Thoughts on Biden, now that he has been elected president

Joe Biden has won the election for president. It will be a narrower margin, however, than the polls originally predicted, to the embarrassment of the pollsters. I lay much of Biden’s underperformance at the feet of the Democratic Party leadership, but that is a subject for another time.

Beyond advanced age, however, Biden has several weaknesses. But as things now stand, there was simply no choice for the knowledgeable and intelligent voter. Another four years of Trump would have brought about the end of the American experiment. Throughout our history, powerful plutocratic forces have attacked our democratic-republican political system over and over. Fortunately, this nation has proved time and again that it can meet the challenges with courage, determination, and luck.

The elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency was only the latest of these attempts by those same forces to turn a democratic republic into an authoritarian state, ruled by the wealthy and powerful.

Joe Biden poses a danger to the republic of a more subtle nature. He is unquestionably a good man, but like all humankind, he is flawed. Some colossal errors of judgment have marked his political career. These errors are a clue to help us predict how President Biden will run his presidency.

When Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act[1], a corrupt and injurious law that benefitted the credit card industry and creditors in general, I vowed never to vote for him under any circumstances. Then I turned around and voted for the Obama/Biden ticket twice. I voted for him again this year, a textbook example of being forced to choose a lesser evil. It is an excellent practice to refrain from making rash vows. Who can foretell the future?[2]

But I digress.

Joe Biden was a U.S. senator from Delaware (1973–2009) and vice president (2009–2017) under Barack Obama. His thirty-six years as a U.S. senator spanned the sea change from the decline of New Deal liberalism to the triumph and all too visible consequences of Neoliberalism at the hands of Donald Trump.[3]

Until recently, the term “neoliberalism” has not seen widespread usage and consequently has flown under the radar since 1947. In that year, prominent anti-Keysians, an assembly that later became known as the Mont Pèlerin Society[4] met in New York City intending to repeal the New Deal and reorganize the nation in accordance with a set of premises now known as Neoliberalism. There is neither time nor space here for an extended discussion of Neoliberalism, but its principal elements are:

• Faith in the market mechanism as the measure of all value. By its workings, it is supposed to arrive at optimum prices of everything, so long as it is unrestrained. Society loses the benefits of the market when regulations restrain the latter:
• A concept of society as a collection of independent individuals whose successes and failures are their sole responsibility;
• A firm belief that governments and most other forms of collective action will ultimately fail because those who depend upon them are “losers.” This rule, however, does not apply to the military-industrial complex or heirs of the extremely wealthy;
• The belief that both taxes and the social safety net should be as low as possible.[5]

Neoliberalism as an active program began 1n 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. It became the ruling dogma of our political leadership during the presidency of Bill Clinton (1993–2001). He fully embraced the program and acted accordingly. Republicans and Democrats, including Donald Trump, have subsequently accepted and furthered the dominance of Neoliberalism.

Census income data shows that the gap in income between the top earners[6] and the rest of the American people began to widen immediately with the advent of Reagan[7]. Wages stagnated, and the financial returns that invariably flow from an increase in productivity were captured by the top 10%, with very little of it going to the bottom 50%. The power elite and their bought senators and representatives engineered this transformation by suppressing unions, outsourcing well-paying jobs overseas, and cutting taxes on the wealthy. Along with these changes, our lawmakers began to chip away at the protections enjoyed by workers in a thousand different ways. Most of these were unnoticeable separately but together amounted to less job security, less protection from arbitrary firings, and lower wages.

Simultaneously, the power elite reduced funding for public goods, like education, the social safety net, and programs that aid the less fortunate. More recently, they have starved the public sector so that in many places, cities lack the resources to repair roads and bridges[8]. Deficit hawks in Congress are already beginning to murmur and complain about the deficit and arguing that it should be fixed it by cutting Social Security and Medicare.[9] The massive Republican tax cut last year (which primarily benefitted the extremely wealthy) has not caused inflation or adversely affected the overall economy, as some predicted. One would hope that Biden might learn a lesson from this and change his attitude towards deficits.

We shall see.

To be fair, his announced plans for Social Security assume no cuts in benefits, and in some cases, increases in benefits.

Well before Reagan became president, the American people were being fed a story designed to obscure to the public the real intent of the proponents of Neoliberalism. Reagan began his war against labor with race-tinged invocations of “welfare queens” and “moochers” (which he could not substantiate when challenged), the virtues of deregulation of financial institutions (leading to the Savings & Loan débâcle), the largest tax increase percentage-wise in the history of the nation (the increase in the payroll tax to “save” Social Security and Medicare. The increases fell almost exclusively upon middle and lower-income taxpayers), and the Strategic Defense Initiative, (an expensive and virtually worthless missile defense system nicknamed “Star Wars”).

The neoliberal project has continued inexorably to the present. Through its ownership of the media, the power elite has succeeded in deflecting people’s anger toward individuals and institutions having little or nothing to do with the slow, creeping demise of the American dream. They have hidden the reality behind a curtain of academic prestidigitation, neoclassical economics, and outright bullshit, language designed to confuse the listener and ultimately to blur the difference between opinion and fact, as well as between truth and falsehood[10].

The election of Donald Trump marked the zenith of Neoliberalism as the dominant political philosophy of the ruling class[11]. His elevation to the presidency would not have come about had the way not been prepared long in advance by the power elite and their well-paid professors, politicians, and pundits. His election also represented the culmination of Americans’ anger at being duped by every presidential administration since Jimmy Carter in believing that the changes wrought by the neoliberal program would be equally beneficial to everyone.

They promised bread but handed us a stone.

Biden cut his political teeth during this transition. I do not doubt that the fundamental tenets of Neoliberalism are baked into his political consciousness, whether or not he is aware of it. I have lived long enough to remember when Biden became a senator. I have followed his career to the present, but I cannot recall a single instance of his standing on principle against unwise or harmful legislation when the wind was blowing the other way. Throughout his time in office, the political wind was blowing towards Neoliberalism.

Now it is rumored that he is choosing advisors that were part of the Neoliberal project under previous Democratic presidents. That is a disquieting omen that he will backtrack over many of the most significant and transformative actions he has promised over the past eight months. He will likely embrace austerity, a policy of impoverishment that has failed—over and over—at promoting the general welfare. It has invariably enriched the financial sector, however, especially equity fund managers and bankers[12]. Congress’s partial repeal of the Federal Estate Tax has enabled family dynasties to maintain their wealth and power for generations[13].

For reasons inexplicable to me, Obama embraced austerity within a year of his election and consequently failed to timely pull this nation out of the most severe recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Granted, he faced a Republican congress that killed his initiatives during most of his two terms. Still, Obama and his Democratic majority in Congress failed to act decisively in the two years they controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency. I suspect that the Republican takeover of Congress in 2010 resulted in part from that failure.

Biden’s political history reveals him to be a good, well-intentioned man of limited imagination. I do not think this is the time for leaders who lack imagination.

By imagination, I mean the ability to develop bold, viable alternatives to the way we do things now. Wisdom is not just the ability to choose but to know from what there is to choose. Imagination works best when 1) there is a problem to be addressed, and 2) the person or team tasked to find the best solution is knowledgeable. While I do not believe President Biden will turn out to be an imaginative person, he is in a perfect position to find creative experts and guide the process.

It takes no unique insight to see that what we are doing as a nation is not working. Suppose we keep running on the same neoliberal track we have been running on the last forty years. In that case, we will run off a cliff in the not too distant future: climate disaster, rapidly growing poverty, pollution, food scarcity, mass migrations, revolutions, wars, and a government even more corrupt and ineffectual than the present one.

There is no returning to the world as it was on November 2, 2016, the day before Trump’s election. Our electoral folly in 2016 has sorely disrupted and injured our democratic republic. Still, the wounds are not fatal, thanks to Trump’s narcissism, ignorance, and utter incompetence. If Biden tries to revive and continue the neoliberal project—to return the nation to “normalcy”— it is not just possible but probable that we will get President Donald Trump (or worse) in four or eight years. We survived Trump because he was a vile fool. We might not be so lucky next time.

Biden will be a lame-duck president as soon as he takes office. He is aware that four years is his lot. Given that he will be free from a concern about being reelected, does he possess the strength of character to take unpopular measures that offend powerful interests but advance the general welfare?

It remains to be seen.

Will he choose his advisors from men and women who refuse to double down on disproven and harmful economic and governmental doctrines?

It remains to be seen, but it doesn’t look good at the moment.

Will he (like Roosevelt) assemble a brain trust to supply ideas and solutions that he is unlikely to think up himself?

It remains to be seen.

This challenge does not apply only to Joe Biden. It is also a challenge to our nation and its citizens (that’s us) to take seriously the obligations laid upon us when our forefathers ratified the U. S. Constitution:

• To form a more perfect union;
• To establish justice;
• To ensure domestic tranquillity;
• To provide for the common defense;
• To promote the general welfare, and
• To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

The United States, from its birth, has been a demanding project. It has never been easy. All of us have much work in front of us. We should not look to any president to do what we should be doing ourselves.

Further, as a US Marine would say, we should not cut President Joe Biden any slack whatever in carrying out the duties of his office. And never forget that we have the absolute right to hold him accountable.

It remains to be seen how he does. And how we do as citizens.

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1. https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/senate-bill/256/text)  ↩

2. The Biblical story of Jephthah and his daughter comes to mind. Judges 11: 1–39  ↩

3. For an insightful presentation of the doctrine, see Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste; How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, (Verso, 2013)  ↩

4. The most influential were Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Lionel Robbins, and Milton Friedman. These four, along with the other attendees, were discredited for their utter failure in managing their respective governments’ response to the Great Depression,  ↩

5. Social safety nets, their thinking went, may be necessary to prevent revolutions or other threats to the market-oriented economy. The government should set them at the minimum levels that achieve their purpose, irrespective of the human suffering that results from such parsimony.  ↩

6. I use the term “earners” advisedly since most “earners” in the top 1% income bracket are rentiers who live on their investments and manipulation of money flows. They contribute little to society.  ↩

7. U. S. Census historical tables of income. Table A–2 is a good place to start.  ↩

8. Privatization, the sale of public enterprises at bargain-basement prices to private businesses, often investors and equity funds, who promise to operate them in the public interest. Privatization has seldom benefitted the citizenry. There is an inherent conflict of interest between serving the people and maximizing profit. Bolivia’s experience with privatizing its water system is illustrative.  ↩

9. On several occasions during his Senate career, Joe Biden has been willing to put Social Security and Medicare on the table during budget negotiations. I attribute his deficit hawkishness to the general ignorance in Congress of how the money system works. For an in-depth but readable discussion of the whole subject, I recommend Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth, Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, (Public Affairs, 2020)  ↩

10. Trump is a master of bullshit. He spent his life mastering the technique.  ↩

11. It is unlikely that Trump himself knows anything about Neoliberalism or much of anything else.  ↩

12. The Bretton Woods conference (1949) and the treaty that it spawned governed the world economy until the 1970s. The famous economist John Maynard Keynes, who organized the conference and guided its proceedings, excluded bankers from participation.  ↩

13. Aristocracies and oligarchies form when ruling families or cliques can pass on their power and wealth to future generations.  ↩