Progressives who believe that Joe Biden is Democrats’ problem are fooling themselves.
Progressives who believe that Joe Biden is Democrats’ problem are fooling themselves.
T wo-thirds of Americans think Joe Biden is doing a poor job in office. The other third is selling meth to Hunter. The trajectory is decidedly southerly, and this has not escaped the notice of leftier Democrats who weren’t all that excited about the old man in the first place.
I don’t think that I would have much in common politically with RootsAction, the progressive group that has just made a splash with its new campaign to convince Joe Biden not to run for reelection in 2024. But I do admire progressives’ willingness to take on their party’s president. That’s a sign of good political health — rare on the left.
“A president is not his party’s king,” the RootsAction statement says, “and he has no automatic right to renomination. Joe Biden should not seek it. If he does, he will have a fight on his hands.”
Biden should have a fight. He should lose it.
The Republicans used to enjoy that kind of pseudo-regicide from time to time. There was Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald Ford’s nomination in 1976, and in 1972, National Review led conservatives backing John Ashbrook in the primary over President Richard Nixon, noting that representative from Ohio “shows the kind of political courage by which one distinguishes between those automatons who represent us in Washington and those special others who are human beings endowed with mind and an active conscience,” by implication judging the sitting Republican president to be the conscienceless automaton type. (National Review has often declined to endorse the nomination of incumbent Republican presidents, including both George Bushes and Donald Trump.) In the eternal battle between Caesar and Brutus, I am Team Brutus all the way, and I believe that it is an excellent thing for a president to be horse-whipped from time to time. The political world is lining up to beat Joe Biden like a rented mule, and “I’m not Donald Trump!” is unlikely to save the incumbent bacon.
Joe Biden’s workaday problems are obvious and specific to him: He is elderly and diminished, a fact about which Democrats have suddenly decided it is permissible to speak. The only kind of politics Biden really knows how to do is politics among senators, having been first elected to the Senate back in the Age of Disco when John Ashbrook was challenging Richard Nixon. He is a creature of the 20th century at odds in his tone and his temperament with the catharsis politics of the contemporary Left. But while his roots are in the post–New Deal Democratic Party, he does not seem to have any very strong commitments but is instead willing to be carried along wherever the political currents take him. Biden’s “leadership” is the opposite of leadership. Barack Obama made Democrats proud to be Democrats, whereas Joe Biden makes Democrats wish they were Canadians.
But the problem with Biden is not that his administration will not aggressively pursue the kinds of policies progressives want. The problem with Biden is that his administration is doing just that. The Democrats may need to dump Biden for reasons of political survival, but dumping Biden will not solve their problem, because their problem is fundamentally a policy problem.
If Biden had been a more able and energetic champion of the policies his administration has put forward, what would we have? Probably a couple of trillion dollars more sloshing around the economy making inflation much worse than it is, a bunch of wasteful make-work projects, and a catastrophically stupid tax scheme. If a more committed and vigorous Joe Biden had been installed in January 2021, there would be more chaos in our economy and in world affairs rather than less. If Biden were more solicitous of progressive priorities, he might have made Afghanistan even more of a debacle than it was.
Democrats are right now experiencing a collision of theory with reality. Americans like big spending in theory, but they hate the reality of inflation and rising interest rates. (They’ll hate the reality of a national debt crisis a lot more.) Americans tell pollsters that they oppose vacating Roe v. Wade, but they are not warming up to the unseemly spectacle of Elizabeth Warren calling to turn Yellowstone National Park into an abortion mill. Americans like the idea of economic protection until they can’t buy baby formula or ground chuck for less than the price of a bucket of diamonds.
Everybody is an environmentalist when gas is $2 a gallon. Everybody is a good civil libertarian when crime is low. Everybody is a peacenik when Moscow is playing nice.
Democrats who want catharsis from their politics may prefer someone more along the lines of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the representative from New York will turn 35 a few weeks before Election Day in 2024), but more sensible voters who are interested in lower inflation, geopolitical stability, and crime control — many of whom are Democratic voters — will not be satisfied with the outcomes of the policies currently in vogue among progressives, however inspiring those proposals may sound in campaign speeches.
Joe Biden was Joe Biden when he was elected — it is not as though he has undergone some radical political or stylistic change since being sworn in. What has changed is that the country is worse off under the influence of policies that are not unique to Joe Biden and that are in fact likely to become worse under some other Democrat.
Progressives who believe that Joe Biden is Democrats’ problem are fooling themselves. It’s no good dumping Biden and keeping the worst of Biden’s agenda.