Joe Biden’s Two Left Wings

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 07, 2021

 

Joe Biden, if he is to be an effective president, will have to keep his administration from being dominated by the left wing of his party — or, rather, the two left wings of his party.

 

The first Democratic left wing is the social-justice/Twitter-feminist/greenie-weenie faction, dominated by well-to-do college-educated professionals, people who drive Subarus and live in neighborhoods where all the houses have Black Lives Matter signs outside and white people inside. Subaru country makes a lot of campaign donations, and its citizens are all caught up on The Queen’s Gambit and Bridgerton — they are easily bored and need to be petted. They are the Left’s answer to the talk-radio Right, which means they approach politics as Kulturkampf. Their main interest is not really in policy at all but in moral and emotional validation. The cheapest way to pander to them is with a symbolic fight over one of the so-called social issues.

 

Biden is ready to offer the political version of one of his famous neck massages.

 

The president-elect, like many men before him who desired to be president, has experienced a late-life epiphany on the question of abortion. Biden is a long-time abortion-rights supporter, but he also was, until quite recently, an old-fashioned kind of politician who is happy to accept a compromise if it means he gets the bulk of what he wants. One of those compromises — one that Biden supported devotedly — was the so-called Hyde amendment, a series of legislative measures first introduced by Repre­sentative Henry Hyde (R., Ill.) in 1976 prohibiting the use of Medicaid money and other federal funds to pay for abortions in most cases.

 

The Hyde amendment is the kind of compromise that 1980s–90s Joe Biden liked: Democrats got their way under the terms of Roe v. Wade and its companion cases, and those with moral objections to abortion were spared, if only symbolically, being directly implicated in the practice. Biden is at heart a New Dealer, and he is a man who still presents himself for Communion as a Catholic; his instincts point him toward a broad coalitional politics. But 2021 Joe Biden has a problem with the Hyde amendment: Accommodating different views of abortion is, in the view of Subaru country, a betrayal.

 

There isn’t any pressing financial need for publicly financed abortions: Planned Parenthood et al. will spend more fighting for public funding than it would have cost to simply fund the abortions. The issue isn’t money — it is making a display of power, ritually humiliating abortion opponents by forcing them to participate in the bloodshed. Like the jihad against the Little Sisters of the Poor, the case against the Hyde amendment is purely vindictive. Biden has offered a preposterous explanation for his flip on the Hyde amendment (that it must be jettisoned to accommodate an expanding federal footprint in health care), when the simple explanation is that Subaru country wants it, and the infamously handsy president-elect is terrified of its feminists and desires to buy them off first.

 

House Democrats, led by appropriations chairman Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), intend to take up the Hyde amendment in this Congress, and Biden is backing them. There is a superficial attractiveness to a fight like that from Biden’s point of view: It probably will go nowhere, especially if Republicans retain control of the Senate. If Democrats should happen to win the fight, then Biden gets to throw an abortion party; if Democrats lose, the stink will be on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. An abortion fight is an easy way to throw a hand grenade into the political conversation, creating a diversion while the real business gets done. But Biden is not that clever a politician: He is clever enough to think of doing it, but not clever enough to do it well. These fights develop lives of their own and have a way of taking over more of the conversation than Biden may want to give up.

 

The same is true for any number of emotionally charged fights Biden might start in Congress about other issues. And Biden’s “first 100 days” agenda is full of items that the president will not be able to deliver on his own, requiring congressional cooperation: repealing the corporate-tax cuts of 2017, for example, expand­ing the Voting Rights Act, easing the way for certain illegal immigrants to become citizens, reducing the use of mandatory minimums in criminal sentencing, etc. Subaru country is not going to be satisfied with a lot of blue-ribbon commissions or years of congressional wrangling. They want a win.

 

The more politically serious elements in Biden’s coalition — the high bureaucrats of state and local government who are engaged in real-world politics rather than amateur social-media activism — want to get paid, and get paid yesterday. Having a fight over federally funded abortions doesn’t cost anything — bailing out Illinois and California would, and the thrifty people of Florida and Nebraska, who might be inclined to support some of Biden’s other initiatives in health care or infrastructure, are not going to sit still for it. They probably aren’t going to sit still for it if it is called “coronavirus relief,” either.

 

The other left wing that Biden will have to fight is the one that he will in­herit partly — strange as this may seem to write — from Donald Trump. In much the same way that the socialist Bernie Sanders ended up making a lot of very Trumpy speeches in 2016 — anti-immigration, anti-trade, heavy on economic nationalism — Biden is hearing the sirens of populism, and he is naturally inclined to heed them. Biden already has walked back promises to reverse Trump policies on asylum-seeking immigrants, for example, and he is committed to pursuing and expanding Trump’s trade war with China. His barmy slogan is “to ensure the future is ‘made in all of America’ by all of America’s workers.” Like most of our political discourse, those words are without genuine meaning, chosen only because they are pleasing to a certain kind of ear. But Biden is poised to play a familiar game: to subsidize businesses with a federal spending spree (procurement, infrastructure, an energy scheme) and coddle them with protectionism (“aggressive trade enforcement actions against China,” in the words of his published program) and then launder these into welfare payments through various employer mandates: requiring, somehow, that firms “favor U.S. jobs over offshoring,” empowering union bosses with card check and the like, reclassifying independent contractors as employees, etc.

 

There’s a lot of batty Warrenism in Biden’s announced program, a lot of “You didn’t build that!” E.g., this peach of a complaint:

 

Taxpayer-funded research investments in the 20th century laid the foundation for MRI technologies, yet some of the companies directly benefiting from these innovations are moving MRI production to China. If companies benefit from taxpayer-funded research that leads to new products and profits, those products should be made in the U.S. or the company should reimburse the government for its support.

 

So Biden already is putting his twist on Trump-style economic nationalism at the center of his agenda, including his foreign-policy and defense agenda. In­coming officials such as national-security adviser Jake Sullivan are making hawkish sounds about a transatlantic anti-Beijing coalition, a project that will be complicated by the fact that China and the European Union have just negotiated an expansive new trade accord.

 

Repairing our relations with the Euro­peans, with an eye to countering China, is the right policy, and Biden would do well to pursue it. But the populist Left is no more interested in new market-opening protocols or beefing up NATO than the populist Right is — what it wants, and what Biden promises from time to time, is protectionism, subsidies, foreign policy conducted on the cheap, and corporate welfare. Biden said in December that he isn’t in any hurry to repeal the Trump tariffs. In an interview with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Biden did his best Trump impersonation, de­scribing his own economic agenda as “America first.” While Trump took his trade advice from the ignorant crackpot Peter Navarro, Biden will be advised by Katherine Tai, a trade-law specialist who speaks Mandarin and has worked on China issues. But Biden will not be able to practice economic nationalism at home and liberal internationalism abroad — he is not that slick. He is likely to fall for the same kind of boondoggles that plagued Barack Obama’s economic-development policies — sweetheart deals and fat subsidies for politically connected firms in politically pleasing industries such as solar and wind energy.

 

Both the right-wing populist and the left-wing populist push a combination of economic nationalism with redistribution, but the left-wing populists have a much more dangerous and vengeful domestic agenda, one that is less informed by economics than by the desire to punish. Biden is not immune to the desire to punish, and desire to please the left-wing populists could easily lead him down any number of destructive rabbit holes, from Elizabeth Warren’s daft proposal to tax savings to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s imbecilic push to forgive student debt, a funny kind of economic populism that transfers wealth to the wealthy.

 

Subaru country has Biden’s ear, but the union-hall Left has his heart. Neither camp has a very good policy agenda, and there will be a great deal of pressure on Biden to continue the worst of Trump’s autocratic state capitalism while adding in a large dose of modish social-justice hoo-ha. What Biden needs is someone to push him in the right direction, either from without, from Re­publicans in opposition, or from within, from the technocratic holdovers from the Obama administration who will take many important jobs in the Biden administration. But even the most competent of those technocrats require political direction toward a larger purpose, and there is little reason to hope that the intellectually lazy Joe Biden has what it takes to rise above old-fashioned constituent-servicing or escape the hardening presidential habit of simply lurching from crisis to crisis. Everything is pushing Biden in the wrong direction, and he does not seem much interested in pushing back.