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THINK BIDEN’S UNPOPULAR? CHECK OUT HIS FELLOW LEADERS.  
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Harold Meyerson
December 23, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ If floundering leaders and ineffectual democracies are the new
norm, we’re in a very dangerous time. _

From left, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, President Joe Biden,
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, and President Emmanuel Macron of
France pose for a photo as they meet at the Chancellery in Berlin,
October 18, 2024., Ben Curtis/AP Photo

 

Even though many economic metrics show Joe Biden’s term as president
to have been a success (and a historic success by the metric of
enhancing workers’ rights), by political metrics it has to be judged
to be a flop. It’s becoming clearer that much of the reasons for
that flop resulted from Biden’s age-related infirmities
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which made him a very uncertain trumpet for his own policies.

But when Biden is put up against his peers, it also becomes clear that
something more menacing than the travails of age is stalking the
leaders of the foremost Western powers. The polling firm Morning
Consult surveyed citizens of the world’s major democracies
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late November and early December, and the results, even allowing for
exceptional margins of error, show that Biden is anything but alone.

Morning Consult had Biden with a 37 percent approval rating, against a
55 percent disapproval rating. That dismal approval number, however,
was roughly _twice_ the size of the leaders of France and Germany,
and higher than those of all the leaders of the G7 nations save Italy,
with whom he was effectively tied. Here, in descending order of
approval, are the numbers:

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni: 38 percent approval to 55 percent
disapproval

America’s Biden: 37 to 55

The U.K.’s Keir Starmer: 30 to 59

Canada’s Justin Trudeau: 26 to 68

Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba: 24 to 53

Germany’s Olaf Scholz: 19 to 75

France’s Emmanuel Macron: 18 to 75

Most leaders of major democracies that aren’t members of the G7 also
came in with a negative balance. Spain’s Pedro Sanchez put up a 32
percent approval rating to 63 percent disapproval; Brazil’s Lula
(before his emergency surgery) was at 42/53, and Poland’s Donald
Tusk almost broke even, 44/45. It’s important to note the vast
ideological spectrum of these leaders, ranging from the democratic
socialism of Sanchez and Lula to the right populism of Meloni.

By contrast, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, who is continuing the very
popular left-populism of her mentor and presidential predecessor,
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has an approval rating of 64 percent to
a disapproval rating of 28 percent. Argentina’s Javier Milei, who
mixes the ideology of Ayn Rand with the authoritarian swagger of Elon
Musk, comes in at 66/29, though a December Gallup poll puts his
approval rating significantly lower, at 48 percent. As over half the
Argentinean public, by the government’s own measures, lives in
poverty, and more than a quarter in “extreme poverty,” it’s
likely that polling the poorer half of Argentineans is difficult.

That same prevalence of poverty may have led Morning Consult to
overrate the popularity of India’s Narendra Modi, whose approval
rating sits at 76 percent, though India’s recent parliamentary
elections registered a significant drop in support for Modi’s party.
Indeed, it’s notable that Morning Consult’s positive findings were
achieved in nations with significantly higher rates of poverty and
extreme poverty—and thereby higher rates of difficulty in reaching
sub-middle-class residents—than the nations whose leaders placed
lower on the approval scale.

What is beyond dispute is that the leaders in nations with what we
call advanced economies, where it’s easier to reach a genuine cross
section of the public, all bombed. That’s as true for elections as
it is for approval ratings. As former Biden aide Bharat
Ramamurti pointed out
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incumbent party in a developed nation facing re-election in 2024 lost,
and Biden’s party actually fared the best among them all, losing the
presidency by only 1.5 points in the popular vote and gaining seats in
the House of Representatives.

In none of these developed nations are the economies performing to the
public’s satisfaction, notwithstanding Biden’s significant
achievement in the U.S., with the highest cumulative GDP growth
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the pandemic. In most of these nations, immigration is also a source
of considerable dissatisfaction, but it’s chiefly economic
conditions, and the ineffectualness of governments in bettering them,
that are bringing their leaders down.

The post–World War II welfare states in those nations have been
eroded by capital’s escape from regulations, taxation, and
employment standards that their governments once enacted, and none of
those nations’ governments have been able to arrest the accompanying
shift in income from wages to investments. Offshoring, but also the
growing mechanization of manufacturing, has simultaneously reduced the
number of and rewards for jobs in industry. The broad prosperity of
the 30 years following World War II, when democracies with advanced
economies saw real wages and median incomes increase due to those
nations’ pre-global social contracts, has long since vanished in the
rearview mirror.

In 1937, during Franklin Roosevelt’s second term as president, the
economy, which had been recovering steadily since he took office in
1933, took a sharp turn downward, due chiefly to the government’s
abrupt enactment of a balanced budget. Within six months, the
reduction in spending that the budget cuts induced led to such a slump
in consumption that more jobs were lost than had been lost during the
first two years (1929-1930) of the Great Depression. Many Americans
then feared that government, even a government headed by Roosevelt,
who’d won re-election the year before by the greatest margin in
American history, was powerless to reverse the dire economic
conditions that were beginning to appear routine and perhaps even
inescapable.

With Roosevelt uncertain as to how to proceed, and with Hitler and
Stalin increasingly looming over Europe, Marriner Eccles, then chair
of the Federal Reserve, and the most progressive Fed leader in its
history, sent Roosevelt a note. “The greatest threat to democracy
today lies in the growing conviction that it cannot work,” he said.
“I urge that you provide the democratic leadership that will make
our system function. Only in that way can the growing threat of
fascism be overcome.”

Fortunately, Roosevelt did provide that leadership, persuading
Congress to increase spending, which began again the reduction in
unemployment that culminated with the massive job creation of World
War II. But the shift in public allegiance from democracy to strongman
rule against which Eccles warned is with us again today, and not just
because the bottlenecks to effective government encased in our
constitutional structure, and the right’s hundred years’ war on
government, have paved Donald Trump’s path to power. That shift is
also with us, and with all our peer nations, because national
democracies have been rendered weaker by global capital.

In the roughly 70 years between the end of the Civil War and the
coming of the New Deal, what had been an economy of local businesses
morphed into one dominated by national corporations over which state
and local American governments had little if any control. It was a
time of great and rising economic inequality, and it was not until
FDR’s presidency that the national government won the power to
regulate those corporations and set standards that bettered the lot of
most Americans. Today, like those local governments of yore, merely
national governments lack the power and coordination to effectively
regulate global banks and corporations, and economic inequality again
has soared. Unless and until those governments can find a way to do
that—presumably, in concert—the poll ratings of the leaders of
democracies may continue to be depressed, and the toxic allure of
autocratic rule may become a lasting feature of our times.

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._

_Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
[[link removed]], 2024. All rights reserved. _

_Read the original article at Prospect.org:
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