Let the people rejoice.
That reversal will take time to finish, as the last reversal took time. Americaās transition from demand-side economics to supply-side economics dragged on over several presidencies, only coming to completion with Bill Clinton. But make no mistake: that reversal, rooted in chaos and crisis, is well underway.
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Everything the Republicans say they are for the working class is what this president has become. Trump said he stood for āthe working manā while making it clear that āthe working manā was white. Biden stands for āthe working man,ā but makes clear āthe working manā is anyone who works.
For Trump, āreal Americansā were straight, Christian and male.
For Biden, āreal Americansā are real Americans.
Donāt let the commentariat fool you into believing Biden was just doing what Trump did, only better, with policy backing up his words. When it comes to āmade in Americaā and domestic nation-building, Trump is an imitator.
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Biden is the Original Gangster.
Over and over, the president said that he and the Congress need āto get the job done.ā āThe jobā meant a lot of things, from banning āassault weaponsā to codifying Roe to raising taxes on the very obscenely rich, but the impression left by the recurring theme was surely recognized by New Deal scholars.
The takeaway from the 1929 crash was that ātrickle down economicsā nearly took the guts out of America. Even if Franklin Roosevelt, who came from Manhattan aristocrats, had wanted to keep the status quo, he couldnāt. Crisis forced his hand. So he and the Democrats, to prevent the wholesale loss of faith in democracy and capitalism, decided to flip the previous 40 years.
Not only did he put the US government on the peopleās side. He set it against empurpled āeconomic royalists.ā He famously said: āThey are unanimous in their hate for me ā and I welcome their hatred.ā There were so many echoes of Rooseveltās bring-it-on attitude last night it drowned out the heehawing of House Republicans bespittled by the old man handing them their asses.
But again, Biden is the OG. Hereās what he told the Associated Press in a sit-down last year. Heās been saying something similar for a long time:
Iām not a big believer in trickle-down economy, and, um, and so everything I look at from the time I took this office, but even before that when I was a senator all those years, is whatās the best shot to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out because when that happens everybody does well. The wealthy do very, very well.
And the biggest thing I think that, when I came into this job, that I have the greatest frustration with the last four years, is that, um, uh, everything was constructed and built and arranged in order for the top 1 to 3 percent of the population to do very well. The rest was sort of, I mean that literally, everything else seemed to be an afterthought.
In a key moment last night, said as if merely a variation on a theme of āblue-collar revival,ā Biden killed two birds. He drained away whatās left of āneoliberalismā ā the idea that governments should be hands-off markets that know best ā as well as whatās left of a Left that has squalled for years for greater government involvement in the economy. He said: āCapitalism without competition is not capitalism. Itās extortion. Itās exploitation.ā
Can you imagine being Matt Taibbi this morning?
āBetter milk this con long as it goes,ā heās saying, probably.
The thing about saying that the government is on your side is that itās risky. It depends on existing political conditions. Biden knows that better than anyone in Washington. He got his start fighting āforced bussingā ā or the government compelling local public school boards to racially integrate. He made his nut telling white constituents they were right to be big mad.
Conditions, born of chaos (insurrection) and crisis (covid), have changed so much over the intervening years that Biden has gone from rebutting Ronald Reaganās 1982 SOTU, which reflected the last paradigmatic president to flip the way Americans understand themselves, to being a new paradigmatic president whoās flipping the way Americans understand themselves.
This man can do more than walk. Anyone who can convince America that stone-cold liberalism is down-the-middle politics deserves to run again.
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