Biden’s first 100 days: An assessment

The Biden administration is about one-third of the way through its first year of a four-year term, and already liberals are speaking of President Biden in historic terms. The progressive writer Anand Giridharadas, writing in The Atlantic, has already proclaimed this the beginning of a new progressive era. Sen. Bernie Sanders called the Biden-backed American Rescue Plan (ARP) passed in March “the most significant legislation for working people that has been passed in decades.”AOC said, “The Biden Administration and President Biden have definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had. A lot of us expected a much more conservative administration.”

Liza Featherstone, writing in Jacobin on the day after the inauguration, when Biden issued a number of progressive executive orders, said the left should claim credit for Biden’s liberal shift: “The best strategy for the Left is not to ignore the emergence of this new Biden, nor to insist that the old one has gone away for good. Instead, we should claim credit for the good liberal now visiting the White House and create the conditions to ensure that he does everything he says, and much more. This is especially true on climate, an issue where there is so little time to waste, and so much potential for action.”

Given that we’re in the first months of an administration that doesn’t even have all of its positions staffed yet, it might be a bit early to proclaim the beginning of a new era. It’s not even clear if the administration’s agenda was planning to be as ambitious as it seems now when Biden won the election in November. For one thing, the election results confounded liberals’ expectations of a “blue tsunami”. And for another, Biden/Harris didn’t even have a majority in Congress until the unexpected victory of two Democratic senate candidates in Georgia. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was on record as conceding the U.S. Senate and as skeptical that both Democrats could win in Georgia.

Early May delivered a reality check. When Israel launched its attacks on Gaza and the West Bank and unleashed repression on Palestinians inside Israel’s 1948 boundaries, Biden’s first response was the tired old saw about Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Behind this rhetoric, Biden and his foreign policy team showed that when it came to one of the U.S.’s main imperial allies, Biden is still the same old mainstream Democrat that his career showed he is.

What is different today?

Even if Biden still carries much mainstream baggage from his career as a leader of the Democratic Party’s neoliberal policy agenda for the last generation, he (or his handlers) has shown a knack for rhetoric that differs from the standard Democratic Party mush about the “middle class” and “opportunity for all.” For example, in his April 28 speech to Congress and in other venues, he used leftish rhetoric: telling trans kids that the president “has their back” and talking about “systemic racism” or expanding the definition of “infrastructure” to include the “care economy”. He’s also adopted some of the rhetoric of his 2020 Democratic primary opponents Sens. Sanders and Warren justifying tax increases aimed at the rich and corporations, even though his plan would return the corporate tax rate to that under the Republican George W. Bush administration. Pundits note that Biden is successful in talking about liberal policies in a way that makes them sound common-sense, and even boring.

At least this marks a temporary break from the austerity politics that prolonged the recovery from the 2007-2009 recession under the Obama administration. But it may not owe as much to Biden and the Democrats as liberals are saying. As Susan Watkins points out in a recent lead article for March-April 2021 New Left Review, U.S. emergency spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic—more than $5 trillion in the last year, with most of it so far being spent under the Trump administration—represents about 16.7 percent of the U.S. GDP. This stood out as a contrast with the European Union, none of whose member states spent as much proportionally as the U.S. did. However, as Watkins explains, the U.S.’s sparce pre-pandemic welfare provision may be the main reason for this.

Why now?

While it would be wrong to say that the prominence of people like AOC or Sanders had no influence on this situation, those who attribute Biden’s moves to “the left” are missing the bigger picture. So far, the “left” has stayed pretty much in Biden’s camp, and have put little pressure on him or the administration. It’s clear that they are playing a supportive role to the administration and the congressional Democrats. They didn’t mount a fight against Biden’s decision to drop the $15/hour minimum wage from the ARP. And Biden’s about-face on immigration policy—first supporting the Trump-imposed cap on refugees, and then reversing himself—responded more to the complaints of mainstream Democrats like Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin than to the Progressive Caucus. There are two more important reasons for the Biden administration early moves: one temporary, one more long-term.

The temporary one is, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, which was the main reason for Biden’s election. It can justify all sorts of spending and innovation as responses to the crisis—as it indeed did even under the Trump administration. Today, Biden’s American Rescue Plan is overwhelmingly popular, and even moderate Dems can get behind it. Business is solidly on-board too. More than 150 of the largest U.S. corporations signed a letter in support the ARP, and business is certainly supportive of Biden’s efforts get the country “back to normal,” get schools open, and to revive travel and tourism.

Plus, whatever has been the real impact for working people of the successive emergency packages from the 2020 CARES Act to the ARP, big business has made out like bandits from them. The ARP’s stimulus checks cost about $400 billion. The Federal Reserve’s expanded authority under the CARES Act made as much as$4.5 trillion available to non-financial corporations. In other words, in this comparison, the Fed made available to Corporate America more than 1,000 times the money the government provided to working people by way of stimulus. What’s more, the best aspects of the ARP (the ones liberals are labeling “transformative”), such as expanded childcare tax credits and lifting means testing on subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, are temporary and set to expire in 2021 and 2022.

But there is a second, and more long-termstrategic reason for the Biden administration’s spending plans: equipping the U.S. for the decades-long challenge of China to U.S. imperial dominance. This was a constant theme of Biden’s April speech to Congress. “China and other countries are closing in fast. We have to develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future,” he said. He has couched his proposals for infrastructure—building out transportation systems, converting U.S. autos to electric vehicles and expanding solar power, improving workforce productivity with increased subsidies for childcare and community college attendance—as part of the U.S.’s effort to win the future in the competition with China. It’s important to recognize that this is a bipartisan project, and that it’s less of a break from Trump than the liberal intelligentsia want to say. Biden has proposed a higher military budget than Trump did, and progressives in Congress (including “the Squad”) haven’t yet used their leverage in a closely-divided House to challenge it.

Competing against China also requires a level of social cohesion and “national purpose” that has been lacking as the US ruling class has fallen from the period of the “unipolar world” in the early 1990s. Many on the left (including me) zeroed in on a quote from a 2019 Biden speech to Wall Street donors, in which he assured them that “nothing would fundamentally change.” To the left, this was the clear sign from Biden that he was the same old neoliberal hack that he’s been since the 1970s. There’s enough time for Biden to show that side of him over the next few years, but for now, it’s important to read the full quote that Watkins reproduced in her NLR article:

When you have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. It allows demagogues to step in and blame ‘the other’ . . . You all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change.

The pandemic exposed a rot and social division in U.S. society that put a question over the ability of the U.S. to rise to an external challenge. Biden clearly hopes his program will enlist the working class into a “national project” whose underlying aim is to refit the U.S. for competition with China.

Biden’s policies are more in line with what the largest U.S. publicly held multinational corporations want in terms of competing against China too. A recent Politico interview with business professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who helped organize U.S. corporate leaders to issue statements against GOP voter suppression efforts, related that major U.S. multinationals were exasperated with Trump. They couldn’t abide his erratic nationalist behavior that included calling for boycotts against U.S. corporations or preventing the immigration of the world’s “best and brightest” to the U.S. Biden’s main geo-strategic focus on retooling the U.S. for competition with China led the Financial Times’Ed Luce to dismiss the Biden comparisons with FDR or LBJ:

Parallels with Dwight Eisenhower’s 1957 Sputnik moment, when the USSR’s satellite launch triggered huge US investments in technological research and development (culminating in the Internet), may ultimately prove apt. America’s success in producing two vaccines based on mRNA technology – Pfizer and Moderna – demonstrates what can be done. Both were the partial fruits of federal R&D. Today’s Sputnik moment is the rise of Xi Jinping’s increasingly ebullient China. It may be that Biden’s most relevant historical parallel turns out to be with Eisenhower, not FDR.

Will it work?

The passage of ARP was the easy part. The follow-on legislation in the Jobs Plan and the Families Plan are going to be much harder. And that’s not even to mention other reform legislation on the docket, from voting rights to the PROAct labor law reform, that have even less of a chance of passing—and maybe not even receiving support from all Democratic senators. The Democrats’ control over Washington is precarious, with a tie in the Senate and only a five-seat advantage in the House. One of infrastructure bills can probably pass through reconciliation to get around the filibuster threat in the Senate. The other one can’t. Biden is now looking for bipartisan buy-in on at least some of his roads-and-bridges infrastructure plans. This may be a fool’s errand, but it’s about the only “bipartisan” play Biden has with the GOP, whose leaders have made clear that they will oppose almost without exception everything else on Biden’s “socialist” agenda.

The question of whether Biden’s plans will it work is a topic for another article. The Marxist economist Michael Roberts recently characterized Biden’s plans as providing a “sugar rush” that will juice growth for the next couple of years. But this will return the world economy, and especially the U.S. economy, to its pre-pandemic state of low growth, with a huge debt overhang where one in five U.S. companies only make enough to pay their creditors to keep them from bankruptcy (so-called “zombie” corporations), and a lack of profitable investment opportunities. Even with provisions in Biden’s program that led some to refer to a “pop-up welfare state” or “welfare without a welfare state”, it’s unlikely these measures change the course that neoliberal capitalism has set for the U.S. in the 21^st century. And as Robertspointed out,only mass bankruptcies and a world war set up the U.S. economy for its long boom in the post-WW2 era. Neither of these appear to be on the horizon today.

U.S. political history provides unsettling lessons to the Democrats as well. The rhythms of the 18^th-century constitutional system—set to in-build many conservatizing forces into the regular operation of government—suggest that the Democrats will lose the House and likely the Senate in 2022. So, they’d better get as much as they can of their agenda passed now. Democratic politicians hope that the administration’s passage of legislation that benefits working people, their success (so far) in taming the virus, and the expected economic boom that will take place when the economy fully reopens will provide them a tailwind. It might even blow strongly enough for them to defy historical trends and to maintain their hold on Congress in the 2022 midterms.

If all these things do come to pass, we will have an experiment to see if political behavior is supposed to operate the way political scientists say it should: voters rewarding the party in power for addressing critical issues. But there are many trends pulling in the opposite direction: GOP-controlled redistricting, voter suppression laws passing in state after state, the GOP’s enraged middle-class base. The Democrats have little margin for error.

Can 2022 be 1934?

But let’s take the FDR analogy seriously. The idea is this: through all the administration’s “transformative”policies, Biden and the Democrats could see a rerun of their party’s performance in 1934, when the Democrats expanded their control of Congress under the FDR administration. Since 1934, the president’s party has increased its congressional delegation in midterm elections only twice (in 1998 and 2002).

Obviously, there are huge differences between the Great Depression era, the political party system of that time, and today. But the crucial point about the 1934 analogy is the question of class and social struggle. The 1934 election took place in a year of mass strikes that frightened the capitalist class and its politicians. The Communist Party and other left formations in cities across the country organized militant mass actions against evictions, protests of the unemployed, and later the mass unionization movement. The reforms that Congress passed, and the FDR administration effected—the Wagner Act(setting up the modern system of labor relations) and the Social Security Act—were a direct response to this pressure from below.

Though publications like Jacobin and even New Left Review talk about struggle and the rise of a left as being an important independent variable in determining Biden’s course of action, they overestimate these factors today. Even though last year’s racial justice uprising was enormous and had amajor impact on public opinion, its impact on government policy is harder to track.In the 50 largest cities—most controlled by Democrats—law enforcement spending increased as a percentage of total spending.It’s also important to note that theperiod of the COVID-19 pandemic has actually represented a period of real hardship, rather than advance,for the working class.

All of this assumes that the Democrats won’t betray their voters on important issues, like health care or voting rights. Some of the most critical legislation that would help to nudge the political system or political economy in a more popular direction (the voting rights bills, changes to the Supreme Court, or the PROAct), won’t get past GOP filibusters. And it’s unlikely—either because they don’t have the votes, or deep down, they don’t want to—that they will get rid of the filibuster to force votes on these priorities. Here’s where Biden’s loyalty to old school Democrat operating procedures could ultimately sink his administration. If the shoe were on the other foot, the GOP would not hesitate to do what was necessary to win their agenda.

If the best known, most pro-working-class, reforms of the New Deal were a product of mass industrial actions and general strikes in 1934, the level of social struggle today doesn’t remotely measure up to those. The election of a few dozen left Democrats and activist-driven pandemic relief projects aren’t at the same scale. So, at least as of this writing, the Biden administration is under little to no pressure from below. Without mass pressure, the pandemic can give way to a new sense of “normalcy.” And with normalcy can come the old “normal” politics that foretell Republican gains in 2022, and an early end to the “Biden era.”