[ The president repudiates the neoliberal ideologies of the past
and puts the party on solid economic and political ground.]
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BIDEN FORGES A NEW DEMOCRATIC PARADIGM  
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Harold Meyerson
February 8, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ The president repudiates the neoliberal ideologies of the past and
puts the party on solid economic and political ground. _

President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address at the
U.S. Capitol on February 7, 2023., PATRICK SEMANSKY/AP PHOTO

 

Well, _that _was a Joe Biden who could win re-election.

In his second State of the Union address, the president exhibited such
a surprising display of vigor, such a capacity for empathy, such a
knack for storytelling, and such a mastery of political improvisation
that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the speech itself was
almost a refoundation of American liberalism. On-the-stump
improvisation has always been the bane of Biden’s rhetorical
existence, but his snap response to Republican heckling—effectively
compelling them in real time to back off their otherwise perpetual and
instinctual war on social insurance—was a moment of political
virtuosity the likes of which we almost never see in public life, much
less in Biden’s public life. He may have been gamed by Joe Manchin
behind closed doors, but he just gamed the Republicans before an
audience in the tens of millions.

All of which may eclipse just how thoroughly Biden’s speech set the
Democratic Party and American liberalism on sounder economic and
political ground than they’ve been since the New Deal. Compare
Biden’s analysis of what ails the American economy to those put
forth by some previous Democratic presidents—Carter and Clinton most
particularly, but at times, Obama as well—and what you see is a
thorough repudiation of what once was the Democratic establishment’s
holy writ. Biden declared that globalization, once touted as a
solution, was really the problem. The doctrine of “Buy American,”
so ridiculed by Wall Street Democrats and the self-proclaimed
pragmatists who viewed corporate globalism as the inevitable way of
the world, was not only affirmed by Biden but made a requirement for
federally funded infrastructure projects.

Just a decade ago, when the Steelworkers union protested that building
the new span of the Oakland Bay Bridge with Chinese steel wasn’t
really such a hot idea, they were scorned as not just protectionists
but primitives by the party’s moneymen. Decades ago, the Democratic
presidential primary campaigns of Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin (a progressive
populist) and Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt (an economic nationalist)
were dismissed by polite opinion and the party establishment as so
much pandering to a dwindling blue-collar constituency that failed to
heed Bill Clinton’s college-centric stump-speech adage that “what
you earn depends on what you learn.” 

Decades ago, when Economic Policy Institute (EPI) founder Jeff Faux
argued that the R&D tax credit should be fully rewarded only when a
new product was not only devised in America but manufactured here as
well, Faux’s was a voice in the wilderness. Last night, Faux’s
sentiment was echoed by the president, who lamented that while
Americans had invented the semiconductor and once produced 40 percent
of the planet’s store of them, today we produce just 10 percent, a
decline that Biden’s massive funding of domestic semiconductor
production is intended to reverse. 

Faux was just one of a number of progressive economic thinkers who
could justly claim to be the intellectual authors of portions of
Biden’s speech. Taking a line from Seattle businessman Nick Hanauer,
Biden committed the party to “middle-out” economics, as opposed to
the top-down variety beloved by Republicans and corporate Democrats.
Biden also proposed quadrupling the tax on corporations that buy back
their own stock rather than investing their profits in research or
production or, outrageous though it sounds, higher wages—an idea
whose father is economist William Lazonick. Readers of
the _Prospect_ or _Democracy_, accustomed to advocacy for
industrial policy, antitrust actions, and worker rights, would have
found Biden’s analysis and proposals old hat, save that this time,
they were coming not from the pages of lefty magazines but from the
president of the United States. (In fact, it was the first time the
word “antitrust” was mentioned in a State of the Union address
since 1979.)

Doctrinally, Biden’s address was a wholesale repudiation of the
economics of both the Carter and Clinton presidencies, against which
EPI and a few outliers like the _Prospect_’s Bob Kuttner,
economists Lester Thurow and Barry Bluestone, and socialist Michael
Harrington had railed. As those dissidents’ predictions came to
pass, as wages stagnated and the middle class shriveled, growing
majorities among House Democrats voted against trade accords like
NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations for China, which were
nonetheless enacted with Republican and establishment Democratic
support. In time, the critical chorus swelled to include Occupy Wall
Street, Bernie Sanders’s legions, and two generations of young, but
not entirely up-and-coming, Americans: the millennials and Gen Zers.

It may have taken the shock of Donald Trump’s working-class support
to spur the Democrats to acknowledge what Biden termed in his speech
“the hollowing out” of Middle America under Democratic as well as
Republican administrations. It may have taken the Republicans’
majority support within the white working class, and growing support
within the Black and brown working class as well, for Democrats to
pledge, as Biden did last night, to devote unprecedented resources to
a “blue-collar blueprint” for our hollowed-out regions, to invest,
as Biden said, “in places and people who’ve been forgotten.”

And so, a completely asymmetric war for blue-collar America has
commenced. Biden and the Democrats hope to woo at least some of it
back through investment and through policy to affirm “the dignity of
work,” the mantra of Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, whose staunch
opposition to globalization and the ensuing hollowing-out has made him
the only Democrat who can win statewide in Ohio. Republicans, as
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders made clear in her official
Republican response to Biden’s speech, hope to consolidate their
gains among working-class voters by depicting Biden as a creature of
the woke left. She railed against critical race theory (which she
referenced with the initialism “CRT,” a shorthand that’s likely
foreign to the majority of Americans) and touted eliminating the use
in her first weeks as governor of the word “Latinx.” Of course, if
that was the usage of Arkansas government before she took office, it
was put there by her Republican predecessor.

By their details shall you know them. Sanders axed “Latinx.” Biden
called for laws and rules that banned hotels adding “resort fees”
to their bills and airlines charging extra when families want to sit
together. Biden seems to me to have the better of that argument, both
small and large. I doubt many Arkansans have encountered the word
“Latinx,” which is the necessary prerequisite to being bothered by
it, while I suspect more Americans have encountered those resort or
family-sitting-together fees. Biden’s wager is that by addressing
actual problems that non-rich Americans encounter, he can make headway
against the culture-war issues that often are metaphors for what the
right says are attacks on working-class culture.

Besides, Biden is a hard target to slime with the charge of wokeism.
Cultural issues were anything but the major focus of his speech last
night, the core of which was really a straightforward appeal to
working-class voters that was not just culturally affirming but also
economically tangible. You have to go all the way back to Harry Truman
to find a Democratic president who made those themes the centerpiece
of his presidency. And against all odds, we should recall, Truman was
returned to office.

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

Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
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