Joe Biden Is Not Ready to Confront Corporate America
Joe Biden will likely govern to the left of Barack Obama. But his willingness to spend has everything to do with capital’s relaxation of deficit worries — and where capital says “no,” no one should expect Biden to say “yes.”
Jill Biden and President-elect Joe Biden wave as they arrive on the East Front of the US Capitol for the inauguration in Washington, DC. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
Joe Biden has spent the last year trying to be everything to everyone. In the Democratic presidential primary, he ran as the moderate who could beat Trump. At the same time, he tried to convince the large section of the Democratic electorate who wanted more than a return to normal that he had real progressive roots. In the general election, he vowed a decisive repudiation of Trump’s legacy, while simultaneously assuring country-club Republicans that the changes he promised wouldn’t be too radical.
Biden is hardly the first politician to shape-shift as it suits him. Yet as a summary of what to expect from his administration, you could do worse than “change, but not too much.” Biden is likely to pursue a more progressive macroeconomic policy than the Obama administration — largely because the parameters of elite opinion have shifted. In this, as in everything else, Biden campaigning as a consensus candidate has left him ill-prepared for any confrontation with elites.
New Day in Babylon
Though Biden ran as a moderate in the Democratic primaries, the fact that he did so while promising more progressive economic policies than anything seen under Obama only underscores how the party’s center of gravity has shifted. Biden ran on making community college free, lowering the Medicare eligibility to sixty, and massively expanding public housing assistance. Recently, he’s given his approval to a new round of substantial stimulus checks.
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