Among Joe Biden’s afflictions and miseries, his wormwood and gall, there are the insults (about his diminished capacities), and then there are the compliments unpaid (about his achievements). We are exposed to more of the first, but it seems that to him the second are more painful. In his first interview after he withdrew as the Democratic Presidential nominee, Biden—wounded, proud, self-pitying, defiant—said, by way of defending his record, “No one thought we could get done, including some of my own people, what we got done. One of the problems is, we knew all the things we did were going to take a little time to work their way through. So now people are realizing, ‘Oh, that highway. Oh, that . . .’ ” He trailed off for a moment and then recovered. “The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying ‘Joe Did It.’ ” He ended this with a bitter chuckle. Biden isn’t wrong. Objectively, and improbably, he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt.
In the early weeks of 2021, very few people saw Biden as the obvious winner in the large field of potential candidates for the 2024 Democratic nomination. His victory over Donald Trump had not been overwhelming. The Democrats had lost seats in the House even while maintaining a narrow majority, and got to fifty votes in the Senate only after two runoff elections in Georgia broke their way. Then, with nothing close to a mandate, Biden passed domestic legislation that will generate government spending of at least five trillion dollars, spread across a wide range of purposes, in every corner of the country. He has also redirected many of the federal government’s regulatory agencies in ways that will profoundly affect American life. On Biden’s watch, the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power.
All of this doesn’t represent merely a hodgepodge of actions. There is as close to a unifying theory as one can find in a sweeping set of government policies. Almost all the discussion of “Bidenomics”—by focussing on short-term fluctuations of national metrics such as growth, the inflation rate, and unemployment, with the aim of determining the health of the economy—misses the point. Real Bidenomics upends a set of economic assumptions that have prevailed in both parties for most of the past half century. Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t speak of free trade and globalization as economic ideals. His approach to combatting climate change involves no carbon taxes or credits—another major departure, not just from his predecessors but also from the policies of many other countries. His Administration has been far more aggressive than previous ones in taking antitrust actions against big companies.
What would you call these policies? One apt label might be “post-neoliberal,” a term that does not resonate at all with the public. Another way of thinking about Biden’s approach is through terminology devised by the political scientist Jacob Hacker: it rejects redistribution as a guiding liberal principle, in favor of “predistribution,” an effort to transform the economy in a way that makes redistribution less necessary. Predistribution entails understanding the economy as something that structures the balance of power among institutions, rather than as a natural phenomenon that must be managed in order to lessen its harmful effects on individuals. So Bidenomics has overturned a number of unwritten rules that you previously had to follow if you wanted to be taken seriously as a policymaker: economic regulation is usually a bad idea; governments should balance their budgets, except during recessions and depressions; subsidizing specific industries never works; unions are a mixed blessing, because they don’t always promote economic efficiency; government should not try to help specific regions of the country or sectors of the economy.
At least in domestic affairs, nobody makes policy without thinking about politics. One grand ambition behind all the Biden economic initiatives is to usher in a political realignment that would make the Democrats competitive again in the more sparsely populated parts of the country, which have disproportionate political power. The idea is that Americans are not as motivated as you might think by notions of “opportunity” and “mobility”—that such liberal rhetoric has limited appeal among people who want to live safely and securely in the communities where they grew up, surrounded by strong institutions that are not subject to relentless economic and social disruption. (According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, ninety-two per cent of Americans say that financial stability is more important to them than upward mobility.) What people see happening around them matters far more than what the latest statistics tell us about the state of the economy. As Elizabeth Wilkins, who worked in the Biden White House, told me, “It’s national G.D.P. numbers versus how people feel about their lives, their families, their communities. It’s their job, the jobs of the people around them, what those jobs pay—not the aggregate numbers. We fully embraced that in our policy orientation.” And that meant shoring up specific places and institutions as a primary political strategy.
Cartoon by Liana Finck
The irony of Bidenomics is the vast gulf between its scale—measured in money and in the number of projects that it has set in motion—and its political impact, which is essentially zero, even though a major part of its rationale is political. It has become a standard talking point of the engineers of Bidenomics that it will take at least five years, maybe ten, possibly even longer, for the public to understand its effects. “That’s the way it was with the New Deal,” Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving aides, said. “It wasn’t just three or four years of new programs. It was leveraged for twenty or thirty years into the future.” But the short-term politics worked out a lot better for Franklin Roosevelt; he carried all but two states in his first reëlection campaign. There is little evidence that the Democrats will be similarly rewarded in 2024. Only late in the race, when she was spending much of her time in the Midwest, did Kamala Harris begin speaking regularly about Biden’s major economic initiatives. It’s unclear how committed to them she will be if she becomes President. Trump has promised to repeal many of them. Still, President Biden can rest assured that many signs are being put up. They just don’t say “Joe Did It.” They say “Investing in America.”
Over the summer, I accompanied two Biden Cabinet members, Julie Su, the acting Secretary of Labor, and Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, as they travelled around the country promoting the Administration’s projects. These visits took place away from the coasts, mainly in small towns. Watching the Biden officials in action made me feel like a time traveller transported back to the social-realist days of the thirties and forties. At every stop, it seemed, we’d come upon a tall chain-link fence and drive through an open gate, past a guardhouse, and then down a long, lonely road leading to a factory. All around would be forklifts, cranes, pickup trucks, huge metal sheds, silos, and lengths of pipe so wide that you could stand up inside them.
On a Friday morning in July, I went to Fort Valley, Georgia, the seat of Peach County, to watch Su promote a new factory that will build electric school buses. If the over-all goals of Bidenomics sound abstract, this project makes for a good concrete example, because it unites all the major ideas. Fort Valley is a majority-Black town in a rural swing county, in a historically Republican state that the Democrats have targeted. The biggest business in town is the Blue Bird Corporation, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of school buses. During the next five years, nearly a billion dollars in grants will be awarded to dozens of school districts nationwide through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus Program, some of which will go toward the purchase of Blue Bird’s electric buses, and Blue Bird will receive eighty million dollars from the Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In essence, the Administration is generously funding a private business. Because the money will go to electric vehicles, the plan is part of both the transition to clean energy and the Administration’s project of bringing manufacturing back to the American heartland—rather than letting it happen, in particular, in China. And Blue Bird, for the first time in its ninety-seven-year history, has coöperated with its employees’ effort to unionize, a development that aligns with Biden’s support for unions.
For the event in Fort Valley, there was a temporary canopy to protect the audience from the summer sun, a few rows of folding chairs, a makeshift podium in front of a yellow school bus, and “Investing in America” signs posted at every possible location. The mayor, Jeffery Lundy, opened the event by saying that he was “excited and ecstatic” about the new plant. He thanked the federal government, the Blue Bird Corporation, and God, and ended by quoting a few lines of Scripture. Then came Yvonne Brooks, the president of the Georgia A.F.L.-C.I.O. Finally, Su, who has a brisk, cheerful charm, took the podium and said that the plant would help solve the climate crisis, create jobs for the local community, and give schoolchildren a chance to breathe cleaner air.
After the ceremony, Su and I found a room where we could talk for a few minutes. She is a lawyer who started her career in civil-rights organizations and then worked in state labor agencies in California. (Her liberal past has made it difficult for her to be confirmed by the Senate, and that is why she is the “acting” Secretary.) She told me about the amount of effort that had gone into making the Fort Valley announcement possible. Phil Horlock, Blue Bird’s C.E.O., had been brought to the White House for a meeting with Biden. Then, this spring, Su had come to Fort Valley to urge Horlock to speed up his slow-moving negotiations with the United Steelworkers. Was the conclusion of the negotiations connected to the eighty-million-dollar grant to build the electric-bus factory? “I’m going to answer this way,” Su said. “The way you asked me implies conditions. Whether workers want to join a union depends on them. Politicians should not interfere. It is not a condition. What I said to Phil was ‘There’s no reason not to have a contract after a year of negotiations.’ They got that done. The company took it seriously. Phil said, ‘We heard the Julie Su challenge, and we accept.’ ”
How did this new era in economic policy come to pass? How did Biden, the most familiar of politicians, and previously not seen as someone with sweeping policy ambitions, become the organizer of such a big program? In retrospect, it’s possible to see what happened as the convergence of a number of forces that have been building for fifteen years. It’s a story line that seems clearer now than it did as it was unfolding.
In 2008, Barack Obama swept into office with three hundred and sixty-five electoral votes and firm control of both the Senate and the House. It seemed as if the Democrats were on their way to securing a lasting majority, as they did in the New Deal era, this time with a coalition of educated urban and suburban voters and racial and ethnic minorities. The last stage of Obama’s campaign and the beginning of his Administration took place against the backdrop of the worst financial crisis in eight decades, but Obama seemed well equipped to handle it. He and a team of experienced economic advisers got Congress to pass a large stimulus bill, aimed at preventing another Great Depression. But we wound up having a Great Recession. The unemployment rate rose to a peak of ten per cent in October, 2009; it took until 2017 for employment to recover fully. The recession generated populist revolts on the right (the Tea Party movement) and the left (the Occupy movement), and made what had appeared to be broad public acceptance of pro-market bromides seem like an illusion. In the 2010 midterms, the Democrats lost six seats in the Senate and sixty-three seats, along with the majority, in the House.
