Biden Prods Progressives to Rescue His Legacy from History’s Gutter

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

 

It’s probable that the authors of Joe Biden’s farewell op-ed published this week in the American Prospect designed it for the exclusive consumption of the American Left. No one else would believe the fantastical propositions in the piece or the questionable assumptions that contribute to Biden’s claims of managerial competence.

 

If the president is once again leaning on progressives to salvage a legacy he has badly fumbled, it’s an odd strategy. It makes sense only if we assume, as we probably should, that the Obama-Biden intellectual project is exhausted, and that what we’re observing is only the braindead “Lazarus sign” reflex emanating from this presidency’s corpse.

 

Biden admonished readers who thoughtlessly expected to see their economic conditions improve under this administration. It will “take years to see the full effects” of his policies, the essay promises. You see, all the good stuff is backloaded. But, as the author repeatedly stressed, building “the economy from the middle out and bottom up,” a new economy that dispenses with “a failed approach called trickle-down economics,” is a complex undertaking. So complex, in fact, that the president himself doesn’t seem to understand it.

 

Biden tickled progressive erogenous zones by repeating the words “invest” and “investment” like a mantra. Indeed, the op-ed boasted, the legislation passed in Biden’s first two years marks “the most significant investment in the United States since the New Deal.” It was stimulus the already overheated American economy couldn’t painlessly absorb. Team Biden even has the gall to admit that the “Inflation Reduction Act is the largest single investment in clean energy in the history of the world.” For those of us who know what inflation is, that sentence contains a contradiction. It’s telling that Biden thought it was one he didn’t have to address given his intended audience.

 

The president seemed to often assume the ignorance on the part of his readers. He mourned a status quo he inherited in which the fruits of American innovation are shared all the world over: “Scientific discoveries and inventions developed in America were commercialized in countries abroad, bolstering their manufacturing instead of ours.” By “commercialized,” we must assume he means American-designed goods being manufactured abroad, which is a convoluted way of describing comparative advantage. Biden can (and did) go to war with elementary economics if he likes, but he’s not unaware of the inducements that lead to the conditions he’s denouncing.

 

In promoting the CHIPS act, which seeks to create a domestic semiconductor industry from whole cloth, Biden touted the output from three Taiwanese-owned TSMC chip plants in Arizona: “America will be the only economy in the world to have all five of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturers in the world operating on its shores.” This is the same phenomenon. The only difference is that Biden seems to like it when Americans are manufacturing products innovated abroad — an economic step backward that is obvious to all who haven’t romanticized America’s industrial past.

 

“I fought hard to secure an investment in modernizing the IRS that is already paying off. The IRS is already collecting over a billion dollars from wealthy tax cheats,” Biden insisted. Indeed, taxes went up, but government receipts went down. So, too, did private sector labor union membership over the course of Joe Biden’s presidency, despite his vigorous efforts to support unions in rhetoric as well as (blessedly failed) legal schemes designed to make it harder for workers to avoid unionization. The president even insisted that he had measurably reduced consumer costs. How? By allowing Medicare to fix the cost of certain drugs and opening America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to temporarily drive down gas prices.

 

From beginning to end, the op-ed is a sop to the progressives Biden assumes will write the history books. But if the reporting on Biden’s first few months in office is accurate, those historians themselves contributed mightily to Biden’s failed presidency. The whispered seductive nonsense in Biden’s ear about how his victory — though it was narrow and in a year when Republicans expanded their House majority — paved the way for him to become the next LBJ. And this gave Biden license to indulge his ego. The president should have recognized his error early on, but he never did. For the remainder of his presidency, Biden was led by the progressives rather than the other way around.

 

Within months of taking office, the president surrendered to the unrepresentative, exceedingly online activist class he had defeated in the 2020 primaries. He never passed up the opportunity to engage in racial agitation even when the facts and prudence should have militated against it. His efforts to sell the public on the Build Back Better agenda — initially, a $4 trillion monstrosity with grand ambitions to reengineer the whole American social compact along progressive lines — landed as flat as did his efforts to pitch “Bidenomics.” The failed ideological paradigm encapsulated by the word “equity” put an egalitarian gloss on a radical program designed to redistribute economic and social goods based on accidents of birth. The Constitution put a stop to that, but it couldn’t prevent Biden from using Title IX regulations to restore the conditions that deprive young men on campus of their civil rights. Biden even innovated a new Title IX injustice by using it to allow men to compete in women’s sports.

 

Even in the twilight of Biden’s political career, when his fate was known to all but the president himself, the president and his team expected the progressives to save him. Within a week of the disastrous debate performance that rendered Biden a walking political cadaver, the president suddenly rediscovered the Left’s desire to pack the Supreme Court with pliant Democratic justices — a change of heart supposedly inspired by an article that left-wing law professor Laurence Tribe published in the even more left-wing British media venue, The Guardian. The true motive — the transparent one — was to use progressives as a cudgel to silence the Democratic establishmentarians calling for Biden to cede the presidential nomination. The strategy worked, insofar as it convinced the Left’s political celebrities — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others — to support Biden. But the strategy ultimately failed to save his presidency for the same reason deferring to the Left from 2021 ruined it: Biden massively overestimated the influence and popularity of his party’s progressives.

 

It’s the same mistake, over and over again. Perhaps Team Biden kept making it because they bought into the Left’s hype, or maybe they were so lethargic and unimaginative that they couldn’t conceive of an alternative approach. In either case, the president should not expect anyone, much less the progressive Left, to salvage his legacy.