Joe Biden ran for president as Mr. Normalcy. During the pandemic, with the body count rising and the economy teetering, he looked pretty good next to a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who refused to lead the nation or take responsibility for it. Compared to Donald Trump, Biden was a no-brainer. All he had to do was stand up straight, brush his teeth and comb his hair.
But Biden is not Mr. Normalcy, never was. He’s long denied this fact, to be sure, for reasons good and bad, but he seems to have changed his mind. During a speech in Chicago, he embraced the fact that he is what his former boss had wanted to be: a transformational president. “Bidenomics is working,” he said. “The American people strongly support Bidenomics.”
This is a BFD, and not because Biden is taking possession of an insult hurled at him by the GOP. (That, in fact, is not a BFD; it’s a clever perspective intended for people who believe themselves to be clever.) “Bidenomics” is real, new and, most of all, believable. That its namesake is self-consciously embracing it, indeed running for reelection on it, is a BFD. He’s saying the old political order is dead, and vote for me and I’ll make sure it stays dead.
“Bidenomics” is real. The economy keeps adding jobs at rates unseen since the 1960s. Private companies hired nearly half a million people last month, doubling expectations. (Inflation has also been slowing down, for months).
“Bidenomics” is new. The last time the federal government invested in the economy, in the way that it’s currently investing in it, was six decades ago, which also happens to be the last time jobs were added at historic rates.
“Government is no longer shying away from pushing investment toward specific goals and industries,” according to the Post’s EJ Dionne. “Spending on public works is back in fashion. New free-trade treaties are no longer at the heart of the nation’s international strategy. Challenging monopolies and providing support for unionization efforts are higher priorities.”
But the biggest reason “Bidenomics” is a BFD is that it’s believable.
Since I came of age in the 1980s, most people most of the time have been receptive to the claim that “government interference” in a free market – taxing wealth, regulating critical industries, expanding opportunities, public works – is something akin to socialism. To be sure, no one knew what socialism was, not even the so-called socialists. It just sounded right.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnnell said that the president’s student debt-relief program is “student loan socialism.” Thirty years ago, that would likely have made a loud clang. But it doesn’t sound right anymore. It can’t.
For one thing, the Great (Long) Recession showed everyone that a free market isn’t really free. If you’re too big to fail, you’re also too big to jail – full stop. For another, the pandemic showed everyone that “government interference” isn’t as bad as its reputation, given that we might be dead without it. The lucky survivors among us would be much poorer, too.
So Biden is not arguing that the old political order is dead. He’s pointing his finger at the corpse and saying, look, it’s dead. In Chicago, he declared that the regime of the last 40 years, which included the economic policies of his two Democratic predecessors, is no longer viable. New conditions, new challenges and new urgencies call for the establishment of a new regime.
Normal presidents try to appear to break from the past.
Transformational presidents do not try to appear to break. They break.
But the past was already broken.
Biden is not leading the way toward regime change as much as he’s leading the way toward a new consensus that the old regime has changed, has been changing. The old regime (sometimes called “neoliberalism,” sometimes called “Reaganomics,” named after Ronald Reagan) started OK. It privileged tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and free trade. But that was at the expense of normal people, their standards of living, and the democracies they inhabited. The old regime was great – if you were very obscenely rich.
Even so, every president since 1980, including Biden’s former boss, has defended and protected a political order that over time immiserated the middle class. (Wages were higher in the 1960s, adjusted for inflation, than they are today, though, thanks to “Bidenomics,” they are catching up.)
Joe Biden is the first president in my lifetime, going back to Richard Nixon, to self-consciously take the side of people who work for a living while also self-consciously making enemies of people who own so much they don’t have to work. That’s a transformational president. That’s regime change.
That’s a BFD.
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