politics

Biden’s Submerged White House

Despite its class composition, the Biden White House took deliberate steps to bolster its appeal to working-class Americans. These efforts, however, were all but smothered by its market-managerial approach to policy design. Though Biden spoke boldly about his economic, environmental, and socially transformative goals, his three signature legislative accomplishments — the IIJA, the IRA, and the CHIPS Act — proved to be political duds precisely because of their reliance on the same old hard-to-grasp and even harder to enjoy managerial, technocratic, and market-based approaches.

These bills comprised the main thrust of Biden’s green industrial policy. But given their sweeping scale, ambitions, and real policy successes, it is especially telling that people rarely talk about them. The 2021 IIJA included some $550 billion for infrastructure improvements. The 2022 IRA contained around $750 billion for climate-related innovations as well as funding to reduce home energy costs. And the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act is spending nearly $300 billion to foster the domestic production of semiconductor chips, foundational components for everything from solar panels to cell phones. These incentives aim to make renewable energy so cost-effective that, experts believe, US electricity-related emissions may drop by 75 percent by 2035 and transportation-related emissions could drop by one-third.

As a result of Biden’s investments, manufacturing’s share of the country’s GDP is the highest it has been since 1981, and green investments in manufacturing facilities doubled between 2021 and 2023. If these trends hold, some $300 billion in public subsidies are forecast to stimulate more than $500 billion in private investments over the coming years across a range of green sectors: solar and wind energy production and storage, electric vehicles and batteries, and decarbonization of traditional manufacturing, including decarbonizing concrete and steel production. This spring, the Department of Energy announced it was processing 203 applications for $262.2 billion in loans across 245 locations in the United States. And these applications — from companies working on carbon reuse and reduction, advanced nuclear technologies, electric vehicles and batteries, energy transmission, and more — are coming from businesses in both red and blue states, their new jobs and businesses championed by Republican and Democratic governors alike.

Biden has repeatedly pledged that Bidenomics would grow the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up,” but vanishingly few Americans have perceived benefits from these initiatives. One poll found that a majority of Americans “haven’t seen, read or heard anything or much at all” about the IIJA or the CHIPS Act, while 48 percent said the same about the IRA. Of those who had heard of the bills, just one-quarter reported positive sentiments. Roughly the same share of voters believe that Donald Trump — whose administration’s repeated failure to invest in infrastructure only brought us the “Infrastructure Week” meme — did as much as Biden to create jobs and deliver infrastructural investments.

These kinds of market-mediated and, as the political scientist Suzanne Mettler has called them, “submerged” policies are clearly hard to sell to voters. But there is little evidence that Biden and Vice President Harris were even interested in trying. They received vanishingly little notice in Biden’s final State of the Union address. And in their lone presidential debate, when Trump challenged Harris on Biden’s (actually strong) record on stimulating industrial investment and manufacturing jobs, she failed to mention the IRA or the CHIPS Act.

Instead of embracing their roles as messengers, the Biden administration and its surrogates often took a condescending approach, blaming the media and voters themselves for not knowing what was going on. As John Podesta, Biden’s top clean energy adviser, put it, “I don’t think people are paying attention to the names of bills or even that legislation’s passed.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm agreed: “It’s just huge how much is happening out there,” she said, but “people don’t realize what is actually happening.”

This version of liberalism may have begun building the green transition, but it is not a recipe for building political power. The problem clearly lay less with the American public than with the priorities of policymakers and politicians. Rather than embedding its slower-moving business-oriented green economic policies within a wider set of immediately tangible social benefits, Democrats offered vague forecasts about the trickle-down employment effects of its subsidies for green capital. As the economic historian Adam Tooze has written, “it is a top-down agenda” that lacks a “transformative ambition” when it comes to the fundamental nature of American class and social politics.

These dynamics also demonstrate why health care reform has not yielded the political dividends Democrats long hoped it would. The architects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) routinely promised that taking a market-based approach would make the delivery of care more efficient. The implementation of the ACA has nevertheless proven that structuring a market in health care delivery enables price inflation, not to mention grift by private companies. Biden’s successful negotiation with drug companies did lower the costs of certain prescription drugs like insulin, but these efforts ultimately treat the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. And despite repeated updates to the ACA’s open enrollment website, it remains profoundly difficult to navigate the many plans to choose from and the complex rules of eligibility in the limited time provided to make plan selections. It is equally difficult to get a representative from HealthCare.gov on the phone. These experiences have made many Americans even more frustrated by and alienated from government and, by extension, the Democratic Party, the party of “smart” governance.

Learning the Right Lessons

It doesn’t have to be this way. In a society as socially, politically, and regionally fragmented as the modern United States, robust public policy could offer a means of forging cohesion and connection. As in the New Deal, good public policy would also validate and help facilitate wider movements for the green transition, improved wages and benefits, and union organizing. Effective, legible governance could provide the foundation for restoring faith in democracy itself. As originally conceived, “Bidenism” contained social welfare proposals that could have materially improved people’s lives and, perhaps, Democrats’ electoral prospects up and down the ticket.

The Build Back Better package, the original legislation from which the IRA was salvaged, was the first feasible major piece of legislation in generations on the scale of the New Deal’s social and economic policy, with the potential to shore up the social safety net and reinvigorate American class and electoral politics. It included universal social policies: funding universal preschool, extending the COVID-era child tax credits, establishing federal support for paid family leave and medical caregiving, and much more. Of course, Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema ground down the legislation, cutting many of the direct social benefits and refashioning the bill as the compromised Inflation Reduction Act.

That so many other liberals in the House and Senate were willing to make these compromises in the name of party comity and respect for procedural norms suggests just how allergic the liberal professional class has become to overt struggles over political power or moral vision. Voters are asked to trust the process, enter their vote, and wait. For working-class voters who saw the child tax credit withdrawn under Biden, this was especially galling, as they watched childcare costs soar alongside ballooning grocery bills and rents.

As former AFL-CIO director Steve Rosenthal recently told the New Yorker, the working-class voters he’s polled crave politicians who will lead with economic issues, including better jobs and health care. Rosenthal heads the pro-labor organization In Union, which cosponsored a report that found many working-class voters “believe Democrats care about everyone else but them.” That’s the messaging side, of course. But, as Rosenthal continued, these voters needed to see “clearly that our candidates and our party are working to improve their lives economically.”

If professional-class liberals resented Donald Trump’s vulgar and in-your-face presidential style — signing stimulus checks personally, for instance — there is no denying its populist appeal. It’s impossible to imagine John Q. Public writing a letter to Biden describing how the IRA’s green energy provisions immediately improved his family’s life.

The Biden administration somewhat stubbornly refused to accept that, no matter how many times the president donned a hard hat or dropped a “malarkey” into a speech, it could not combat how alienated working-class voters of all races and ideological orientations have become with the approach and image of the Democratic Party. The last four years have proven that the Democrats’ fifty-year indifference toward — and contribution to — union membership decline could not be changed overnight.

Harris, much more than Biden, exudes a professional-class liberal ethos. Her hyper-managed campaign’s microtargeted approach clearly prioritized the quantitative analysis of experts more than it tried to genuinely connect with the needs of working people. Harris’s selection of Tim Walz as her running mate initially generated excitement among a diverse swath of the electorate. Yet the campaign’s team of professional-class political consultants managed Walz so carefully that he came to represent just another disingenuous hard hat awkwardly sat atop a profession