An elegy for Bidenism

Joe Biden has dropped out of the race. Will his successor embrace his populist agenda?

In 2020, Joe Biden pitched himself as the only Democrat who could beat Donald Trump. He was nominated on that basis — as “Scranton Joe,” “Amtrak Joe,” the particular favourite of the party’s moderate African-American voters — and won. What happened next was astonishing: the Biden White House’s political-economic agenda was, in crucial respects, a concession to the discontent that had ignited a populist revolt four years earlier.

From tariffs against Chinese goods to industrial reshoring, and from rural redevelopment to aggressive anti-monopoly action, Bidenism could be remarkably, well, populist. Now that Biden himself has bowed out of the 2024 cycle after weeks of pressure from panicking Democrats and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, it’s an open question whether the Dems will continue down the path of economic nationalism and protectionism, let alone appreciate why the Biden version struggled to widen its appeal.

The analogies between Trumpism and Bidenism are too distasteful for most professional Democrats to acknowledge. For many, Trump is simply the Orange Bad Man who owes his rise to a combination of Kremlin machinations and the deplorable prejudices of his supporters. But an important faction inside the Biden administration, probably led by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, was astute enough to look beyond such partisan cant.

The Bidenites discerned reasonable popular demands that Democrats had to try to mollify. In an April 2023 address at the Brookings Institution — perhaps the most important text of the Biden administration — Sullivan made this explicit. In it, he denounced the neoliberal, free-trade dogmatism that had eroded the “public investment that had energised the American project in the postwar years” and treated “liberalisation as an end in itself”.

Biden-style post-neoliberalism took shape in the form of: massive regional investment programmes bundled under the (tragically mis-titled) Inflation Reduction Act; a monumental effort to shift semiconductor production back to the homeland via the CHIPS Act (the arch-neoliberal Wall Street Journal, where I once worked, conceded its significant impact); a Federal Trade Commission reversing decades of neglect by pursuing aggressive antitrust under Chairwoman Lina Khan (even J.D. Vance described her as “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job”); the most pro-union National Labor Relations Board in decades; and a renewed emphasis on consumer protection, particularly in downscale financial markets at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These were major achievements for which Team Biden has received too little credit.

Bidenism was faltering well before his disastrous debate against Donald Trump in June. Why? The short answer is: immigration and inflation. The first one was a largely self-inflicted wound, while the other is the result of structural forces that will haunt Biden’s successor, whether that’s Trump, Harris, or some other figure.

On immigration, the Bidenites simply couldn’t see the free movement of labour the same way they viewed the free movement of goods that they sought to bring under political control. The crisis on the US’s southern border was acute as millions of newcomers were waved into the homeland as “refugees” — the overwhelming majority are economic migrants — putting pressure on the social services of the native underclass, creating a shadow reserve army of labour for the DoorDash economy, and stoking urban incohesion that drove even blue-city mayors crazy. Immigration surged to the top concern among voters in February, according to Pew polling.

The inflation issue is more complicated. As the left political economist Justin Vassallo has persuasively demonstrated, the Bidenites, like most everyone else, have been too quick to accept Federal Reserve hawks’ account of the problem — an overheating economy, too much money supply chasing too few goods — rather than looking at the structural crises of the American economy, particularly the inefficiencies created by trying to do the same things with cheaper and cheaper labour.

Compounding these two issues was the Bidenites’ own failure to properly sell Bidenism as an answer to working- and lower-middle-class misery. To have done so would have offended the liberal NGO industrial-complex that forms what authors John Judis and Ruy Teixeira call the Democrats’ “shadow party”: people for whom there is nothing redeemable about the other half of the country, and who eagerly gobble up books like White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.

Can Kamala Harris – as either the Democratic nominee or the president – chart a different course? Would she even want to? Or would she ditch the populist elements of Bidenism and revert to some version of Clintonism-Obama-ism: that is, technocratic tweaks to the still-kicking neoliberal order combined with aggressive cultural progressivism? It’s hard to say, in large part because Harris is a policy cypher. In the event, the populist revolt hasn’t abated, and polls indicate that the majority of voters are swayed by Trump’s populist platform, rather than the more complex and muted Democratic version.

[See also: The rise of disaster nationalism]