deliver a verdict on the appeal of a populist, left-wing politics. Both candidates who fully embraced it (one endorsed by the new Latina congresswoman who was the party’s rising star) lost to an elderly white moderate whose Washington political career spanned the entirety of the neoliberal era—and then some—and who campaigned on restoring a gauzy notion of America’s past. Given the option to vote for “big, structural change” (Warren) or “revolution” (Sanders), Democrats chose the safer path of moderation and nominated Biden, who won.
And yet the strain of economic populism that arose after the Great Financial Crisis plainly shaped the core ideas of American politics and governance in 2020, even among people who weren’t as closely identified with it as Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez. The most striking illustration came as the primaries were still unfolding. Trump, with Democratic backing, signed the first of two economic stimulus packages totaling nearly $3 trillion to mitigate the effects of a new financial Crisis, this one brought on by the COVID pandemic. They featured an almost point-by-point list of policies Warren had pushed to no avail during the last crisis, measures aimed not at Wall Street but at the general public. These included multiple rounds of direct cash payments to most adults, enhanced unemployment benefits that in some cases exceeded workers’ prior wages; a freeze on evictions and student loan payments; and a generous bailout of millions of small businesses contingent upon the continued employment of their workers. It was an effort, on a scale never seen before, to positively affect the lives and livelihoods of millions of American workers and their families and avoid repeating the mistakes of the last crisis. Whether or not Trump was conscious of this, the coherent scheme of aid, and his efforts to keep the economy open—often over the objections of Democrats helped him to win more votes, including from Black and Latino voters, than in 2016 (his margin improving in seventy-eight of the hundred Latino-majority counties). His protecting people from the economic ravages of the crisis undoubtedly helped Republicans gain seats in the House and Senate, even as he himself lost.
Perhaps this shouldn’t come as shocking. When Warren, and then Sanders, began to lose their appeal during the primaries, the major argument against them was that they posed too much of a risk of losing to Trump. But taken on their own, many of their economic ideas were highly popular, not just with Democrats, but with independents and many Republicans. The same surveys that showed voters didn’t think Warren was electable also showed that her policy ideas were strongly preferred to Biden’s and every other candidate’s in the race. Stripped of their association with radical left-wing politicians, populist economic ideas fared well on state ballots, too. In 2020, Arizonans voted to raise taxes on the wealthy to fund teacher salaries, while Floridians voted by a wide margin to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Biden framed the general election, probably wisely, as being choice between Trump and the turmoil he brings and a familiar, reassuringly moderate alternative who intended nothing more radical than to “restore the soul of America,” whatever that pleasant-sounding phrase meant. But Biden wasn’t blind to the populist appeal. Nor was he wedded to the market-oriented neoliberalism Democrats had embraced earlier in his career. For much of that period, stretching at least through the bankruptcy battles with Warren in 2005, people in Washington would joke that Biden was “the senator from corporate America. As president, though, he’s governed more in the manner of the nickname he seems to prefer, “Scranton Joe.”
Biden never got much respect as a politician. Still, throughout the primaries and the fall election, he seemed to have the most perceptive understanding of his own appeal. He didn’t try to one-up his competitors with bigger, more radical plans. He didn’t employ the abstruse language of the activist class or even seem to comprehend it. He knew his limits. And he found a way to explain what he had to offer and how it might serve to curb the intense economic and political upheavals that have poisoned American civic life over the last fifteen years.
After his string of Super Tuesday victories, Biden held a big rally in Detroit. By then it was clear he was going to win the nomination. Several of the candidates he’d defeated lined up onstage to support him. For Biden, who had been seeking the presidency for much of the last fifty years, it must have been a moment of extraordinary satisfaction. But instead of dwelling on it, he looked ahead. “Look,” Biden told the crowd, “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of new leaders standing behind me. They are the future of this country.” |
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