Joe Biden, Nowhere Man By Joel Kotkin
J oe Biden’s beleaguered presidency has fueled criticism of the man himself — his history of policy missteps, mental incapacity, and inept administrative style, as well as his family struggles. Whatever his personal flaws, though, the real cause of Biden’s incoherent and even contradictory policies lies not in his incompetence but in the contradictory nature of his agenda and his party.
Biden, despite decades in politics, remains something of a nowhere man, with no demonstrated, consistent worldview beyond expediency. He was elected because corporate power brokers saw him as the only viable alternative first to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and then to the widely detested Donald Trump. These forces, joined by some labor unions and the older black establishment, pushed him over the top in a bizarre, heavily scripted campaign funded largely by the ultra-rich. The pandemic proved ideal for muzzling Biden’s gaffe machine.
In this tumultuous period, the Democratic Party could use a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama, a leader who defines a coherent agenda and inspires voters. Some still believe that Biden’s reputation for compromise and bipartisanship is working, but his poll numbers suggest otherwise. The president’s approval rating, which was dropping before the Afghanistan debacle, is now heading toward the lows plumbed by his predecessor. Unless Biden somehow succeeds in elaborating a clear agenda, his presidency likely will continue to unravel.
Democratic Divisions and Contradictions
Like Caesar’s Gaul, the Democratic Party contains three distinct and often competing factions. The first consists of increasingly “woke” tech oligarchs and their Wall Street funders. They financed “a shadow campaign” for Biden, pouring millions into get-out-the-vote efforts and running media interference (most obviously in the Hunter Biden scandal) for his campaign.
Once elected, Biden duly inserted representatives of this class at the top of his administration. His cabinet is made up overwhelmingly of pedigreed, coastal metropolites (a third of the new cabinet went to Harvard). As the leftist Nation put it in a convincing story, under Biden the Democrats have become, without question, “the party of the rich.”
Yet the worsening inequality epitomized by Biden’s top picks runs against the Left’s ascendency within the party. Their agenda is not at all oligarch-friendly, with progressive demands for massive tax hikes — especially on capital gains — targeting a key Biden constituency. This progressive agenda — whose primary passions are gender fluidity, climate change, and “systemic racism” — has drawn its sustenance from the educated upper classes and not from the old middle- and working-class base of the party, which has been steadily shifting to the GOP for decades.
Some of these voters may have seen working-class Joe as a “reasonable guy,” enough perhaps to secure victory in key Midwestern states. But overall, as Democratic analyst Ruy Teixiera notes, the old party base is routinely ignored and even disdained by both the corporate and progressive wings, though they still constitute up to 44 percent of the total electorate. You see this on the local level: Democrats once ruled mining and manufacturing towns; today, they represent 41 of the 50 wealthiest congressional districts. The big losers inside the party debates have been the now widely disdained centrist Blue Dogs, generally from semi-rural, suburban or heavily working-class districts, whose numbers have fallen from nearly 50 in 2010 to 19 today.
The Tech Conundrum
The president (rightly, to my mind), has appointed some tough trust-busters including FTC chairperson Lina Khan, antitrust attorney Jonathan Kanter and White House aide Timothy Wu. Restoring competition to the tech marketplace should appeal to all but the most doctrinaire libertarians and of course the oligarchs themselves. But these efforts may be undermined and weakened at the highest levels of an administration largely staffed with former Obama officials, including Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Domestic Policy Council Director Susan Rice, and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, all of whose personal coffers now brim with money at least partly derived from the Valley or Wall Street. Vice President Harris is particularly close to the oligarchy, especially Facebook, while National-Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has close ties to Microsoft.
Biden’s corporate-progressive alliance forces him to expand welfare for hoi polloi but also seeks to maintain and even expand oligarchal privileges. His infrastructure bill subsidizes the oligarchs’ investments — from electric cars to broadband and artificial intelligence — turning him, as one observer put it, into “Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capitalist.” Biden has also worked to free up the supply of H1B visas granted to the foreign “indentured servants” who now account for upwards of three-quarters of Silicon Valley’s tech workforce.
The contradictions, as Marxists would agree, are pretty profound. Oligarchs want cheaper, unorganized labor, while progressives increasingly seek to unionize workers. Public sentiment does not rest with the oligarchs, whom many in both parties see as an overweening threat to competition and privacy. So, here’s the rub. Democrats depend on tech money (just ask Gavin Newsom), but the ascendant wing of the party seeks to throttle Silicon Valley. AOC suggests that a country that “allows billionaires to exist” is immoral, calling for the confiscation of most tech fortunes. AOC and her co-belligerents have a lot of reach: She, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others have Twitter followings that many establishment Democrats can only dream of.
Over time, this conflict will get worse: Democrats will struggle to accommodate both avaricious capitalists and grassroots radicals. Early skirmishes are already occurring at the local level. In Seattle, for example, local progressives have been feuding with Amazon, the city’s mega-employer, whose founder is a prominent supporter of the greens and Black Lives Matter, among other progressive groups. They are also working to impose a state-wide capital-gains tax. San Francisco passed several “tax the rich” measures last year and new moves to confiscate some of the wealth of its huge tech elite, while an attempt to impose a wealth tax is high on the progressive agenda of the Bay Area–dominated Legislature.
The Green Jim Crow
In a brilliant paper for the environmentalist Breakthrough Institute, California attorney Jennifer Hernandez describes the impact of draconian green policies on minorities as “the Green Jim Crow.” The state’s policies, she argues, leave minorities worse off in terms of home ownership and cost-adjusted income than those of redder, less “enlightened” places. Latinos and African Americans have done worse in California than their counterparts nationally. Green policies are of rather more benefit to oligarchs such as Jeff Bezos and Wall Street financiers who are poised to enjoy a huge windfall from their solar and wind investments.
Yet this is the model that Biden has embraced. An ecstatic account in the Los Angeles Times claims his goal is to “make America California again.” Somehow neglected is any discussion of California’s highest-in-the-nation poverty rate or its very low level of homeownership. Nor do they focus on how super-high energy costs have chased out many industries — construction, energy, manufacturing — that traditionally provided higher-wage blue-collar employment. As major industrial and business-service companies have left, fields like hospitality, which generally pay low wages, have become more important.
Yet California at least has Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and North America’s dominant port complex. Similar policies would be more catastrophic in the Midwestern swing states that often decide elections. Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa are between two and three times more dependent on industrial employment than New York, Massachusetts, or even California. Aviation, one of the last high-paying and competitive U.S. industrial sectors, would face enormous reductions in employment under Green New Deal policies adopted by the administration.
Especially in danger would be workers in the fossil-fuel industry. Among Biden’s first actions was to cancel the Keystone Pipeline, with a potential loss of upwards of 10,000 jobs, many of them unionized and concentrated in the heartland. The headlong shift to “zero carbon” and a fracking ban could translate into as many as 14 million job losses, concentrated in places like the Rockies, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma. In Texas alone, as many as a million good-paying jobs would be lost.
Biden’s recent plea to OPEC to send us more oil and gas, rather than allow increased domestic production, won’t win him many friends in the oil patch or parts of the Midwest. While Biden and his media cheerleaders will seek to mollify middle-income workers with the promise of “green jobs,” a recent report by the Building Trades Unions finds that these jobs pay far less, are shorter-term, and are less likely to be unionized than those being replaced. This may be an attractive fantasy in Malibu and Manhattan, but perhaps far less so in Michigan or Oklahoma.
The Suburban Battlefield
Biden’s election margin came largely from middle-income, educated suburbanites, particularly females, many turned off by Trump’s crassness. These suburbanites, not the big-city dwellers so dominant in the party, represent the critical territory in U.S. politics. In the decade before the pandemic, more than 90 percent of major-metropolitan-area growth took place in the suburbs and exurbs, a trend that is now apparently expanding, in part due to the pandemic.
Yet the internal political winds from both the corporate and progressive wings have led Biden to seek policies that primarily serve big-city interests. By placing much of his infrastructure emphasis on transit, which carries a small portion of the overwhelmingly car-dependent suburban workforce, his plan “shortchange[s] the suburbs” by neglecting the roads, bridges, and tunnels most Americans use daily, notes analyst Aaron Renn.
Biden also has expressed support for programs that would force suburban areas to densify and accept large amounts of low-income housing into stable middle- and working-class neighborhoods. Proponents of these moves point to the record of enforced segregation common to the post-war suburban boom as justification, but this is an old, very outdated story. In the last two last decades, notes demographer Wendell Cox, only 4 percent of all new suburban growth came from non-Hispanic whites while almost half of those who accounted for it were Latino.
The current “white flight” to suburbia and exurbia is, in reality, a hegira of many colors. It’s likely few suburbanites of any color would welcome outsiders determining the ideal makeup and density of their increasingly integrated communities.
The Nowhere Man and the Changing Political Calculus
Biden’s balancing act between the progressives and the oligarchy seems likely to force him to adopt positions that may not play well with some traditional party constituencies. The loosening of border restrictions may appeal to the two contending factions but has become such a disaster — including the recent incidents with Haitians at the Texas border — that even the head of DHS admits it is “unsustainable,” with many new immigrants, including as much as one in three migrant children, having disappeared somewhere in the country. Allowing a largely unregulated flow may provide dutiful new wards of the emerging welfare state and cheap labor for upper-class progressives, but opinion surveys show disapproval among most voters.
Nor does a “liberal” immigration policy, as some may think, necessarily appeal to Hispanics. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have flooded into many heavily Latino border areas and working-class towns deeper into the interior. These communities, not the Upper East Side, Georgetown, or Palo Alto, have to bear the brunt of functionally “open borders.” The result: a growing shift of Latino voters to the GOP, particularly in heavily Hispanic and traditionally Democratic south Texas, and in other areas like Florida.
This is just one example of how embracing the progressives’ woke agenda — supported by roughly 8 percent of the population — undermines the party’s historic base. Asian-Americans, the primary targets of academic quotas and often urban violence, have broken with Democrats on issues like affirmative action. Last year Trump, despite his crude thoughtlessness, won a significantly larger Latino vote than in 2016, as well as making surprising gains among African-Americans, Muslims, Jews, and Asians. Even in California, as many as half of Latinos for a time suggested they planned to support the recall of Gavin Newsom, although they ended up supporting him but by a considerably smaller margin than in the 2018 election.
The economy could prove the decisive factor. Biden shows signs of squandering the incipient recovery by embracing highly inflationary policies. These may be manageable (or even profitable) for some, but, notes former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman, they are bad news for working people whose rising wages are being canceled out by inflation.
Future Prospects
Despite the administration’s current travails, the political die is far from cast. Biden may have blown his natural “lunch bucket” constituency but could still morph into a more conciliatory figure, much as Bill Clinton did after the party’s 1994 walloping. Much of the population, as progressives note, are generally supportive of an activist government that helps them. They are, however, less enthusiastic about the Left’s cultural agenda, draconian climate policies, and higher taxes.
If Biden fails to recalibrate, there’s an opportunity for the GOP. The question is whether the Republican Party can embrace growth and opportunity to further progress with minority voters and, by adopting less stringent positions on social issues, also win back some of the middle-of-the-road support it has been losing. It is not yet clear whether mainstream conservatives are willing to compromise on these issues. If they fail, Joe Biden could get away being the latest in our long history of presidential screw-ups. Even a nowhere man can succeed in a vacuum.
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