When Joe Biden entered the White House many hoped that the new administration would mark a historic break not just with the madness of Trump, but with the disappointing legacy of the President’s Democratic predecessors. There was talk of Biden as the heir not to Barack Obama or Bill Clinton but to FDR, who in the 1930s instituted the New Deal and reinvigorated American liberalism. Biden’s team seemed to grasp the scale of the emergency. They understood the peril that the American Republic was in and how far it was falling behind other advanced economies. The sequence of programmes that Biden announced – the Rescue Plan, the Jobs Plan, the Families Plan – fell short of the more radical demands of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2020, but they demonstrated real ambition. Eleven months on from the inauguration, as congressional Democrats are struggling to pass the mangled wreck of Build Back Better, a once-promising piece of legislation, it is tempting to write off Biden’s agenda of investment and reform. That would be premature.
The recovery from the Covid crisis is remarkable and confirms that the expansive approach to economic policy taken by the Biden administration was the right one. Nor should one underestimate the skill and intelligence that have driven the legislation. New and innovative models of policy-making are being experimented with in real time. Biden’s domestic policy impasse is testament not so much to the abandonment of ambition as to the obstacles that any progressive politics faces in the US. The truly alarming thought is that this may well be as good as it gets. As the political clock speeds towards the midterms in November 2022, the room for manoeuvre is about to tighten painfully.
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