Bidenism After Biden
Amid the growing chaos of his second administration, Donald Trump has declared yet again his intent to restore American industry. As before, plans for new tariffs, corporate tax cuts, and ramped up fossil-fuel production—Trump’s preferred methods to stoke growth—have distressed top trade partners, importers, budget hawks, environmentalists, and now, with some economic markers trending downward, anxious consumers. A familiar degree of skepticism and foreboding likewise pervades the economics profession and foreign-policy establishment. Many analysts warn of grave turbulence ahead, rather than the “golden age” Trump heralded in his inauguration speech.
The attraction to Trump’s cocksure message in 2024 was driven by a recurring panic over the eclipse of the American Century, made rawer still by inflation, the unconvincing Covid recovery, and Joe Biden’s ghostly tenure. Despite Trump’s manifest flaws and the mounting backlash to Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, there seems to be a willingness across the country to test a more assertive “America First” agenda, predicated above all on “energy abundance.”
The geopolitical conditions which partly made this resurgence possible cannot simply be wished away by progressives who instinctively recoil from the idea of a “national interest.” At no time since the 1930s have the United States’s strategic vulnerabilities weighed so heavily on its political economy. China’s relentless export model and leaps in A.I. are conspiring to make countless jobs redundant. New plant investment, meanwhile, requires vast subsidies from the federal government—which may soon be rolled back thanks to Trump’s aversion to renewables. Meanwhile, despite recent talk of “deglobalization” and the egalitarian possibilities it might hold, democratic capitalism appears to be nearing the threshold of extinction.
As progressives scramble to find their bearings, it is likely most will not want to revisit Bidenism and its assumptions anytime soon. But this would be a mistake. Biden’s policies reflected a conviction that, left to its own devices, the market can’t be counted on to provide Americans with essential jobs, skills, and products. His administration understood that it would take a significant exercise of state authority and state capacity to incentivize making things here. Bidenism also effectively conceded that the old progressives who forewarned a great unraveling under global capitalism were right. Out of the principle of capitalist competition, we have weakened our ability to provide for our citizens—and now, after pawning off our know-how, we may be on the verge of producing little of what the world wants or needs. Turning the page from Biden need not—and should not—mean turning away completely from Bidenism.
From the outset, the Biden administration was thrust into the crosswinds. It promised a renewed respect for norms and steady global leadership, but it also realized that, in important respects, the old order could not hold. For all Trump’s failures, his alarm over America’s industrial decline and the exhaustion of the international order were vindicated before and during Biden’s term. First of all, China had taken advantage of the World Trade Organization and other international institutions at the expense of American companies and workers. Lately, it’s even reneged on its own commitment to multilateral climate action—the holy grail of international cooperation—by deepening a massive trade surplus built on continued use of coal-fired plants and other heavy industry. What’s more, the pandemic exposed the folly of just-in-time production and far-flung supply chains. And Russia’s war in Ukraine revealed the vital importance of “energy independence,” both for national security and the market stability that welfare states depend on. The rules of the international system, so many of them rooted in global economic integration, could not furnish a decisive response to the crises at hand. Liberal democracy’s survival, these overlapping emergencies made clear, depended on reestablishing the legitimacy of national economic prerogatives.
The challenge for Democrats, made harder to confront by Biden’s flagging presence, was to convince both their base and working-class voters that they could succeed where Trump failed and that it was imperative to do so. But the rhetorical resources were lacking. The Green New Deal in particular proved a poor motivating concept; progressive ideology in general seems unable to serve as the wellspring for the “project state” the way it did in the mid-twentieth century. Instead, by the time Biden took office it had taken on an overly partisan hue that only raised suspicions about Democratic priorities, especially from blue-collar workers who already viewed the liberal elite as disloyal outsourcers of jobs.
Meanwhile, continuities with Trump’s first term and his neo-mercantilist outlook caught much of the Democratic Party’s base flat-footed, despite having reasons to brag that their leaders were doing more for manufacturing than Trump ever did. Democrats, not least Biden himself, had invested so much in repudiating everything Trump stood for, including his Fordist nostalgia. But no matter how much Biden invoked Franklin Roosevelt to justify his policies, his promise to fortify American industry was shadowed by his predecessor’s. As Trump, that avatar of flamboyant moguldom, understood, this could only be achieved by shielding major sectors from Chinese competition and ignoring orthodox economics. But in most instances his tariffs achieved little, and were undermined by giveaways to the ultrawealthy and shareholder class. As beleaguered Democrats from the industrial Midwest noted, Trump’s Wall Street-friendly agenda ran counter to his pledge to boost plant construction and halt offshoring. Still, the core argument that Trump had made since Japan’s rise in the 1980s held: the United States would eventually be hobbled if it did not defy the very rules it had prescribed for global trade and development.
The reason for this brewing crisis was straightforward. As long as it made “good” economic sense for domestic firms and large multinationals to manufacture abroad, the trade deficit would widen. That may not have mattered much in the “unipolar” moment, when it appeared that the United States’ unmatched military power, an explosion of low-cost goods from China, and the tech boom would ease the transition to a post-industrial economy. But the trade deficit inevitably drew down state capacity, worker training, and institutional know-how within fading industries. Simply importing more to meet the country’s infrastructure and technology needs could not solve the crisis of development in communities where it had become, in theory, too costly to keep plants online.
The notion that limits on domestic reinvestment would become permanent in a world system dominated by China—a country on pace to level the economic rationale for advanced manufacturing in Germany—burrowed its way into the minds of rising Democratic policymakers such as Jake Sullivan, Biden’s future National Security Advisor. Democrats, he and other policy minds understood, could not leave it to someone as erratic and contemptible as Trump to prevent such an outcome. The lowered ambitions of the Obama era also weighed upon the party’s congressional wing and labor-friendly economic advisors like Jared Bernstein. Accomplishing big things in the real economy would require more than “cleaning up Trump’s mess” or making the safety net a little more generous. As Sullivan wrote in a 2018 essay, Democrats had to confront “the geography of opportunity” if they wanted to strengthen democracy at home.
Besting Trump’s bluster on manufacturing while restoring America’s leadership on climate seemed tantalizingly possible, particularly since Biden was willing to declare an end to the “paradigm” that had hollowed out working-class communities from northeastern Ohio to the North of England. The drawbacks of upping the ante on protectionism, meanwhile, seemed negligible, despite pleas for lower tariffs from economists like Larry Summers. As Biden knew, Midwestern Democrats had survived largely because of their opposition to the old Washington Consensus. Then–Senator Sherrod Brown and other left-populists were relieved when Biden affirmed the one judgment of Trump’s they felt held merit.
Following the administration’s Covid stimulus bill, Biden’s team and congressional Democrats set to work forging an industrial strategy that would funnel money toward local infrastructure and incentivize domestic production of renewables, advanced chips, and related tech, particularly in regions that Democrats had retreated from since the 2010 midterms. As a practical matter, tax credits and trade barriers, including more tariffs, would be critical to making the plan work, since otherwise both infant and established firms would have little reason not to locate production in China and other places that assured high profit margins. Actions previously considered ill-advised under Trump became, overnight, part of the new arsenal of democracy.
The overall thrust of Biden’s experiments pointed to the resurrection of what economist Mariana Mazzucato called the “entrepreneurial state.” To revive growth and competition, the state had to do more than soften capitalism’s rough edges. But there were limits to this neo-Hamiltonian industrial strategy. Other tools that might have aided in a more thorough transformation of “supply-side” management—like new iterations of New Deal-era entities such as the Public Works Administration, Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and Office of Price Administration—were considered off limits. Direct and indirect subsidies would have to suffice in a political system that typically forbade public ownership and explicit economic planning.
In spite of these limitations the response of the Atlanticist intellectual class was uneasy. Though hardly an attack on profits, Bidenism did threaten the status quo as it had evolved since the globalizing 1990s, characterized by low taxes, wage restraint, outsourcing, and “creative destruction.” One of the seeming paradoxes of globalization was that, while it had promised a “leaner” state in exchange for new avenues of growth, it had, in some respects, relied on more means-tested social assistance (public and quasi-public) while privileging rents over productivity. Modest improvements to the safety net, even if they raised the specter of new taxes, did not fundamentally encroach on the free play of markets.
From Wall Street’s perspective, Biden’s industrial policy risked a slippery slope to far more intrusive capital controls. While that fear overstated what was likely under his presidency—not least due to the market in green energy tax credits his policies created—the intensified U.S.-China rivalry signaled he was perhaps willing to go further than Trump. Efforts to incentivize U.S. allies to adopt complementary industrial policies illustrated a determination to rewire the world order.
In the end, domestic political support for this expansive grand strategy proved wanting. Weary from inflation, many American workers doubted the efficacy of Biden’s trillions in spending. Headlines that hailed a manufacturing renaissance due to the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act were offset by reports of snarled projects and stagnating output in older sectors. Meanwhile, there was a deepening sense that U.S. foreign policy had become dangerously overextended in the Middle East and Ukraine in ways not seen since the George W. Bush years. Rather than crater under the weight of its own ambitions, Bidenism was swallowed up by the very international chaos and suffering that Biden had sworn he would prevent.
America after Biden is a country that defies easy explanation. Against all the evidence of his prior misrule, enough voters at the margins believed that Trump, not Kamala Harris, would restore normalcy. However tragicomic, the motivations behind Trump’s victory cannot all be reduced to base impulses. There is a gnawing hunger for growth and “dynamism” of a qualitatively different sort than what has occurred this century. As with so many of his political bets, Trump’s intuition on this front was rewarded: American voters still seem to dread stagnation more than the burdens of work.
Amid mounting global crises, Democrats made the fatal mistake of dismissing Trump’s pitch as nothing more than warmed over Reaganism. This missed the basic juxtaposition that favored Trump. Biden’s troubled agenda was predicated on creating a new path to security and sustainable development, whereas Trump brashly declared that the old methods were more reliable, more efficient, and less demanding of workers. In a world of frightening unpredictability, Trump essentially promised what liberals used to promise: that living standards would continue to rise for the next generation of Americans. For all the fanfare about what they had achieved under Biden, Democrats did not convincingly stick to this most elemental pledge. When presented the chance to speak to people’s pain, they instead presented them with Kamala Harris’s gauzy “opportunity economy.”
Trump capitalized on voters’ desperation. In comparison in 2016, he more readily invoked the idea of national providence, while letting the theme of “American carnage” fall to a lower register. He hearkened to William McKinley, the staunchest protectionist in the history of the GOP, to redeem popular belief in American exceptionalism. Critics mocked the infatuation with this unloved personification of the Gilded Age and late-nineteenth-century conquest, yet Trump’s historical shorthand recalled a time when the country was ascendant, not embattled and overextended. More than ever, he was declaring that decline need not be the country’s fate.
The déjà vu of Trump’s first weeks back in office has had the air of a bleak cosmic joke. Most Democrats are at loss over how to appear competent, much less recover a positive vision for the country. As Trump bulldozes his way toward consolidating executive power, it is tempting to conclude that worship of the tycoon and the rehabilitation of Manifest Destiny will stamp out what remains of the progressive tradition. But an American left that is determined to persevere will not get very far bemoaning credulous voters. Nor will the same rote condemnations counter Trump and his cabal.
An effective politics must at last comprehend that, as far back as 2015, Trump tapped into—and in some ways flagrantly coopted—arguments that were once common on the Democratic Party’s left flank. From Indiana Senator Vance Hartke, a forgotten author of the Great Society, to Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, a torchbearer of progressive populism during the go-go Nineties, the preservation of the American dream through fair competition and trade, industrial, and regional investment policies had been a hallmark of progressives who sought to steer, not merely react to, market forces. They were, in effect, proponents of “pre-distribution” as the best means to disperse political and economic power. That is, they favored the use of government policy to ensure the greatest possible distribution of goods and services with respect to the needs of different communities.
The effort to provide the resources to make life whole did not reflect a sub rosa utopianism. Rather, it held that the modern United States, having transitioned from agrarian colony to industrial behemoth, was obligated to provide for each of its citizens. There was no reason, in the view of the old progressives, that technological change and the rising wealth of other nations should sweep away the opportunities that made small cities and towns thrive. They warned, too, that the pillars of a decent society ought not give way to a culture of greed and a social contract offering only remedial aid and fleeting comforts. In a land of plenty, the outbreak of acute need at the end of the twentieth century was a terrible omen of where the country was headed.
Just twenty years ago, it seemed possible that this tradition could remake American politics. The War on Terror, the financial meltdown, and the foreclosure of millions of homes had exposed just how distorted the American experiment and American power had become. The chance to recover it was then consumed by the great epistemic wars over MAGA and America’s past. In this fractured context, the partial solutions of Bidenism fell short of a foundation for a new social contract.
Yet those voices who persuaded Biden that he had inherited an emergency far greater than Covid weren’t wrong about which tools could, with time, help make the country whole. Rather, the project they began was sabotaged by status quo forces within the Democratic Party and the same hawkish security paradigm that had helped justify reinvesting at home.
American society thus faces a choice about the future of its development: it can fight to radically delimit the profit motive and massively invest in wage-earners and left-behind places, or it can become a subsidiary market of private equity and multinationals in an unaccountable and undemocratic global system. It can invest in social goods like schools, hospitals, transportation, and housing, and ensure there are enough jobs dedicated to building climate resilience, or it can the test the consequences of another round of creative destruction.
Donald Trump’s vision of Fordism redux is unlikely to provide a sustainable or coherent answer. Though at times unorthodox, he remains very much a capitalist, and his plans will soon meet the test of profitability and consumer welfare as conventionally understood. Whether Democrats make any effort to prepare an alternative vision is another matter. Those who profited handsomely from the spectacle of the Harris campaign are attached to a dying order, while many of the party’s self-appointed reformers seem to be readying the banner of good governance as the antidote to Trump’s clientelism. For others, the best hope for winning back Congress and the White House is for Democrats to come to their senses and seize the “abundance” principle from Trump. In all such cases, Democrats seem determined to avoid a reckoning over how economic power has distorted and frayed American life. Yet this evasion on behalf of the party’s masters will only sap the will to confront what lies ahead. The plain truth is that Trump will either destroy the American Dream and all that underpins it, or buy it time at untold cost. Those who grasp the stakes cannot stand idle for long.
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