The Moment It Unraveled

Everyone has their own idea of when exactly Biden’s presidency fell apart: the August 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal debacle and his media savaging over it; the February 2023 departure of left-curious chief of staff Ron Klain and his replacement by a private equity millionaire; Biden’s October 2023 “bear hug” of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his razing of Gaza; his disastrous June 2024 debate performance. Really, you could date it much earlier.

The decision that started the unraveling came as early as April 2021, when Biden decided to cleave in two what was meant to be the centerpiece of his presidency: a trillion-dollar injection to mend the country’s long-ailing infrastructure, and his Bernie Sanders–like progressive wish list (free community college, universal pre-K, and Medicare expansion, among other things), later called Build Back Better (BBB). Instead of a single, colossal piece of legislation, they would now, on Biden’s orders, be separate bills.

The move didn’t make a lot of sense. The two proposals needed to stay together in one big package for Biden to have the leverage to keep his flimsy Senate majority together; he had been warned by Senate Democrats’ number two and others that splitting it would jeopardize its chances, and he had even reportedly expressed privately that he needed to go big and fast and say to hell with GOP votes.

But despite all this — and despite having just seen his approval shoot up and getting the biggest plaudits of his career for ramming a stimulus bill through Congress on a party-line vote — Biden decided to do it anyway, because, as he explained to “some of my party who discouraged me from seeking an agreement with our Republican colleagues,” it was important to show bipartisanship still worked.

“I know a lot of you in the press, particularly, doubt that unity is possible, that anything bipartisan is possible. It’s hard, but it’s necessary,” he said.

Just as he had been warned, the resulting endless negotiations with Republicans over the infrastructure portion killed Biden’s momentum, while separating the original proposal into two gave the Senate’s corporate rebels the opening they needed to whittle down and block the bill they didn’t like, the safety net expansion. As months went by with no progress, inflation ticked up, and the media gave Biden black eye after black eye for leaving Afghanistan, the president had nothing to show for himself, and his approval ratings never recovered.

Worse, once he finally abandoned the progressive portion later that year, Biden would have nothing he could point to that voters would feel directly in their pocketbooks to offset their mounting frustration with a surging cost of living. Two years later, as he worked desperately to pass an enormous military aid bill for several increasingly unpopular foreign wars, he took the exact opposite approach, getting it over the line by stubbornly refusing to split it into two. By a generous read, it was a sign Biden had learned from his mistakes; by a less charitable one, it was a sign of his priorities.

It was vintage stuff from a man who, for all the rank cynicism and lack of principle that defined his career, had always held a genuine, hokey belief in the importance of the country’s two-party duopoly and had been more than willing to sacrifice working Americans to show it. Far from being “a man who could not choose,” Biden’s presidency fell apart precisely because he did choose — he just chose poorly, as he had done so many other times.

A Populism Unlike Any Other

What it meant was that, for all the incessant comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, as he departs office, Biden leaves behind no permanent new program or landmark welfare state expansion akin to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. In fact, he oversaw the rollback of the massive welfare state expansion occasioned by the pandemic, sometimes not lifting a finger to fight to keep it, sometimes actively pushing for the dismantling of some of its most popular components. After making an attack line out of the threat of Trump throwing 20 million people off their healthcare in 2020, Biden wound up throwing 25 million off theirs as president.

Meanwhile, what should have been wins were laced with political trip wires. Biden’s major contribution to the US safety net, the expanded child tax credit, was a temporary measure that expired a year later, after which the child poverty it had briefly slashed shot right back up again. He allowed Medicare to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, but only for ten of them, and only well after he would be done running for reelection, with the fine print watering the measure down even further. He chose the weakest legal rationale for forgiving student debt that all but ensured it would be struck down and delayed.

These are just some of the reasons the rapturous talk of a populist Biden presidency has rung so hollow. Voters didn’t experience a populist presidency, something they kept saying over and over to no avail; for them, Biden’s four years were ones of hunger, evictions, homelessness, dwindling savings, and mounting debt; of low wages and multiple jobs, and of mail carrying flabbergasting medical bills, or news of being denied care or losing their insurance altogether — all as the “European-style” safety net enacted during COVID slowly dissolved under their feet.

The voters weren’t imagining it. Biden has expressed regret for not putting his signature on the stimulus checks he sent out like Trump had, but seems to have no introspection over the fact that he nickel-and-dimed voters on the size of those checks before he even took office. One exasperated Democratic door-knocker in Georgia who leaned heavily on those checks to help win Biden a Senate majority called it “a betrayal of the working class.”

Unlike Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, one of the only left-of-center leaders to set his party up for reelection in the age of inflation, Biden chose to punt on raising the minimum wage to $15 early in his term, a key campaign promise that voters would have seen and felt the benefits of as inflation went up, and he never tried to again. Something else that vanished from his vocabulary: the words “public option,” a major campaign promise that was last mentioned by Biden in December 2020 — though he did continue a Trump-era scheme aimed at gradually privatizing Medicare. There are countless more examples.

If these paragraphs described a Republican administration, we’d find it laughable to call it “populist.” There’s no reason we shouldn’t do the same for this one.

Biden’s claim that he was “the most pro-union president in history” rests on similarly gaunt foundations. It’s true Biden was a staunchly pro-labor president and the most pro-labor one in modern memory, banning noncompete clauses and staffing a resolutely pro-union National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which catalyzed an explosion in workplace organizing that arguably made up for his squelching a railroad strike. It’s also true that the near-nonexistent bar set by his predecessors let him shuffle to the top spot by simply endorsing a union drive and walking a picket line.

But this too has its limits. Four years of a pro-labor NLRB hasn’t fundamentally reshaped the worker-employer relationship in the way passing major new labor law legislation would have. And for all the importance Biden placed on the NLRB, he leaves office failing, entirely thanks to his and his party’s own complacency, to install a pro-labor majority on it that would serve out the first two years of his union-busting successor’s coming term. How Biden’s pro-union legacy holds up may well rely on what Trump does with this gift Biden handed him on his way out.

Biden’s term was full of these kinds of contradictions: the man who ran against what he called Trump’s policy of “cruelty and exclusion” but continued and legitimized that policy as political common sense; who signed into law the largest climate investment in history while also investing trillions more in the carbon-belching military and making the United States the world’s largest fossil fuel producer; who vowed a “foreign policy for the middle class” before sending unprecedented billions out of the country for foreign wars and telling Americans to endure higher gas prices for them; who talked about saving democracy while ramping up the domestic war on terror and expanding warrantless spying powers; who promised to exorcize Trump from the soul of America but ended up handing him freer reign than ever to reshape the country in his image.

In the end, it’s a genuine question how much Biden the man was actually committed to his own putative agenda. Once it was dead, Biden barely talked about BBB or its constituent parts again, nor did he make it part of his 2024 campaign. His last three years were consumed instead with foreign policy — incidentally the worst area of his presidency, and one that seemed to become more calamitous the more he made it his central focus. Biden’s lame-duck period has been a stark demonstration of what matters to him, rushing out billions for “wars around the world,” bragging he had outdone the Cold War on funneling money to weapons manufacturers as he let the NLRB fall by the wayside.

Trumped-Up Trickle Down

Biden does firmly deserve credit for wrenching the United States from a very likely recession, and doing so with a distinctly un-Biden move: acting on one of the few lessons he and his party seemed to have learned from the Obama years and passing a large fiscal stimulus, deficit be damned. As gloomy as things have been for the US public economically, it would have been much worse without the jump-start this gave the US economy and the fiscal lifeline it gave to tapped-out states and cities.

After that, it gets iffy.

Biden’s infrastructure bill pumped $1 trillion into various public works projects across the country — a historic investment, even if it still left a shortfall worth trillions more and saw less than half actually doled out by the middle of last year, letting rising inflation and interest rates shave down its value as time went on. The investment served as a further shot in the arm to the economy and funded many worthy projects.

But it also came at a less-discussed cost: it has opened the door to more privatization of infrastructure, while its overwhelming focus on infrastructure like roads and airports that necessitate and drive the use of fossil fuels and its lack of climate-friendly strings attached threaten to make it a “climate time bomb,” as one transport policy group called it.

Likewise, Biden’s industrial policy and attempt to reshore key manufacturing in the United States made a crucial start on a process Trump centered his political identity around but did little about. That effort has seen manufacturing projects started and jobs created, albeit at a slower pace than the political cycle demands, and often without the worker-friendly conditions that were one of its selling points.

More dubious are Biden and his advisers’ claims that they have ended trickle-down economics and even neoliberalism itself. Biden’s industrial policy is a creature of both, a supply-side measure with a pro-labor gloss, aiming to shower big business with taxpayer money and hoping it bleeds over into workers’ pockets. He even put a Wall Street darling in charge of doling it out — who has, predictably, failed to make sure firms consistently deliver on things like good pay and respecting union rights, or to stop them from carrying out stock buybacks.

Biden’s climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), fits squarely in this model too. Another historic investment that looked to reach its policy goals by throwing money at private industry, the law has supercharged the production of renewable energy and the market shift toward it, as well as helping spur state- and municipal-level climate action.

But it’s also come with downsides, like yet another distinctly un-Rooseveltian boost to private ownership of infrastructure, or the fact that its focus on tax subsidies and expensive electric cars meant its benefits were mostly felt by the well-off. This was not the Green New Deal, which wasn’t about just spending lots of money on renewables but about creating an entire economic architecture that would ensure moving away from fossil fuels would be easy and painless for rich and poor alike, creating across-the-board buy-in to the idea. Yet few Americans took advantage of the IRA, and many couldn’t even point to its impact in their lives, something reflected in the Democrats’ dismal Election Night showing.

There are other bright spots in Biden’s presidency — the antitrust work of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, arguably the Biden appointee most loathed in corporate circles, comes to mind, as does his major expansion of veterans’ health benefits. But this money cannon is, thanks to the BBB’s defeat, the heart of Biden’s domestic record. Its exact legacy is still uncertain, not just because of the flaws discussed, but because less than 17 percent of it was spent by April last year, and Trump is now threatening to gut the climate measures as soon as he’s inaugurated.

What we can say for sure is it failed at its political goal of engineering an electoral realignment, partly because of its lengthy timeline, and partly because it was focused on an important but narrow slice of the working class in the construction and manufacturing sectors. Meanwhile, the fight against climate change is still in peril, thanks to more of the self-sabotage that was rife through Biden’s presidency: whether his record-high fossil fuel production, his continued hampering of global climate efforts, or his stoking a new Cold War with China, of which his industrial and climate strategies were a deliberate part, and which is already doing damage to both America’s and the world’s ability to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels.

When all was said and done, the sum of Biden’s domestic record amounted to a larger stimulus and a massive program of subsidizing big business, all justified and motivated by a needless drive for war. In other words, it’s roughly what you’d expect an attempt at left-populism to look like if it was tried by Joseph Biden.

Something Has Fundamentally Changed

In the end, Biden didn’t become “the most progressive president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” as Bernie Sanders once hoped, and he didn’t end trickle-down economics, which Biden recently and preposterously said “everything I’ve done in my career” had been “designed to change.” He didn’t even do the thing he claimed was the reason he had run for president and erase his predecessor from American political life; instead, Biden will be remembered as the inept, disastrous failure who legitimized and returned to power an emboldened Trump.

But maybe this is the wrong way to assess him. At the end of it all, Biden succeeded at the one overarching goal of his life, the one he happily lied, started wars, and helped immiserate working Americans to reach: electing Joe Biden president of the United States.

Many were stunned at the destructive selfishness Biden showed in running for a second term (a term he later admitted he wasn’t sure he could have served out anyway), and at the crisis and likely doom he stubbornly plunged his own party into by refusing to step aside. But that shock was a testament to how thoroughly Biden’s history has been rewritten over the past five years.

In reality, Biden’s career, like many elected officials, was a four-decade-long quest for the boyhood dream of sitting in the Oval Office, picking up and dropping principles, beliefs, and political priorities as he went — whatever suited the path of least resistance. We should probably not be surprised, then, that a man who built his career on lying for both convenience and self-aggrandizement and on shamelessly giving “different talks to different people,” as a voter once delicately put it, exhibited so many contradictions as he scrambled to establish some kind of legacy: whether his eleventh-hour transformation from a career-long champion of neoliberalism to its destroyer, his decision to sacrifice his populist agenda for the sake of bipartisanship, or his choice to lurch to the right, as well as to lean on NATO and unpopular “wars around the world” as his closing pitch, after running on ending “forever wars.”

What Biden’s presidency meant for liberalism and the broader progressive left is more complicated. On the one hand, Biden proved a successful, last-ditch vehicle for a corporate, media, and political establishment desperate to halt the rise of Bernie Sanders’s left-populist insurgency that could have gone toe to toe with Trump’s movement, pouring untold money and resources into propping him up against it and shielding him from scandals that could have ended his brittle campaign.

It worked. Biden — who almost no one in the Democratic establishment, least of all his former boss, had actually wanted to run — nevertheless bumbled his way into crushing the best chance a movement for social democracy had in the United States. That defeat was compounded by Biden’s subsequent abandonment of the progressive agenda he had negotiated with that movement and, now, his role in returning to power a Trump and GOP trifecta bent on destroying the organized left. While the neoliberal Biden of decades earlier worked deliberately to kneecap a leftward political shift, the new “populist” Biden merely did so by accident.

On the other hand, Biden gave the Left the important symbolic victory of proving its point, by virtue of having more political sense than Hillary Clinton and bringing Sanders’s movement into the fold. To this day, his progressive 2020 run, as tepid as it was, is the only Democratic campaign that’s ever beaten Trump, the closest thing to a real-world proof of concept for what the Left has been saying for years about how to win in electoral politics. Biden also gave the broad progressive left a genuine opening — its first in decades — to try and enact its vision, however badly fumbled it was when trusted to his hands.

His attempt at left-populism is less notable for what it tells us about Biden the man than the fact that he even tried it. It’s a testament to how the Left has reshaped the political terrain that one of the leaders of the Democratic Party’s rightward turn decided it was in his political interest, and the interests of his legacy, to spend his presidency doing his best Bernie Sanders impression. Barack Obama came into office thinking cutting entitlements is what history would remember him by; Biden, despite a lifetime taking aim at the programs, realized he would be better remembered for not doing so.

In another time, with a different Biden, even what relative progressivism was eked out of this administration would not have happened. We should look at Biden’s four years in a similar way to Trump’s, during which, in an act of desperation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the right-wing billionaire signed into law the massive welfare state expansion passed by a Democratic Congress and made a series of shockingly radical executive orders like his eviction ban — all ideas that had their origins on the Left. To different extents, both of these presidents were unlikely figures for the advancement of any kind of progressive policy, but thanks to years of left-wing movement-building and the historical moments they found themselves in, both realized they would benefit from poaching ideas from the Left.

Biden’s time in the White House didn’t make up for the damage he inflicted on Americans over five decades to get there, let alone fix it. But after being widely pilloried for pledging that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he became president, Biden can now at least safely say that’s not true. As he departs the White House, Biden leaves behind a country far more disillusioned, divided, and beaten down than when he took office, and places it under the control of a man he believes is a fascist.