Biden’s Half-Trumpism

Michael Brendan Dougherty has a must-read column today on the squeezing of the “Trump lane” — nationalist on economics; hawkish on China; aggressive on the culture war — from both the left (Joe Biden) and the right (Ron DeSantis). DeSantis has made a name for himself as a culture warrior’s culture warrior, “kicking off a conservative counterrevolution on education” and taking the fight to the DEI bureaucracy, Michael points out. And Biden’s State of the Union address last night was conspicuously heavy on what could only be described as Trumpian economic themes — something that Michael and I both noted during NR’s SOTU liveblog last night. Here’s a couple notes I posted on the topic during the speech:

Biden’s economic nationalism — “I know I’ve been criticized for saying this, but I’m not changing my view: we’re gonna make sure the supply chain for America begins in America” — is one of the major places where his administration’s philosophy has marked a substantive break from that of Obama’s. (And in an important sense, a continuation of Trump’s). Interesting to see him lean into that heavily tonight.

And:

Biden talking about the “economic upheaval” of the past few decades and “investing in people that have been forgotten” and “left behind.” Once again, sounding distinctly Trumpian notes here. Seems like a strategic effort to emphasize the aspects of the old-school Democratic Party — i.e., blue-collar economic populism — that made it popular with a lot of constituencies that have moved toward the GOP in the past few years. Notably, we have yet to hear very much about social issues tonight.

As Michael notes, Biden actually has a real record on these issues that he can tout — he “can credibly out-hawk Donald Trump on China,” and he “signed the CHIPS Act and a series of executive orders that aim at crippling the Chinese semiconductor industry and facilitating the onshoring of that industry in the United States.” DeSantis, on the other hand, has been arguably the most successful and creative culture-war fighter on the Republican side in recent memory. Beyond CRT and gender-ideology bans in public education, using his democratically prescribed authority to install a new board at a failing left-wing college or to defund the DEI apparatus in public bureaucracies is entirely within his purview; but wielding such authority is something that few Republicans in similar positions seem to have even considered.

The thing is, the “secret sauce” of Trump 2016 relied on a combination of these factors, at least as a political pitch. (His ability to actually execute on those priorities once in office is an entirely different matter.) The vision that Trump sold of dispossessed working- and middle-class voters in the heartland — the “forgotten men and women” he toasted on the eve of his election victory (notably, Biden, too, employed the language of “forgotten Americans” in last night’s speech) — was one of both cultural and economic alienation and decline. The two spheres aren’t mutually exclusive; in the context of mass politics, they’re a bundle of intersecting impulses that drove voters to sense (a) that the country they grew up in was on the verge of disappearing and (b) that the nation’s elite had not only stopped representing their interests, but were actively hostile to them.

The “New America” envisioned by the technocratic progressivism of the Obama era was one that these voters suspected — with good reason — did not include them. Selling out their jobs to foreign labor via free trade and mass immigration, degrading their local traditions and folkways, and sending their children overseas for nation-building military expeditions all served the interests of a “global community” that America was being integrated into, rather than the material national interests of their homeland. This was, and is, the true meaning of “America First”; a restoration of the American people’s interests, values, and political orientation, stewarding a distinctly American way of life that comprises both economic prosperity and a set of cultural and social institutions. It is this vision that Trump, however haphazardly, presented in 2016. And it is such a vision that his would-be successors, on either side of the aisle, must embrace if they are to recapture the forgotten men and women it spoke to seven years ago.