Clinton’s approach could only work, as it had for her husband and his Democratic successor, as long as the party’s voters stayed motivated enough to turn out on Election Day and as long as her opponent was firmly to her right. But Donald Trump made for a very different Republican candidate than those who came before: he criticized the political corruption endemic to the system, rejected foreign wars, attacked the free trade deals that put corporate interests over those of workers, acknowledged working-class suffering, and pledged to take aggressive action as president to alleviate it. The fact that he was disingenuous about all this and would largely betray these promises once in office made little difference. Trump held onto the affluent Republican base and peeled away just enough working-class voters from Clinton, while many traditional Democratic voters, seeing nothing for themselves in either option, didn’t bother voting at all.
Joe Biden, who is cast by much of the media, as Clinton was, as the safest, most logical choice to defeat Trump, has all of these weaknesses and more. While Clinton was hammered for her husband’s criminal justice policies that overwhelmingly hurt black communities, Biden was one of the chief architects of a racist system of mass incarceration and showed a career-long willingness to sacrifice African American communities for political survival. While Clinton’s neoliberal politics alienated many voters, Biden was one of the earliest adopters of neoliberalism, successfully pushing the party to become more like him. The hawkishness that turned a war-weary public off Clinton has been a cornerstone of Biden’s foreign policy views for decades. Trying to be all things to all people, Biden has stuck to a Clinton-like strategy of telling different audiences whatever they want to hear. And while not matching the scale of corruption Clinton and Trump have engaged in, Biden has tended to follow the instructions of his wealthy and corporate backers while letting his family profit off his political connections.
Even if Biden manages to beat Trump, there is every chance that his presidency will produce the rise of someone much worse. Rather than appealing to the material, class-based interests that unite voters across racial, gender, religious, or other lines, Biden has instead sought to find a nonexistent middle ground between working-class Americans and the rich and powerful, often leaning toward the latter. Rather than offering a bold alternative, Biden has spent his career reflexively adopting his right-wing opponents’ positions as his own. Genuinely believing in consensus and bipartisanship for their own sake, he has repeatedly worked with Republicans to advance the lion’s share of their political goals, dismantling the legacy of the New Deal in the process. At the same time, whether it has been crime, drugs, terrorism, or something else, Biden has tended to get swept up in every right-wing panic of the last few decades, often going even further than Republicans in his response. All of this has supposedly been on behalf of the “middle class,” a group Biden defines as white, suburban, and largely conservative voters, whose interests alone he sees as essential to political success.
This would all be concerning no matter what. But in a time of rising white supremacy and with a Republican Party more ruthless and ideologically extreme than any major “center-right” party in the Western world, a Biden presidency could well end up taking the United States further down a Far-Right path than even Trump, whether by attempting to appease his opposition by pursuing some of their political goals—a hallmark of both his politics and of the administration he served in for eight years—or by creating the kind of economic conditions tailor-made for a Far-Right populist, which, in a sense, Biden has done his entire career.
Many interpreted Clinton’s 2016 defeat as the neoliberal center’s death knell. But Biden’s ongoing popularity—based mostly in his overwhelming support among older voters who long ago internalized the myth, disproven in election after election, that unambitious corporate centrism is the only answer to an increasingly radical right wing—suggests its obituary has been written too soon. Whether Democratic voters ultimately decide to go with Biden or not, pre-Trump “normalcy” has collapsed and isn’t coming back, particularly with an intensifying ecological emergency that much of the media and political establishment are trying their hardest to block out.
With a temporarily ascendant Far Right and a growing popular rejection of forty years of neoliberalism feeding the sudden return of the kinds of ideas that led Roosevelt’s Democratic Party to dominate politics for decades, the world and the United States in 2020 are standing on the precipice of something. The question is: will Democratic voters rise to the occasion?
There are some things worth losing over. Don’t be involved with this for the politics of it. Be involved only if you believe in something.
—Joe Biden to Delaware Democrats, March 19961
It is no small irony that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born in the cradle of the New Deal order he would later help dismantle. Neither Biden nor the United States is unique in this respect. Look at just about any developed country’s generous postwar welfare state, and among its rich and powerful foes, you’ll find many who benefited most from its generosity, only to turn against the system that created them, convinced they had done it all on their own.
The Irish heritage Biden would stress throughout his public life was only part of his family history. His parents met in high school: Joe Sr. was born to the daughter of a French family with roots in colonial times and a Baltimorian who may or may not have hailed from England; his mother, Jean, to the Scranton son of Irish immigrants and the daughter of a Pennsylvania state senator. “Your father’s not a bad man,” Biden later recalled his Irish aunt telling him. “He’s just English.” Though recounted in jest, Biden’s later approach to various foreign conflicts would suggest he had in fact internalized something from this family lore about the immutability of ancient sectarian grudges.2
The hyper-focus on the middle class that would define Biden’s politics may well have been shaped by his own father’s struggles. Joe Sr. had started out with meteoric success, brought into a burgeoning business by his wealthy uncle who held the patent for a sealant for coffins. Once the Second World War took off, so did the business, which by that point had moved beyond sealant to supplying armor plate, mostly for merchant marine vessels making the dangerous journey across the Atlantic. When Congress passed a law mandating their armor on every US ship trading in the North Atlantic, the business boomed, with Joe Sr., his uncle, and his cousin running the operation across three different locations: Boston, New York, and Norfolk, Virginia, respectively.3
But once the war was over, so was the government largesse, and as Joe Sr. searched for his next venture, he suffered a string of bad luck. Planning to buy a building in downtown Boston and turn it into a furniture store, his business partner absconded with their money. Purchasing an airport and a couple of planes for a crop-dusting business, Joe Sr. struggled to secure contracts, while his cousin, his partner in the venture, squandered what was left of his wartime fortune. His uncle (and financier) pulled his capital. After years of expensive and generous living as a federal defense contractor—hunting pheasant on the weekend and buying dazzling toys for his infant son—Joe Sr. and the family, now mired in debt, moved in with Jean’s parents in Scranton only three years after the end of the war.4
Though the young Biden and his three siblings spent their earliest years in that crowded but loving house in Scranton, their father’s employment prospects would force the family to relocate several times. They first moved when Biden was ten to the outskirts