Why Bidenism Failed
Nothing fundamentally changed. And that's the problem.
Two things can be true at the same time:
Joe Biden was the most progressive President of my lifetime, and
Joe Biden was a terrible President.
This seemingly contradictory statement is only possible due to the incredibly low bar of what is required to become “the most progressive President.” Barrack Obama, the only other arguable contender for the title, was strong on social progressivism but weak everywhere else. He refused to prosecute Bush-era war criminals, bailed out the banks instead of homeowners, expanded the drone war, and became the first and only president to execute an American citizen without trial.1 With little competition from his predecessors, Biden had an open path to becoming the “most progressive President,” sort of like how easy it would be to be “the least rapey guy in Trump’s White House.”
As Bidenism was a one-term project, I am inclined to conduct a post-mortem to identify why the project fell short. Arising during the COVID pandemic and the George Floyd protests, Biden was poised to be an iconic President, a man who took the country in a new, welcomed direction. Many pundits even compared his first year to that of FDR. But as we know, a new direction didn’t happen. As candidate Kamala Harris stated, her presidency would have been “nothing different” than her boss’s. Americans rejected this proposal at the ballot box, ending Bidenism. Why weren’t Americans fond of Bidenism? The answer is no secret.
Back in 2019, Biden was caught promising his wealthy donors that under his future administration, “No one’s standard of living will change. Nothing would fundamentally change.”2 While Americans aren’t entirely sure what kind of fundamental change they want, their positive, negative, and apathetic responses to Biden’s policies show they wanted something different than the status quo. While there were bright spots along the way, the Biden Presidency was doomed to fail given the constraints its namesake placed upon it.
Domestic Policy
The good things the Biden Administration did were those close to home. The American Rescue Plan created about 765,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s term and helped the country escape the COVID economic slump.3 The Inflation Reduction Act capped insulin prices at $35 a month for Medicare recipients, increased IRS funding to pursue wealthy tax cheats, gave $8.4 billion in rebates to solar panel users, and lowered the cost of certain prescription drugs by up to 79%. It also included the short-lived fully refundable child tax credit, which lifted 5.3 million Americans out of poverty before letting them fall back in.
One of Biden’s best instincts was to appoint Lina Khan as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. As the youngest person to ever lead the FTC, Khan pursued anti-trust action against some of America’s most predatory companies. Never intimidated, she took Amazon, Microsoft, Visa, Meta, and other economic titans to court. While Khan’s corporate enemies tried to paint her as a radical, the truth is she was only enforcing the law as written. But what Khan did do differently than her predecessors was ignore the conservative guidance of the Bork Rule, which decreed antitrust law should only be enforced when it” immediately benefits consumers,” which means it will lower sticker prices. For years, the American government had operated under this fraudulent guidance, which was nothing more than the thoughts of a Washington ghoul deemed too radical for the Supreme Court.
Khan’s college thesis paper, entitled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” cast the corporate-friendly Bork Rule aside in favor of a broader antitrust view, one that matched the intent of Gilded Age antitrust laws. When deciding upon anti-trust action, Khan considered the whole picture: prices, market concentration, labor rights, and protections against the disastrous accumulation of power that comes with capitalist expansion. With this holistic view in mind, Khan brought antitrust cases against Ticketmaster, Kroger, Visa, and more. While she didn’t win every case, Khan’s victories helped keep food prices low, strengthen unions, and stick a thumb in the eye of capital.
Unaccustomed to being subjected to the law, something they believe only poor people should experience, corporate interests spent four years complaining about Khan’s suits “stifling innovation.” In reality, she was reading and implementing The Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Act on a fundamental level, which predecessors had forgotten.
“These [anti-trust] laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition.”- The Department of Justice4
Biden was also better than expected on labor. While becoming the first sitting President to walk a picket line was a symbolic act, it showed his union sympathies. In one of the least-known acts of the Biden Administration, the Butch-Lewis Act provided $2.2 billion to save the pensions of 120,000 United Steelworkers retirees, saving them from condemnation to poverty. (Kamala Harris cast the tie breaking vote, but you wouldn’t know it from her campaign.5)
Far and away Biden’s best labor policy was his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Biden quickly replaced Donald Trump’s corporate-friendly appointees with people who were actually hospitable to workers. Again, this sounds radical after decades of neoliberalism, but it’s really a return to the fundamentals of the National Labor Relations Act. The Board was created to protect workers, so Biden filled it with people who support workers. And it worked! According to the Economic Policy Institute:
“President Biden’s appointees have advanced the NLRB’s mission by addressing issues such as employee status under the law, the scope of concerted activity protected by the law, the representation process, and remedies for violations of the law. Further, the agency has reinvigorated its enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and expanded its outreach efforts to ensure that more workers can exercise their rights to a union and collective action with their co-workers.”6
As a volunteer labor organizer, I can tell you such appointments are fantastic. As opposed to organizing under a hostile Republican Administration, organizers under Biden could rest assured workers’ unionization rights wouldn’t be undone by ideologues who took their marching orders from National Review. (Unfortunately, I expect these people to come back during the second Trump term.)
All of this is why I’m happy to label Biden “the most progressive” President I’ve seen. Of course, it must be stated that I wouldn’t call him “a progressive,” given there was lots of bad with the good. Biden broke the 2022 railroad strike, refused to raise the minimum wage to $15, and like most Washington operators who think The West Wing is real life, prioritized procedures and pointless bipartisanship over delivering for the American people. When the parliamentarian, an obscure congressional clerk, refused to let a $15 minimum wage be included in the American Rescue Plan, he should have taken Ro Khanna’s advice and replaced them (as George Bush did). Instead, he said “aw shucks” and invited Mitch McConnell to dinner.7 When Joe Manchin decided to kill the refundable Child Tax Credit, Biden should have opened a Department of Justice investigation into the Senator’s conflicts of interest, namely around his daughter’s illegal epipen prices fixing.
If Biden’s Presidency could be limited to what happened inside the territorial United States, then I would be somewhat sympathetic to his years in office. Sure, he doesn’t share my politics and his four years continued the political dominance of the rich and powerful over the common people, but at least there were domestic policies that were better than average. At the end of the day, Biden was willing to make good on some of America’s anti-corporate and pro-worker laws, as opposed to letting companies run amok.
But as we know, the domestic policy cannot be separated from what occurs abroad.
Foreign Policy
Before we discuss Gaza, it’s worth praising Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Despite the media narratives and the unpopularity of his decision, I do believe it was the highlight of his Presidency.
Prior to the withdrawal, America had been locked in its imperialist Afghanistan War for two decades. Soldiers born after 9/11, the ostensible justification for the war, were dying fighting a conflict older than them. The same was true for Afghans. At the time of withdrawal, the median age of the Afghan population was 17.3 years, meaning most of the country’s inhabitants, and those fighting the Americans, had no connection to Osama Bin Laden.8
As evident by immediate collapse of the Afghan Army upon announcement of the American withdrawal, its tempting to say the entire nation-building project was a failure. However, I don’t believe the Afghanistan War “failed,” but rather was an attempt to keep the United States in perpetual colonial warfare. This conclusion comes from the fact the Afghan Army was built to depend on American air power. The army America created had a fighting strategy identical to its own: patrols venture into enemy territory, find a target, and call in an airstrike. The Pentagon never built a real Afghan air force, so when the American bombers stopped flying, the Afghan Army was without its core weapon. According to a paper published by the Department of Defense:9
The absence of the Afghan Air Force in the final days before the Taliban takeover was not some 11th-hour disaster. It was the last event in a long chain of causality that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has been sounding alarms about for years. In Afghanistan, the United States tried to create a military force that was a mirror image of America’s own— that is, ground forces that rely on overwhelming air superiority—without providing the Afghans with an air force that could maintain, train, and equip itself without US support. The last straw came when US aircraft maintenance contractors left the country in May and June. Once that happened, “every aircraft that had battle damage or needed maintenance was grounded,” a former Afghan National Army (ANA) senior officer told SIGAR in a recent interview. “In a matter of months, 60 percent of [the US-provided UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters] were grounded, with no alternative plan by the Afghan government or U.S. government to bring them back to life. Given that reality, the decision by many AAF pilots to fly their planes to neighboring countries appears to have been a salvage effort: they took some fellow fighters and their families with them and kept their aircraft out of Taliban hands.
To his credit, Biden recognized this project was a road to nowhere and pulled out. As for the media and public disapproval, it comes down to the hard reality that America lost the war. Its forces were forced to retreat, and likely every retreat in military history, it was disastrous. American never witnessed a similar scenario in Iraq, which made the specter that much more horrifying to the public eye.
Of course, all of the good things Biden did, both foreign and domestic, are washed away by the blood of Gaza. I’ve written extensively on the topic, so I’ll keep this brief. Joe Biden is a Zionist to his bones. A religious man and a racist, he believes God gave modern Palestine to the Israelis and is okay with tens of thousands of dead Arabs as long as the fantasy of Eretz Yisrael materializes. Once it does, Biden believes Jesus will return and banish two-thirds of Jews to swim in a never-ending lake of fire. (He’s fighting anti-semitism, by the way.)
Unlike his predecessors, Biden placed no restraints on Israel. He dismissed the International Criminal Court’s charges against Benjamin Netanyahu, refused to pressure the Knesset into a ceasefire, vetoed several peacekeeping resolutions at the U.N., and, even as Los Angeles’ under-funded fire department is struggling to keep America’s second most-populated city from burning, he farewell gifted Israel $8 billion in bombs. All of this has been couched in lies to the American people, often with publicity stunts so see-through a child would call bullshit on them.
But Palestine is not just a foreign issue. Much like Vietnam, the President’s decision cannot be separated from his willingness to let police crackdown on anti-genocide protestors and ignore calls from his constituents, even those in his own party.
The elephant in the room of discussing Biden’s Presidency is the question of his mental state. While the debate with Trump eliminated any doubts that he was unfit to serve, new reports have come to light that show Biden losing his cognitive functions early into his term. I’m usually not one to trust The Wall Street Journal’s criticism of Democrats, but their fifty-source article detailing how White House aids and policy advisors controlled the mentally diminished President is hard to dispute. There’s also Biden’s public statements showing his decline, such as celebrating the birth of his great grandchild (he can’t remember if its a granddaughter or grandson) during a press conference.
While one could attribute Biden’s failures to the staff and family members who played Weekend at Bernie’s with the Presidency, the truth is, this was always going to be Biden’s Administration. In his words, nothing would fundamentally change. And nothing did. Yes, Biden followed the fundamentals of pre-neoliberal Democrat politics, supporting unions and appointing the right people to government agencies, but he had no interest in changing America’s social, economic, or political systems. The Biden Team, which includes the President and his handlers, preserved corporate power, pledged undying allegiance to America’s favorite country (Israel), and continued the same-old Washington bullshit about “respectable Republicans.” As we can tell from Bidenism’s defeat to Donald Trump in the most recent election, the American people wanted fundamental change. The things they liked best about Biden, his labor advocacy and his appointment of Lina Khan, seemed like changes simply because Biden was returning to old school Democratic politics, which younger generations never experienced thanks to Clinton steering the party right. When the Democratic party refused to deliver anything that actually changed the economic reality of their lives and clung to vile allegiance to Israel, uninspired Democratic voters stayed home and the election went to Trump.
This is Bidenism — the stubborn refusal to accept the changing world around you, even when the overwhelming evidence is to the contrary. Bidenism refused to address the climate crisis, approving drilling permits on pace with Trump. Now, America’s second-largest city is on fire. Bidenism refused to address the reality that Israel is a conducting a genocide, and it hampered youth enthusiasm and likely cost them the election. Bidenism refused to acknowledge the reality of American politics, and choose to platform Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban instead of loudly declaring Republicans are fascists who want to give more power to billionaires. And that is why Bidenism failed. It is emblematic of Washington D.C.’s refusal to admit that the American people know what they want better than the politicians. Bidenism understood politics backwards and believed that those at the top could dictate what the common folk wanted. This is not how politics work, and we’ve got a second Trump term because of it.
Hopefully, the next Democratic Presidential contender recognizes the faults of Bidenism and runs on a bold agenda that makes them “the most progressive President in my lifetime.” That said, the bar is still extremely low.
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In Solidarity — Joe
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-claims-unchecked-authority-kill-americans-outside-combat-zones
https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-08-19-in-defense-of-bidenomics/
https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you
https://www.uswvoices.org/endorsed-candidates/kamala-harris
https://www.epi.org/press/new-report-examines-the-nlrb-during-the-biden-and-trump-administrations-president-bidens-appointees-have-rolled-back-much-of-trumps-anti-worker-agenda-but-more-work-remains-to-be-do/
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/25/970637190/senate-cant-vote-on-15-minimum-wage-parliamentarian-rules
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/afghanistan-population/#:~:text=26.7%20%25%20of%20the%20population%20is,in%20Afghanistan%20is%2017.3%20years.
https://media.defense.gov/2022/Jan/06/2002922449/-1/-1/1/JIPA%20-%20CUNNINGHAM%20&%20WINDREM%20-%2022.PDF
Obama tore up the Whistle Blower protection laws. He went after everybody and restricted access to government documents. He started the dirty war on Syria and launched the coup in Ukraine. He pushed NATO into Georgia and other countries. He was a hawk and a phoney.
Nice job Joe.