In 2020, Joe Biden pitched himself as the only Democrat who could beat Donald Trump. He was nominated on that basis – as “Scranton Joe”, or as the particular favourite of the party’s moderate African-American voters, “Amtrak Joe” – 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 and industrial reshoring to rural redevelopment and aggressive anti-monopoly action, Bidenism could be remarkably, well, populist. Now that Biden himself has bowed out of the 2024 cycle and endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, after weeks of pressure from panicking Democrats, it’s an open question whether Democrats 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 “trade liberalisation as an end in itself”.
Biden-style post-neoliberalism took shape in the form of: massive regional investment programmes bundled under the tragically mistitled Inflation Reduction Act; a monumental effort to shift semiconductor production back to the homeland via the Chips and Science Act (the arch-neoliberal Wall Street Journal conceded its significant impact); a Federal Trade Commission reversing decades of neglect by pursuing aggressive antitrust under Lina Khan (even JD 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.
Yet 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 is Trump or Harris.
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 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 public services of lower-income Americans, creating a shadow reserve army of labour for the gig 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 nearly 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’ 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”. These are people for whom there is nothing redeemable about the other half of the country, and who eagerly gobble up books such as White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.
Can Kamala Harris – as either the Democratic nominee or president – chart a different course? Would she even want to? The danger is that she might ditch the populist elements of Bidenism and revert to something like the Clinton-Obama model: that is, making technocratic tweaks to neoliberalism instead of a structural overhaul in favour of wage-earners. Hard to say, as Harris is a policy cypher. In any case, the populist revolt hasn’t abated; 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: Can Kamala Harris save America?]
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