Watching the Wheels Fall Off

In early 2021, no one expected that Trump would again take the oath of office in 2025. After his increasingly bizarre attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, culminating in the January 6th riot, he was widely seen as a disgraced figure who might become the first former president to land in prison. Joe Biden entered office buoyed by embarrassingly positive media coverage. His additions to Trump’s temporary pandemic relief measures and promises of a “Build Back Better” agenda led to breathless coverage declaring him the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Today that feels like ancient history. Some welfare-state measures he promised during the election, like a “public option” for health insurance, were dropped the moment he entered office. Others fell to legislative wrangling with his party’s conservative wing. Sometimes there may have been nothing Democratic leadership could do against their caucus’s obstructionism. Other times, Biden and party leaders performed the political equivalent of a basketball player flopping after minimal contact. When Democrats had enough votes to push a $15 minimum wage through Senate reconciliation, for instance, they simply accepted the Senate parliamentarian’s nonbinding ruling that the measure’s budgetary impact was too “incidental” — despite having the power to override or replace her.

His labor record was mostly a bright spot. His National Labor Relations Board appointees undid much of Trump’s damage and issued numerous pro-union rulings. Even that comes with a massive asterisk — his disgraceful decision in late 2022 to break a railway strike by invoking the Railway Labor Act, a hideous piece of pre–New Deal union-busting legislation.

When a descendant of the big Build Back Better legislative package that was originally sold as the New Deal 2.0 finally limped its way across the finish line, it was missing all of the exciting social democratic measures that had originally been floated. There was no universal pre-K, no paid family and medical leave, no free community college. As his increasingly pointless presidency dragged on, Biden even talked about these things less and less. More than anything else, the Inflation Reduction Act that was eventually passed was a grab bag of tax credits. There was some infrastructure spending, but very little actually got built. Meanwhile, the temporary expansions of the welfare state during the COVID-19 pandemic lapsed. Few of the Biden cheerleaders in the media who’d breathlessly noted that this assistance had “cut child poverty in half” in 2021 paused to run the numbers in the opposite direction when it all went away.

Biden’s cognitive decline (already widely commented on in 2020) was getting harder and harder to deny. Even as the Democratic Party acted to ensure he would be coronated for his reelection run without any opposition candidates getting a chance to make their case and build public support, the president could hardly open his mouth in public without raising serious questions about his competence to do the job.

All of this would have been catastrophic even without Israel’s genocidal war against the population of Gaza. As it is, Biden has spent the fifteen months since the October 7 terrorist attacks providing Benjamin Netanyahu with an endless supply of bombs to drop on schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. Even as millions of Palestinian civilians were driven from their homes at gunpoint, Biden stood by the policy of unconditional support for Israel’s war. Universal pre-K? Free community college? Biden literally might not even remember that he’d ever promised those things.

But through all the months of social media feeds filling with videos of Israeli soldiers posing in the lingerie of Palestinian women they’d killed or driven from their homes and playing with their children’s toys, Biden never wavered. Even as it became universally obvious that Netanyahu had a strong preference for working with Donald Trump and was only too happy to tank Biden’s reelection chances, Biden stood by his proxy. By the time he made his far-too-late decision to step aside and let his vice president (who could at least speak in complete sentences) be the Democratic nominee, his Gaza policy had earned him the deep hatred of many Democratic voters. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, passed on every opportunity to undo the damage. A recent poll showed that, among 2020 Biden voters who didn’t cast their ballots for Harris in 2024, the single largest subgroup (29 percent) cited “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” as “the main factor affecting their vote,” beating even “the economy” (cited by only 24 percent).

The Bernie-Shaped Hole in Our Future

As hard as it may be to remember five long years later, in January 2020, Bernie Sanders was winning the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. After he won all of the first three contests, Biden was only able to beat him when the rest of the centrist candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden, a last-ditch consolidation to stop what they regarded as the unacceptable outcome of a democratic socialist running away with the nomination.

If Bernie had won the nomination race and become president, what would the last four years have looked like? Maddeningly, we’ll never know. But watching Bernie today railing against Democrats for abandoning the working class (and constantly calling on Congress to spend “not one more penny” on funding Netanyahu’s criminal war in Gaza), it’s impossible not to be haunted by a vision of what could have been.

Not so many years before Home Alone 2, another Hollywood sequel, Back to the Future Part II, featured an iconic scene where a white-haired scientist who looks a bit like Bernie Sanders (Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown) explains how time travel can be used to change the present by drawing branching timelines on a chalkboard. Sadly, in real life, what’s done is done. The chalkboard that would represent American politics as it exists just has one line.

We get to decide what happens next, though. As awful as the next four years of Trump may well be, American history isn’t coming to an end. We don’t have to accept alternating periods of rule by right-wing authoritarians and alternately pathetic and horrifyingly hawkish centrist Democrats. We can keep fighting for something better, and we damn well should.